The Newport Folk Festival, with a big crowd for a drenched
Friday and sold out for Saturday and Sunday, is now over. What drew so many people—10,000 each day? And who was missing? The aging hippies with gray ponytails and
Woody Guthrie t-shirts are all but gone.
In their place are mostly people in their 20’s through their 60’s, with
Ray-Bans and shirts that advertise their love for obscure artists like Middle
Brother or Andrew Bird or the Felice Brothers.
Bare skin, bracelets, and sandals on men and women. Sneaked-in bottles of vodka or gin dumped in
containers of Del’s Lemonade. Long but
companionable lines at the coffee stand, beer tent, and port-a-potties. Politeness preventing the taking over of
space from someone who stole a valuable piece of real estate with a blanket
right outside the Harbor Tent and then disappeared.
I felt a strong sense of belonging, maybe coming from
experience. As the grizzled veteran of
eight years of Folk Festivals, I was asked for advice as we waited for gates to
open. Where should we go? Who should we see? All I could say was: create some space by the main stage and then
go explore. At past Folk Festivals, I
have felt too normal, much like I did the first time I attended Earth Day at
Dunn Meadow at Indiana University. It was the late 80’s
and there were guys wearing skirts, almost everybody had on tie-dye, and I even
marched in a Greenpeace parade. But I
was completely out of my element. How
could people be so happy and uninhibited?
I felt similarly going to Grateful Dead concerts in the 90’s. Who are these people and wow, shouldn’t they
be wearing underwear and taking showers?
At the Folk Fest, although the smell of pot lingered in the air, I bet
everyone there had a shower that morning, and the only tie-dye I saw was being
sold in a booth.
Beach towels and coolers, plastic tarps and quilts, picnic chairs
and bags were side-by-side, eliminating space to tiptoe through. In years past, people would leave narrow
avenues of grass between their land claims.
Why is this Festival so big now? What draws us? What does folk music ask of us, and what does
it offer us?
Maybe it has something to do with the whole confessional
piece of folk music. The bringing out of
emotional truths, as ugly as they can be.
Sometimes these truths are romanticized, as in glorifying doomed
obsessions (John McCauley=everything), or making drinking, getting into fights,
and almost dying sound hilarious (Jason Isbell’s “Super Eight Motel”). The music is intensely personal, and the
truth of experience draws us, searingly or painfully or self-deprecatingly. Perhaps that’s part of the draw of this
NEWport Folk Festival vibe. The
mirroring and articulating of emotion without mediation. These artists (that’s what all the signs call
them—not musicians—the artists selling their wares are “vendors”) offer up
their secrets—which we can relate to--for public consumption and dialogue. We,
the audience, have felt this way. This
despair, this rage, this embarrassment.
And we all continue to survive.
I think we all want somebody to speak some truths to us, in
this world of images and trying to sell us life as a commodity. Make no mistake, the Folk Fest was full of
commodity. But the songs themselves, the
artists who wrote and performed them, offered us insights into who we are. Taking those scary emotions that we deny in
order to feel good about ourselves, and putting them out there, saying here,
see how ugly this is, but you can handle it.
You can even enjoy it, because it’s truer than any fake shit you’re
throwing out to the world.
I come to the Folk Fest for the sunshine, ocean breeze,
music, and thrill of bringing in vodka in Canada Dry plastic bottles without
getting caught. I come for the Middle
Eastern Mediterranean plate that costs $14 and I can only eat half of it. I come for the free chips from Late July, and
to stand in line at the bathrooms and the beer tent and the chance to win a
free banjo. I come for the vendor’s
tents, fantasizing what it would be like to wear that chunky necklace or that
funky hat, or even that skirt made out of a t-shirt that I can’t bring myself
to buy for $55. I come to walk around in
the mud, put on sunscreen, always missing my collarbones and patches across the
tops of my thighs, that I only realize when I take a shower that night and
shriek in pain as the water sizzles across the burn. I come to walk through the parking lots
filled with cars from Georgia, Utah, Montanam, as well as Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York.
I come mostly, though, to feel at home, with people who speak my language,
who articulate secret longings or appreciate those who do.
All this being said, I know there are people who are
missing from this particular folk scene.
Even as I enjoy it, I wonder where they are and imagine how much they
must miss their world. Folk music can
mean a lot of things, and really, this feels more like a celebration of
American music (notwithstanding that there are always some international acts
there). You have the weird (Jim James),
the funky (Trombone Shorty) and the sublime (Avetts) all there, holding up a
mirror, saying you, I see you, I am happy you are here. Perhaps it is these assurances we come for
and respond to, even more than the setting, even more than the midsummer
celebration, even more than the sense of belonging.
