Just exactly how much fun does the law allow?
These are just Highlights from the 25th Walnut Valley Festival. Buy the commemorative video if you still can!
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| "Home at Winfield", 1996. It was wetter than it looks, but we were camped on high ground (sorry everybody - we hadn't really ever noticed how high the ground was until this year...) |
| Since I only found out about the festival in 1990, I wouldn't have known that this was the 10th use of Stage 5. | Picture of Stage 5 |
First, our kind hosts' camp got a name before we got there. When
Steve
told
Winfield-L to "look for the flaming bass" I was just sure his bass had fallen completely apart (from too many Winfields?) and was going to be used as kindling. Instead, it had been uniquely restored.
We celebrated two anniversaries and the Very First Winfield for several
additions to the camp community. Having infants around gave new meaning to the name
Winfield Wipers!
On my way out the door (literally) I threw into my camera bag a bottle of
Bajan Hot Sauce
I'd brought from
Barbados.
Bajan rhymes with Cajun, but the cultural influence was British, not French, and Bajan pepper sauce is yellow, not red. Turns out on the day I arrived the camp had decided to have beans and cornbread, so I dug it out and to my great surprise people from as far away from the gulf coast as Kansas City actually liked the stuff.
When I threw it in my bag I was thinking that CindyBear might sneak some into somebody's beverage late Friday or Saturday night, but most of it was consumed with
Clay-boy-r-dee's breakfasts.
The
competition was very intense. Everybody had so much fun that next year there'll probably be a line for contestant sign-up and a fee charged just to get to watch (and I got a couple of beverages just for attempting to keep score...)
CindyBear finally showed up on Friday, with edible presents from Switzerland. The camp kids got the largest lollipops that any of us had ever seen, and were put in charge of dispensing the chocolate. They were very careful to make sure that everybody got some of the chocolates, and were very careful to make sure that none of us ate too much.
The success of the Flamingo Preserve of
1995
attracted another endangered species to the same site for 1996: the North American Vel Crow. My only concern with having these guys as neighbors is that next year they may decide to protect banjo players from bad jokes.
I'd been really worried about whether they'd allowed enough time for Saturday's ever-popular
Story Songs set, considering that any one of
John McCutcheon,
Tom Chapin, Mike Cross, or
Tom Paxton could have easily entertained for that amount of time alone. The sound-check ran right into a really good, supposedly-improvised series of entirely new verses to "John B." wherein each got a chance to make up a verse making fun of one of the others. I do believe some of them were prepared ahead of time, but it was great fun, and the set-selection by each of them made this the best Story Songs set I've seen in six festivals.
These headliners also did very well in their separate sets. As usual, John McCutcheon packed
Stage 3
every time he played there, and even orchestrated a "don't tell Bob" kind of thing by appropriating Julie Davis's Stage 3 time to hold the traditional, but unscheduled for 1996, Sing-a-long workshop.
John and Tom Chapin did a great job with the "Bobby Redford's Walnut Valley Band" thing Saturday night. And
Mike Cross
had a good mix of old favorites and new stuff in his set on
Stage 1.
All of Tom Paxton's sets were good, but I caught the tail-end of what must have been a great set late Saturday night
performed before a small audience
also at Stage 3.
I hadn't seen Paxton at Winfield before, but I was a Tom Paxton fan in the early 70s (I'm not quite old enough to be one of the 60s survivors he talked about, but the people who turned me on to Paxton 25 years ago probably are...)
New (to Winfield) artists that seemed to make an impression this year include Blue Highway and Cherish the Ladies. The former caught the attention of the musicians in my neighborhood and the latter combined proficiency with showmanship as well as anybody I've ever seen (the stage 1 crowd made John McCutcheon wait to get an encore from CtL even though stage 1 was running nearly an hour behind schedule Friday night.)
How many weeks left 'til next year?
| 1997 | |||
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