Kerrville Folk Festival

 

About a week after I arrived in Austin I was brought along to the Kerrville Folk Festival for its final three days. It's about two hours drive away, and is basically a two and half week long jam session on a ranch. Thousands of people, many from Austin, go there with tents, RVS, and other more creative forms of shelter and camp out around the main performance area, setting up their own common areas where people go to hang out and share music, food and beer with each other.

There were five of us, only one of whom had been there before, and this veteran assured us that we wouldn't have to worry about room and board as volunteers. And he was right. We got there at the last moment and signed up on the spot as peacekeepers. For volunteering not only did we not have to pay to be there, but we also got two free meals a day, so that essentially we didn't have to pay for anything if we didn't want to. And I got a particularly good job: roving. I spent four hours a day wandering around among the camps, wearing a radio and drinking lots of water, and then regularly breaking to just sitting down and talk with people

Everyone has to drink a lot of water. These guys were indispensable.

It was very dusty on the ranch. There has been a drought in the area for the past year or so, so the festival staff was doing everything they could to keep the dust level down. Vehicles had a strict speed limit of 5mph. There was a truck driving around spraying water on the roads. Many people wore hankerchiefs over their faces, especially those working in the parking lot which was quite the dust factory. And the communications building (which was next to said parking lot) had a strict closed door policy; you had to sneak in quickly, letting in as little dust as possible to protect the sensitive equipment. Despite all the precautions, one could say the dust was winning based on how all the vehicles looked after they had been there more than a day.

While I was wandering around on the job I explored the maze of camps and tents. There were several people who brought teepees, and a good number of buses. One camp was simply four buses that were parked in a square. Off the dirt roads, the camp areas were labyrinths of tents and overhanging canvases with all sorts of cooking and general living equipment sitting around. Lots of coolers, lanterns and rugs, and various ornaments and decorations, even some couches and mattresses just sitting on the grass. All the big camps had names; some of the names were nostalgic, most were silly. The Halfway House, Mix'd Nuts, Camp Stupid, Camp Estrogen + Ed, Camp Ducttape, Shutup and Camp, Camp Kerrfuffle, Camp Fork in the Road. On one truck sat an appropriate sign: "In camp we dust." And to cool off, one of the camps had a slip and slide with an inflatable mattress on one end, and a kiddie pool on the other. I watched several people try unsuccessfully to surf the mattress into the pool.

It was hot and dusty during the day, but once the sun went down it was pleasantly cool. The wind went from hot to slightly chilly and the tempurature dropped to a very comfortable level. We had originally thought we'd just be sleeping on top of our sleeping bags, but it turned out to be cool enough to warrent sleeping inside them those nights. We didn't bother with sleeping in our small tent though. The five of us just slept under the stars, which were plentiful out there well away from San Antonio and Austin.

Resting up for another music filled day.

I've only been to one other folk festival: the Old Songs Festival which takes place in upstate New York. I went there as a kid with my parents and sister many summers when I was little. It struck me how different these festivals are. In Old Songs, there are a wide variety of performers, not just musicians but also jugglers and magicians, and there are many workshops for kids and adults to attend, doing crafts and alike. But that was all official, scheduled stuff. Though my parents tell me there was camping, we never really went to that part of the festival. But in Kerrville, camping is actually the main event, the real reason for being there for most people. There is a large stage where various bands perform every night, surrounded by shops and stores selling artwork and food and cowboy hats, but the camping areas are where people spend the most time. Some people never even go to the main show; they prefer instead to just stay in the camps and play music among themselves, and just hanging out. Once the main show is over around eleven or midnight every night, the crowd goes to the camp and the real nightly party starts, with people playing music in the roads and in the camps for several more hours late into the night until everyone collapses with exhaustion.

The people there are proud of what they do, too. "We talk shit about Texas all the time but we here do it better than anywhere else" one performer told me while he was strumming on his guitar during the late night sessions. Austin and the Kerrville folk festival have a lot of good musicians, and they love their music scene. Kerrville's a great place to get a taste of it, meeting a lot of the people who make it happen.