By P.A. Geddie
Listening to former Tyler resident Allyn Sorsby play his guitar and sing a newly-written song about love on the East Texas backroads, I was reminded of one of my own long-ago backroads memories—a night when the stars filled the sky, the usual regular-sized ones and millions of tiny ones interspersed among. I’d never seen such a brilliant night, nor have I since. That night, while driving on our own East Texas backroads, my friend pulled his pick up truck to the side of the black top road and we got out, and with the radio playing a popular country tune, we danced.
Allyn’s song brought that special memory back to my mind but more than that it filled my heart with a deep connection with another, both past and present. For some reason I hadn’t been able to share that memory with anyone else in a meaningful way until now.
I met Allyn recently at the Kerrville Folk Festival in the beautiful Texas Hill Country along with hundreds of other talented musicians who resurrected places within me I thought long dead and buried.
It’s the music, the words, the spirit in which they are shared that give songs the power to stir emotions, to bring people together, to go deeper into your soul.
This magic happens for most everyone who attends the Kerrville Folk Festival. It takes place for three weeks each year on Quiet Valley Ranch about nine miles out of Kerrville. It’s about music, friendship, kindness, respect for our differences as well as our similarities.
The diversity of the people who come to Kerrville is vast—Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists; Democrats and Republicans; hippies, yuppies and generation X’ers with pierced noses and eyebrows; vegetarians and meat-eaters; cowboys and doctors, teachers and professional hobos; those with lots of money and those who work as volunteers at the festival because they don’t have any money even to pay the entrance fee.
The focus is on similarities, and the differences seem to fade away.
In her book Hot Jams & Cold Showers, Dyanne Fry Cortez shares her views of the Kerrville experience.
“With rare exceptions, we manage to coexist in a spirit of neighborliness,” she said. “People good-naturedly wait their turn at the showers, the outhouses, the concession booths. Violence is uncommon and theft is almost unheard of.”
Dyanne credits the music for the peaceful coexistence among such diversity. “When you live, eat, sleep and breathe music 24 hours a day, you don’t need Miss Manners to tell you what to do,” she said. “Harmony just gets in your blood.”
Kerrville definitely has some magic about it that lets people feel free to be just who they are, flaws and all, without being judged or criticized.
Peter Yarrow, formerly of Peter, Paul and Mary, is a regular at the festival. He is quoted in Dyanne’s book:
“What you see in Kerrville is a momentary manifestation of a society that believes in itself, “ he said.
With my relatively nonexistent experience as a camper I really appreciated the support this society offered. My friends lovingly gave us the name “Camp Clueless” as one neighbor after another showed us how to tie knots, light the Coleman stove for coffee, shared their leftover breakfast, and set up and reset up and reset up the canopy.
That canopy didn’t make it. After the second storm I gave up and put it on the ground and it became my patio. My generous neighbor George Richardson from San Antonio offered shelter under his huge canopy and after a while it became home for a week or so for me, my friends and many others.
Many exciting, energetic music and singing went on under that red and white canopy, rain or shine. By the third storm even this vast space filled with water. We put on plastic ponchos and garbage bags and propped our feet up on each others’ chairs to keep them out of the rushing water and mud and kept on playing. Final scenes from Titanic kept flashing through my mind. Remember the band kept playing to the bitter end? Of course we knew we weren’t going to sink but it was amazing how the music calmed our fears, erased worry over a few material possessions that might float away or beds getting soaked in tents.
There is a trust in Kerrville that everything’s going to be okay. You know your neighbors will help you out, give you a dry bed for the night, share their food if yours got drenched. You just adjust your rhythm and move along with the music and nature in its rawest form.
Clearly it is the music that keeps everything rolling along. The talent is incredible. The main stage line up included Ray Wylie Hubbard, Tish Hinojosa, Terri Hendrix, Eric Andersen, Chuck Pyle, Steve Young, Kevin Welch, Austin Lounge Lizards, Trout Fishing in America, Butch Hancock, Karen Taylor-Good and Augie Meyers just to name a few.
But it is often after the concerts which end at midnight that the real magic happens.
Heading back to our campsites one evening after a great concert, Chuck and Charlotte Whitton of Canton and I heard a group of musicians playing between the Kerrtry Store and the port-a-potties that I for one had never heard anything like before. We were mesmerized by the full sound of an upright bass, a fast-pickin banjo, a strumming rhythm guitar, and a lively fiddle played by a petite girl with long blond hair, ragged clothing and non-stop dancing bare feet.
The group is called Still on the Hill. Their high energy music is hard to categorize. They say their influences are French, Caribbean, Texas swing, and Ozark Mountain music. Their music has been called “an energetic explosion,” “turbo-powered folkgrass” and “front-porch Ozark funk.”
Whatever it is, it’s good. As is just about every single piece of music you hear at Kerrville.
Describing the music is hard. It is a “folk” festival but everyone has different opinions about what that means exactly. Many of the performers are billed other places as Americana musicians and so there is some cross over there. My brother Tom Geddie, who reviews Americana music for Buddy magazine in Dallas and a couple of national publications, says it is American Roots Music.
“It is real, authentic,” he said. “It is folk with an edge of blues, or country, or rock. It’s an attitude. It’s more rural than urban. Some call it music from the heart.”
It reaches you on levels not usually touched on a daily basis. It hits your roots. You may find your feet take on a mind of their own, dancing some foreign jig in perfect time that you know you’ve never done before. It may open your heart to the basic rhythm of rocking a newborn baby or touch a place that needs healing as a tear rolls down your cheek.
I did some internet research and asked a lot of people for a more clear definition of folk or Americana music but so far it is still vague. And that’s okay. Trying to put this music in a category seems wrong. It doesn’t need to be put into a neat little box any more than we can put people into one specific category. People, like this music, have many aspects to their being.
The bottom line is it comes from the heart and you know it when you hear it and that makes it easy to connect to your own heart.
Not everyone connects to the same tune. “Shopping” the campfires is a popular activity for many at Kerrville. Musicians often stroll around from site to site until they find a music “tribe” they like and harmony happens.
Everyone at Kerrville is not a musician but everyone is a music lover and it is not at all uncommon for 20 or 30 people to be singing along with old favorite tunes. They are not usually timid in their output either. Their voices are heard loud and clear. The universal language of a song brings many different people together and the magnificent harmony that happens could never be reproduced in any studio.
Some campsites focus on songwriters and their original works. Others welcome cover tunes. Most do both. You’ll hear new songs as well as old sing-a-long favorites.
Under George’s red and white canopy we heard his great originals as well as those from Allyn Sorsby, now living in Austin, and Wade Parks of Lubbock and many others. Other performers offered great sing-a-longs. When Mark Schneider of Lubbock, Jim Stanley of Houston, Patrick Porowski from Dallas, Ben Rushing of Louisiana and Jay Votel of D.C. break in to a hearty rendition of Billy Joe Shaver’s “I’m Gonna Live Forever,” everyone joins in. It’s sort of become the camp theme song and if you don’t know it the first time you’ll know it soon enough.
In most camps you’ll hear a variety of music including bluegrass, rock, jazz, American folk classics and country. Keith Cornwell of Lubbock likes to sing old Johnny Cash tunes and does a pretty good imitation.
Other camps may have a “Robert Earl Keen” night, performing only his songs while another may do only folk classics like “Blowin in the Wind,” or down-home gospel favorites like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” with everyone singing along.
All this singing is spiced up with fancy guitar licks, mandolins, harmonicas, dulcimers, fiddles, acoustic basses, flutes, penny whistles and other instruments, some of which are new to me.
The music goes on all night long and it’s hard to pull yourself away. When you’re just so tired you can’t stay up any longer, you can head to your tent and be lulled to sleep by some of the best music I’ve ever heard playing live just a few feet away. It’s part of the atmosphere and those who make the mistake of asking a group of musicians to “quiet down so they can get some sleep” are in the wrong place. Ear plugs may be an option for those folks, but I found after a couple of nights the music just comes in and out of your dreams and when it’s not there you miss it.
It’s hard to leave the Kerrville Folk Festival. Some cry, and everyone takes memories forever lodged in their hearts. Passing through the exit gate I see the familiar sign I passed by every day for almost two weeks that says “It Can Always Be This Way” and it suddenly takes on new meaning.
I wonder about that on my drive home. Can I keep the magic of Kerrville around in the “real world?” Can I work and shop and worship in a community with a diverse group of people where we respect our differences as well as our similarities? I hope so.
One way to make that happen is to keep the music going. There is a spirit in songs that can produce magic.