My Sixth Folk Alliance International Down.....like each one, a set of entirely new experiences (and, yes, comfortingly familiar ones). But unforgettable things! I have at least a dozen stories I want to write now why Americans diminish music as some concept of entertainment removed from art. I can't write it all at once. I can maybe list people and moments I know I would write about.
One would be Nora Guthrie getting everyone on their feet and hand signaling cues to a "This Land Is Your Land" ("no trespassing" verse and all) led by Jimmy LaFave and Betty Soo.
Another is hearing Si Kahn's call to "generate mountains of material to be censored," and Moddi's horror at the BBC wanting to cover his anthology of censored songs but not to allow him to discuss sex, violence, drugs, religion or anything actually censored by the BBC, and Dave Marsh's call for us to educate one another and, if we're serious, we reach out and never stop reaching.
I would write about a ferocious political set by Bruce Sudano that made me want to find everything he's ever written but also has me hungering for the latest release in a five decade career. For that matter, I'd have to talk about how and why Bobby Rush held the second most crowded ballroom I visited absolutely riveted.
I could blog about this feeling the Oklahoma Room just got taken to heights even the regulars hadn't quite found here (or maybe the best time in the Okie Room is the most recent)....anyway, thanks to Susan Herndon, Jacob Tovar, Chris Lee Becker, Kayln Fay, Jesse Aycock, Lauren Barth, Travis Linville, Carter Sampson, the Annie Oakleys, Wink Burcham, Paul Benjamin, Ellis Paul, and Trout Fishing in America, the Oklahoma Room was a life saver.
Then I'd have to tell what it was like hearing David Gillis and daughter Ariana Gillis give a back to back set that only amplified my sense of how important they both are, as a team and separately. And that's something to compare anyone, nevermind a dad, to Ms. Gillis, who is simply-put one of the most striking artists I've ever seen and would ever hope to see.
In that sense, she's a lot like John Fullbright, who was never better Friday night, proving once again to stand apart from and unite the crowd like nobody else...nevermind that he did this playing almost entirely new material and confronting the politics of the moment like only he can at this moment in his career, the show a revelation.
I was thrilled to learn that Jane Kramer, a great new friend I'd made from Asheville, North Carolina turned out to be an artist who could not only hold a room riveted but take all of us to our most vulnerable spaces willingly, and to the feeling of love for humankind that sets the concept of "folk" apart from so many exclusive musical genres.
I can write about how I heard Michael Fracasso as fired as ever after the release of his stunning new album Here Come the Savages.
I was taken away by the Bean Project's ability to find a place where folk and bluegrass had a pop baby that may just be reincarnated Burt Bacharach.
I was reassured about everything I find most important in art by Eliza Gilkyson, Rod Picott, Ayllu, Bobby Rush, SONiA Disappear Fear, Billy Bragg (even though I had to miss his actual set--he was literally in the air)....and then there was Jimmy, Jimmy, always the great Oklahoman Jimmy LaFave, bringing home great songwriting in ways even Woody and Dylan couldn't manage.
If you look at what's above you see over 30 pieces of the conference that could lead me to write about distinctly different and equally important ideas.
Meanwhile, I should end this status by mentioning the first songwriter circle, a sort of duo, of artists Alysha Brilla and Janice Jo Lee, who together may have made the most overtly political music of the conference. Jo Lee finding a way to get a room to sing about water poisoning, Brilla offering a kind of child-like clarity (much like Woodrow Wilson Guthrie) with her track "Bigger Than That" (https://www.youtube.com/
I start fighting my way to write with this recommend. I'll be going back through everything above, over and over again.
It's never been more important to learn.
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