Generations

Day 17 - June 7

All-star lineup on Main Stage Saturday night...

Billy Jonas, who used to be half of a quirky duo called The Billys, which sprung from one of those magical chance meetings at a Kerrville music circle. Eliza Gilkyson, then Jimmy LaFave, then Albert & Gage to close the set.

Jonas has his own act now, with a guitar player named Sherman and a girl singer named Ashley. He has traveled to many parts of the planet. His show is still big on crowd participation, and he’s still making percussion instruments out of recycled materials and putting them to brilliant use.

For the past decade or so, I’ve admired Eliza Gilkyson’s fearlessness. She went through some life changes and came out the other side fierce and outspoken. As if she reached an age and a point in her career where she couldn’t be silenced, because she didn’t have that much left to lose. So it set me back some when Eliza introduced a song that she said she wrote to quell her middle-of-the-night worries, and started listing all the things she worried about. It bore an uncanny resemblance to MY list of worries. Who knew?

How does that saying go? Courage isn’t an absence of fear; it’s the will to keep going in spite of it.

Jimmy LaFave rocked. Halfway through his set he brought Christine Albert on stage to sing a couple songs with him. What a cool idea, I thought: they both have sort of smoky voices; they’ll sound good together. Then he called out David Amram, who wasn’t on the program until Sunday night, but had arrived and was hanging out backstage. Amram walked on with a backpack, dropped it alongside his mic stand and started putting flutes together.

“We’re not hitchhiking to Lubbock, David, It’s just one song,” Jimmy laughed. And added, “He’s the only guy who can make me look young.”

I thought about that and realized something. Every performer on this night’s program is familiar to me; they’re people I’ve been following and listening to for years. But they aren’t the ones I think of as “the old guard.” Not the generation of Peter Yarrow, Tom Paxton, Carolyn Hester, and yes, David Amram. We’ve had some of those on other nights. But the people on stage this Day 17 were rising stars, fresh new voices, when I got to know them. Jimmy LaFave was a New Folk contestant. Eliza Gilkyson was once better known as the daughter of a songwriter. I remember the first time I saw Christine Albert hosting a Ballad Tree session, long before she partnered up with Chris Gage; before she gave birth to a son who is now a man with his own musical career.

“I worry about what kind of world we’re leaving for our grandchildren,” Eliza said during her set. Grandchildren. Yes, we have some of those in our folk community. In the three weeks we’ve been camped here, two young women who grew up as Kerr-kids bore babies of their own. Not here on the ranch -- to the best of my knowledge, we haven’t yet had an on-site birth at the Folk Festival. But a couple of moms have come close. And quite a few younger Kerrverts are pushing strollers and wagons occupied by kids born in the past year or two.

If the memorial tributes to Rod Kennedy and all our other recently departed friends haven’t given me a sense of time passing, tonight’s concert sure does.