Eclectic Company: Can I Go Home Again?: Philadelphia Folk Festival, Part I

I was standing in the photo pit at the main stage in a deluge, wearing a flimsy yellow plastic poncho that was keeping my torso dry but wasn’t doing a thing for either of my SLR Nikon or digital Lumix cameras, neither of which was cooperating in the heavy wet. Yet staring up at Mary Chapin Carpenter, grown older, sadder, wiser and far more professional than the first time I saw her at the Philadelphia Folk Festival 21 years ago, flanked by a boffo band, including, unexpectedly, my old pal Don Dixon (he’s been mentioned in previous TJN columns about beach music and his duo with wife Marti Jones) on bass and her longtime bandleader John Jennings on guitar, I was pinched by pleasurable nostalgia tinged with sadness. MCC played new songs from her Ashes and Roses album that stare unflinchingly into the heart of divorce and depression, and then she upended the set with hits like “Down At The Twist and Shout” and “Passionate Kisses,” making the thousands of fans I could see through the downpour stomp, cheer and sing along.

It was a typical dark and stormy PFF night, cold, clammy, and me in the wrong damp clothes and footwear, like dozens I’ve been to over the years. On one hand, it was the same old same old, with great music, lousy weather, and funnel cake, and on that level of consumer experience, I had a very good time. Yet on the other hand, something about the chilly night and the rain and the music felt very different, and even as I warmed myself in the fire of the music’s sweet sounds, even as I laid some old ghosts to rest, even as I gossiped with some of my old music running buds, a garden of clichés kept whispering insistently in my ear: ‘You can’t go home again,’ ‘you can’t step in the same river twice’ — trite but true sentiments that made me wonder if I was going to compare the Festival to its past, and find the present wanting.

You see for many years, the Philadelphia Folk Festival on a late August weekend was my favorite event of the year, the place I’d go to recharge my musical batteries and to reconnect with old folkie friends. No matter what music was playing, and no matter what the weather was like (my first PFF in 1971 was during Tropical Storm Doria that flooded all the nearby rivers, streams and creeks, turning the Festival’s primary hillside into a knee-deep sandal-swallowing mudslide), I’d be there onsite on what was ordinarily a farmer’s field tricked out for this occasion with stages of wood and wire and miles of protective perimeter snow fencing, hanging out with volunteers and performers and the photographers of the major press corps, and guaranteed to have an extraordinarily music-affirming time.

I realize that I’ve set the bar pretty high with those memories, and I have to admit that the PFFs of ten and five years ago fell far short of those I remember from twenty, thirty and forty years ago. Well this year was a rain-and-mud fest too, so it had some of the trappings of the familiar Festivals of my past, but the Philadelphia Folk Festival was different this 51st anniversary, not only because many of my volunteer organizing friends from the Philadelphia Folk Song Society that plans the show and many of my traditional music heroes from my earliest Festival-going years are dead and gone. The Festival itself was different — hardly anything on the stages this year would have qualified as folk music when I first met the genre — and because I went to this PFF with the POSSLQ (the first time ever that I’ve gone to the Festival with a folk fan partner) I saw it through his eyes. “Not much folk music here,” the POSSLQ opined, reading bios of the headliners.

Over the years, the Festival’s take on folk music has changed, as the pendulum’s swung to a combination of singer-songwriters, bands with folk-rock souls, and straight up country and rock bands, with very little, if any, of the folk music I was raised on, way back when. What I liked in the early years matched the core of the POSSLQ’s musical taste — which is very specifically traditional unaccompanied English-Irish-Scottish and American ballad-singing — which he fell for the moment he laid ears on Joan Baez at Berkeley in 1960, and solidified as his thang when he sat through three hours of Scottish ballad-singer Jean Redpath’s thick Gaelic brogue in the college rathskeller. And he’s an unreconstructed lefty, bless his heart, with political/topical folksongs as his favorite musical chaser.

My early memories of Philly Fests reflect both those genres in full measure: Programmed by the late Dr. Kenneth Goldstein — the first graduate and longstanding chair of the Folklore Department of the University of Pennsylvania, whose musical feet were planted equally firmly in the unaccompanied ballads of the British Isles and their American counterparts, and in the raw blues tradition of the United States — with his assistant Paula Ballan, a diehard champion of the ‘70s folk-rock and singer-songwriter scenes, the Philadelphia Folk Festivals I first saw were powerhouses, catering to the traditional bent of the old fans, and offering the modernizing leavening that drew in new crowds. There were traditional crafters (blacksmith, broomsquire, quilter, potter, wood carver, shoemaker, basketweaver) and even the crappy food served up by the cheerful members of the Upper Salford Volunteer Fire Department raising funds for its new equipment was traditional in its way.

I loved those weekends so much, I’m afraid I turned conservative, wanting the Festival to stay the same, even after Ballan, a New Yorker, was replaced by some Philadelphians with a different vision for the Festival, even after Goldstein moved away to run the Folklore department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, and his traditional music nous and catholic tastes for the homegrown musics of many peoples were replaced by other programmers with narrower focuses and fewer connections to the (admittedly disappearing) traditional culture world.

Can I Go Home Again? To Be Continued.

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