Forwarded to Winfield-l after the 27th Walnut Valley Festival in 1998.
Sept 20, l998
Winfield, Kansas
The 27th annual National Flat pickers Contest
Every September John Leigh invites me down to Winfield, Kansas for the National Flatpicking Championship.
"Invites" is a euphemism. Last year John threatened to slip me a "Mickie", roll me in a tarp, and haul my derriere down there by force. But I've never gone. I've always found some higher priority. The very idea of sitting in the sun for three days with the ticks and chiggers, listening to ever faster, dueling banjos, made a week-end of scraping and painting my house sound like real fun.
Not that I don't like bluegrass music. I've been trying to master the Travis pick for thirty five years. Lester Flat and Earl Scruggs inspired me to run out and buy a banjo and a mandolin. My 78 rpm record collection contains many first releases of "classic hillbilly" recording artists. I love bluegrass music. It's just that there are other genres I love more. So as usual, when John asked if I was going to Winfield this year I was non-committal. Besides, this year I'm into opera and I'm not talking about the one in Nashville.
I knew that if I went camping in Winfield with no TV, no internet service provider, no up-to-the-minute news, I might miss the climatic episode in the story of L'll Abner and Daisy Mae. I've been magnetized to the screen for eight months now and to disengage at this moment would be akin to treason. There's a war going on. I don't have time for folk songs. The opinion polls tell me that about half of Americans are brain sucked. Best to avoid large crowds, they could be dangerous.
Then came serendipity. My brother notified me by e-mail that he was going to Winfield. Dennis called. He was going to Winfield with Bob and Chuck and Susan. Friday morning Jim Ralstin came by, his truck loaded with cot and coolers, and asked, "You goin' to Winfield?" I checked my computer. The Clinton tapes were not going to be released until Monday. The week-end news cycle was dead. I grabbed my toothbrush and sleeping bag, jumped in Jim's truck and we headed west to Winfield.
Back in the sixties a guy named Mossman hand-crafted acoustic guitars in Winfield, Kansas. I used to dream of owning a Mossman Flint Hills model but it was way out of my price range. Big time performers bought Mossmans. I couldn't own one but I was proud, as a Kansan, that a world class instrument was being made in a small town down near Wichita. Mossman eventually went out of business, but not before he helped organize Winfield's first National Flat pickers Championship in l971.
This year the contest took place September l7 -- 20. The festival was held at the county fairgrounds next to the Walnut river and during Festival week the walnut and pecan groves along the banks of the river are transformed into a vast campground. People come a week, two weeks, ahead of time to get a good spot. One man I met had been there since August 28th.
By the time I arrived in Winfield, the grounds resembled an upscale Bangladesh refugee camp packed with Winnebagos, pickup campers, trailers, airstreams, dome tents, pup tents, teepees, army tents, every kind of portable shelter Bass Pro Shops catalog and then some. Recycled parachutes, ingeniously rigged by amateur engineers, hung from the trees . A canopy of rip-stop nylon and plastic tarps more colorful than the shopping aisles at Walmart protected the campsites from sun and rain. (Fortunately there was no rain this year.)
If twenty thousand campers with all their gear squeezed into two hundred acres along the banks of a sleepy river sounds like chaos, it was. At first I didn't think I could find a spot to unroll my sleeping bag. Gradually, however, I began to discover the wonderful organic order of this temporary city.
"Virgins" as they call first timers were rare at Winfield. Most of the campers have been coming for years. They have their favorite campsites where they and their friends form a circle of shelters around a pit fire or barbecue grill. Many give their camp a name and a totem. I camped under the sign of "Flip" the Thunderbird. My brother John stayed at "The Metaphysical Camp...where no question is completely answered and no answer completely questioned." Each camp circle overlaps other circles and collectively resembles a stream of interlocking bubbles. At the center of every circle was another circle, a circle of musicians.
The reason all these people traveled across the plains to hunker down together on the banks of the Walnut river was to sing and play traditional music. They came to make music and that's what they did.
The professional groups perform on five different stages from ten in the morning till midnight or later. There were the competitions for flat picking and finger picking guitar styles. Mandolin and banjo contests. Dulcimer and fiddle competitions. I never made it to the competitions. I did catch a number of superb professional acts but I spent most of my waking hours, and that means almost all the time I was there, down among the tents in the camp circles.
At any given time, day or night, there were hundreds of groups of people singing and playing their instruments. Acoustical instruments. (The only amplified music was at the official stages.) I didn't know there were so many Martin guitars on the planet. I couldn't believe there were so many gifted musicians.
John Leigh never left the Thunderbird camp. He said he was afraid he'd miss someone. People were constantly coming and going. A new face would join the circle and stay and play for an hour or two and then move on. A new voice would expand the harmonies. Strangers would walk up with their mandolin or dobro, find the key and join in. Sometimes there would be fifteen or twenty musicians in the group then the circle would shrink again to three or four.
Near sundown a flock of Canada geese honked through the campsite just above the trees and as they passed a wave a cheers from the campers rolled across the grounds like a freight train whistle.
Then with darkness came another transformation. Christmas lights and Coleman lanterns illuminated the circles. A parachute fringed with silver mylar streamers bounced the colored lights into a magical temple where the songs became religious. "Amazing Grace", "I'll Fly Away", "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", rang out in the night.
'Round midnight the road jams began. A single road winds through the camp and late at night it's filled with wandering minstrels. Someone will start to sing and others will step up to accompany. Fiddles, jaw bones, wash tubs, mandolins, spoons, squeeze boxes, gas tank basses, hand drums, banjos, and guitars, guitars, guitars. Every fifty feet or so, as far as one could see there were jams all the way up and down the road.
At four in the morning I stretched out in my bag for a couple of hours of sleep. The bands were still playing then and when I awoke with the sunrise.
Sunday evening I arrived home, and turned on the news shows to see what I had missed and there were the same talking heads, saying just about the same things they were saying four days ago. Nothing had changed except that I learned that Winfield, Kansas is about as far from Washington, DC. as you can get. And the entire week-end I did not hear "dueling banjos" one time. Not ever.
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