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The best festival deal of the year

Five bucks. Dr. Ralph Stanley, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Steeldrivers, and the Clack Mountain String Band. Five bucks. Saturday, June 7, downtown Morehead, Kentucky. Five bucks.

And, yes, this is shameless shilling for an event in which I have some very small part. Shortly after I moved here I was asked to join the organizing committee for a festival, then called Bluegrass & More, which had evolved from the Appalachian Celebration and some other trace memories with which I am not acquainted. Truth to tell, I don't do all that much, and it's always fallen on our production weekend, so I've not been able to go most of the time. This year, at least, it was scheduled not to fall on our production weekend. And, then, we stopped producing, so...ah, well...

A couple years ago Bluegrass & More absorbed folk artist Minnie Atkins' "Day In The Country" celebration and sale, which makes it one of the lesser-known folk art festivals in the country but, if (like me) you collect such things, well worth the trip. In particular, it is worth the trip to see the work of Lavon Williams, a comparatively young Kentucky carver who also played basketball -- not much, I gather -- for Joe B. Hall. Williams is as good and important a young (that is, not retirement-age) figure in folk/outsider/whatever art as I've seen in years, though there's a painter from North Carolina who comes up here whose name I can't seem to find (which is a pity, since one of his paintings is on the living room wall) who's a close second.

Add onto that a craft fair, and a small kind of midway (which is to say: kettle korn), and, this year, apparently, beer and wine sales to augment the brown bags wandering out of the historic Freight Station, now a liquor store, and it's a nice little thing. Ah. We've added a band contest this year, too. For which I am one of the judges, and I think I've lured my old compadre Hayseed down from Ohio to judge, as well.

Not a big thing. An all-volunteer operation funded through small patches of money found in various budgets across the university and from the tourism commission and from local businesses. The performers are on a small wooden stage, next to the moonlight school where adult education began in Kentucky, across the street from the library, down the street a fair piece from the Fuzzy Duck Coffeeshop and CoffeeTree Books. In a parking lot, if you must know, and it can get hot if the weather means it. Booked, I should add, by the head of the Center for Traditional Music, Don Rigsby (a solo artist and member of Longview) and his second in command, Jesse Wells, who happens to play fiddle for the Clack Mountain String Band. Which is not why they're booked (they're just good, that's why they're booked, and if I ever finished designing their album cover...), and it's not why the festival is named Clack Mountain -- that's the best-known geographic thing we could find handy, and we like the ring of it.

Which is not the point. None of that's the point.

The point is that it's a lot of fun. And this is the first year we're charging any kind of admission. At all. The university system has been asked to make 3% cuts all around, which cuts into funding, and so does the recession. But mostly we're convinced this is a good event and people ought to be willing to pay for it.

And mostly I'm convinced it's the best deal of festival season. It's not a lineup we'll be able to repeat, but if enough folks show up it is an event we can keep moving forward with. And we'd like that. So come on down. Morehead is on I-64 equidistant between Lexington, KY, and Huntington, WV, and two hours south of Cincinnati on the AA Highway.

Here's the link:
http://www.myspace.com/clackmountainfest

End of shameless sales pitch. But, hey, there's good music in my backyard, what's a guy to do?

Posted by grant on April 12, 2008 4:57 PM | Permalink

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