| Falcon Ridge Folk Festival 2001: A Journal | |
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It's not that I didn't like any of the festival's mainstage acts - some of them are my favorites, as anyone who has read my columns knows. It's just that, being a veteran of Falcon Ridge for many years, I've seen almost all of them here before: Dar Williams, The Nields, Vance Gilbert, Susan Werner, Eddie From Ohio - even Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer. If Falcon Ridge has an Achilles heel it's sameness. For instance, this is the first time I can remember Greg Brown being absent. The only two acts I really wanted to catch this year were Gillian Welch and Jimmy LaFave. Though wildly popular in other regions and critically acclaimed everywhere, these performers are outcasts from the mainstream, northeast folk music scene - especially when it comes to festivals. Welch has a reputation for being unremittingly slow and serious, and LaFave's voice is an acquired taste that New Englanders simply haven't felt a need to acquire. So it's a rare opportunity for both them and the audiences this weekend.
Unfortunately, LaFave's mainstage set is scheduled for Sunday. So before leaving the festival, we hit the mainstage to hear Gillian Welch and her partner, guitarist David Rawlings.
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
With their cut on the soundtrack of "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" the duo has had a great year, breaking into territory that had been previously closed to them. Dressed in what might be described as "Sunday-best" formal, Welch and Rawlings present themselves as a tableau out of the past, when the tradition music represented was treated with a certain respect and reserve. Welch's repertoire has a gospelly, spiritual feel appropriate to the tone they've set, but her patter between songs is light and friendly. "When I took up the banjo a couple of years ago," she says strapping it on mid-set, "I thought I'd be on the crest of a wave of chick banjo players...." Of course, she is, but the wave just hasn't followed (perhaps she hasn't met the banjo-reborn Lui Collins or watched Erin McKeown newfangled frailing...). Her songs satisfy a craving for meaning and seriousness that the festival's mainstage performances often lack. Among the fast-paced, upbeat, almost pop wash of the rest of the line-up, this set is a welcome chance to dwell for awhile in a music that takes its time, that is built around scraps of folk wisdom and folk idioms, and which, if not old, has been aged in an old, old cask.
On our way out, we encounter the enigmatic mime in the garb of an itinerant Buddhist monk who has wandered the Midway all day and now skirts the edge of the crowd. While Welch and Rawlings play their sermons to the mount, this silent witness to the music and the mass of humanity gathered here seems not to judge any of it. The children gravitate to him and he welcomes them, gesturing emphatically about something that no one seems to be able to grasp. From his little leather satchel, he dispenses fortunes on little strips of paper. Mine says:
YOU
ARE AS
UNLIMITED AS THE
ENDLESS UNIVERSE.
Fortunately, this article needs to end somewhere.
Young Lily with the festival's itinerant mime.
Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com
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