Folk you, too

So last Thursday my sister, her friend Gina and I loaded up the car with camping gear and headed to the Falcon Ridge Folk festival. Now if you haven't read my post on Folk festivals, you might want to get caught up to speed. Held in the small town of Hillsdale, NY, Falcon Ridge is four days of bands, dancing, and entertainment held on the Long Hill Farm.

You can camp on site if you choose to (which I think the majority of people do), but my nasty habit of showering at least once a day made the state campground(with hot showering facilities) four miles away seem just a little more appealing. The farm is huge and has a huge sloping hill rising up from the barn area. The festival stages and vendors are set up at the base of the hill and the tents are relegated to the top of the hill. As we approached the entrance to the festival all we could see is hundreds of tents set up. It looked like a scene from Braveheart, an army of tents cresting over the top of a hill swarming to overthrow the tiny village at the bottom.

But I digress. Before getting to the farm, the three of us made our way to the campground and starting setting up two tents. Two of them because over the course of the weekend there would be seven of us total. My sister Thea, her husband Brian, her friend Gina, her other friend Scotty, my parents and me. So we would eventually need 3 tents to accommodate everyone. We may have needed more but my friends would rather have root canal surgery then to A.) Camp, B.) Spend even an hour at a folk festival.

We finished erecting the tent at about 2:00 pm. It was very hot work and a swim was in order. We changed and headed down to the ole swimming hole (insert Andy Griffith's whistling them here). Apparently this "lake" was an old ore quarry that had been filled with water. You had to lower yourself in from a dock into eight feet of water. About 20 feet from this dock was a platform in the middle of the lake. The depth was there was labeled 40 feet. I found that to be amazing that it would be so deep so quickly.

The water was refreshing, but we were anxious to get on our way. The music really started at 5:00 and we wanted to scout the place out. So we changed, loaded the car and set off.

The evening was nice, but not my favorite bands of the festival. I had high hopes for Mark Erelli but he let me down. He sings with a countryish band called the Spurs and lost me when he sung a song that was about making a baby. It had a lyric about his wife's biological clock. Our group agreed that that should not be in any song. I felt bad for his wife, actually.

So we headed back to camp at around 9:00.

Friday

My sister and Gina wanted to get contra dancing lessons. This festival will always be remembered as the festival that introduced me to the social oddity of contra dancing. What is contra dancing? This page should give you a good definition, but it is long. Let me see if I can sum it up. Basically it is square dancing...for hippies...and awkward men of all ages who leer at women. At least this seems to be the demographic. Apparently there are people who travel to Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, not for the music but for these dances. We met people from all over the country who traveled just for this. So I was intrigued. Enough to watch. Of course you can't just watch. Oh no! I would have been happy to sit there and make mental notes to write up here, but no the next hour and a half would be spent dancing.

Now I am no dancer and this exercise proved that, but curiosity and pressure from my cohorts got the better of me and the next thing I know I am in a line doing things called "the gypsy" and "skater's promenade".

When my dignity had been thoroughly stomped into the ground, I excused myself for some breakfast. As I was eating in the concession tent, the sky turned black. Thea and Gina found me and prepared to weather a storm. Leave it to the Martin's to find the one dry place with plenty of food to find shelter in. The sky's opened up and for the next five hours, a rain storm that religious people would describe as biblical descended upon Hillsdale. We waited out the storm for 2 and a half hours before taking advantage of a break to move over to the dance tent. ( the only other dry place we could find).

It was due to straight out boredom that I decided to put into practice the skills I learned in the morning session. I am not going into great detail, for fear of documenting what is potentially one of the most embarrassing moments of my life, but I will say this: There was dancing involved, and I was on the receiving end of dirty glances given to me by the many dancing zealots who had no patience for my inability to figure out what the hell was going on.

After 2 dances, I limped off the floor. In my mind, I thought that perhaps I could meet a woman and impress her with my nimble dancing style. The reality was that there really only crazy dancing people and as for my skills, let me say that there were 80 year old men with two false hips and walkers who looked more natural than me.

On a side note, the most odd thing to me was apparently you need special shoes . Actually I don't think you actually need them, but apparently the die hard dancers acquire them in some sort of right of passage. Let me just say that there is nothing so odd looking as a festival goer in clothes straight out of Woodstock, wearing these fancy black jazz dancing shoes or wing tipped dress shoes where clearly Birkenstocks should be.

After another hour, our group decided it was time to head to our campsite to assess the damage that the rain may have caused to our tents. Luckily there was none, and waiting for us was Scotty, who is one of the funniest people I know. So the day was looking up.

Just to give my audience a glimpse of the genius of Scotty: There is an Irish Pub my family frequents and on the weekends is a troupe of musicians who do traditional Irish songs. They take requests. Well, Scotty puts in a request for "Copa Cabana". Unfortunately I wasn't there for this, but the story goes that the whole bar goes dead silent. To this day, that story is legend in our family. This is one of the many reasons why Scotty is always welcome to any Martin outing.

Thea and I decided to forgo the rest of the day's musical events and get a hot dinner in town and wait for my parents and brother-in-law to arrive.

Saturday

We woke up to clouds but by noon the sun was shining and the temperature was comfortable. The whole group hung out at our blanket and enjoyed some great groups. My favorites included:

Richard Shindell
Vance Gilbert
Lowen & Navarro

but the two groups who stole the day were Eddie from Ohio and Girlyman. Both groups had a great stage presence and solid musical ability. For me, finding new bands to like is what makes these things fun.

The night was chilly but we toughed it out so that my parents could see Richie Havens. I had heard of him, but was pretty ignorant to his musical contributions. Apparently he wrote a lot of songs that I associate with other artists (All Along the Watchtower). We stayed for 3 songs and then called it a night (It was 12:30 am)

Sunday

The last day found us a little short in patience and having to get up early to break down our camp site. We did this without much incident and made our way to the festival. We got there at 11:00 am for the annual Gospel Wake up call featuring Eddie From Ohio, Girlyman, Mark Erelli & Vance Gilbert. It was great!

We then had a few more acts but none of them really did it for me. It was getting pretty hot and we were thinking of heading out. Thea and I decided we wanted to see a workshop featuring Eddie from Ohio with John Gorka & Girlyman. Truly the best offering of the festival. They ended with "The Weight (Take a Load off Annie)" and it was great. I knew it was time to head home.

All in all, I think Falcon Ridge is a great experience, but I am not sure what it would be like if all 4 days were sweltering. This year's Clearwater is the festival I will compare all others and I know That is one I will be returning to next year. I suspect I will also be at both Falcon Ridge and Newport next year if the line up warrants the ticket price.

Ian

Oh, and if you want a more sincere account of the festival, check out the following links:

Reading (for Dummies)
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Andrea Coller's Blog