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The Folk Life Archives |
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Falcon Ridge Folk Festival 2007
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| John Gorka, Narissa Nields, Dar Williams, Dad and Son Stephen |
Dar Williams summed it up or something. Which you’d expect.
In the middle of her Saturday night set, with the hillside bursting into cell phone and flashlight applause for her song, “Iowa,” she stepped up and asked the crowd to douse the lights. They did. Then she asked them to wait, and on her signal, turn them on again…
And she brought onstage her gorgeous 3-year-old son, Stephen, and positioned him so he could see the dark hill. And then she gave the word, and the whole hillside burst into light. Magic for a kid, right?
There you go. Falcon Ridge, the premiere singer-songwriter festival in the Northeast USA – maybe in the whole USA – has officially – or semi-officially – become a family festival. Babies everywhere. Toddlers abounding. Kids on daddies’ shoulders. Little girls dancing on the hillsides. Happy Grammies waltzing along with Papas in “Hippies and Hillbillies” muscle-shirts. Smiling ex-cops genially guarding the backstage fences. John Gorka conducting a workshop featuring a Scottish family band – The Glengarry Bhoys, from Canada - with a beautiful Miranda fiddling along for good luck - and a leggy young Ellis giggling at her good luck and gorgeous vocalizing.
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Ellis and John Gorka again
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Terri Hendrix blown away by the beauty of upstate New York, with Lloyd Maines being all avuncular by her side. Mary Gauthier, everybody’s favorite wicked sister, drawling evil stories about Manhattan poets and all-night-diner cowboys (and an all-night diner, right on site, run by a commune of lovely friends, The Twelve Tribes, dispensing coffee and sage advice to the insomniac uncles. You cannot make up this stuff, I’m telling you.)
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| Mary Gautier | Lloyd Maines | Terri Hendrix |
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Gandalf Murphy’s rock-n-roll band – deep in the heart of a singer-songwriter folk festival, sure nuff) battering eardrums with “The Peace Train,” what Dar called “a peace song from a Muslim songwriter,” to remind us we’re all an extended family. A Sacred Harp square drawn up on the hillside, Sunday morning, featuring the most elegant pipes this side of the 18th century, in preparation for the Rowan Brothers leading a Sunday morning service, with Eddie From Ohio preaching a necessary sermon on the backsliding of the congregation, can I get an Amen? And kids, kids, kids, everywhere you looked. What an affirmation of generation! It was beautiful families all around, lovely to behold.
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Gandolf Murphy
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The Peace Train
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Lucy Kaplansky and Chris Rowen
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Julie Murphy Wells of Eddie from Ohio
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Katrina Nields on the Family Stage
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Maura Kennedy, Pete Kennedy and Chris Thompson of The Strangelings
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Well, I’m a grand-dad myself, four times over, with four grown-up kids, boys and girls both, whom I’d like to see get an even break all around, if you know what I mean. It was infectious, the smiling faces all across the hills, from Mainstage thro Vendors’ Village (I guess that was its name) to the Workshop Stage to the thundering Dance Stage Tent, and with round-robin sharing of tunes the order of the afternoon, groups guesting on one anothers’ mini-concerts all day and half the night long, and with a campground, turned into a hilltop island by the early weekend rains, which – rumor had it – featured Andrew Calhoun, David Massengill and Jack Hardy jamming around the campfires.
But now we’re getting into exurban legends, and you know them’s stretchers, so we’ll let it go at that. A picture is worth a thousand words, anyway, so I’m gonna turn you over to Jamie’s gallery of photographs. So smile – that’s what everybody else was doing, all weekend long. Could get to be a habit, couldn’t it?
