The Walnut Valley Festival
I've been thinking about going to the Walnut Valley Festival for the first time next month. It's a big folk and bluegrass festival in the US, and hosts national championship competitions for Guitar Flat Picking, Bluegrass Banjo, Hammer Dulcimer, Mountain Dulcimer and the international Fingerstyle Guitar and Autoharp championships, plus Mandolin and Old Time Fiddle contests of their own. And they're less than an hour away, in Winfield, KS.
There are four official stages, and three or four unofficial stages, a couple of which have been a standing tradition for many years. There are multiple unofficial websites, including websites for many of the regular camping groups. One person says about 50% of the campers bring instruments, and there's a lot of non-professional stuff going on.
(Funny, as big as it seems to be, if you google for "folk festival" or "bluegrass festival", they don't show up in the first page. So I may be misled about just how large it is.)
I missed the pre-order on tickets, so I'll have to pay full gate price, which seems kind of high... $35 for one day. (Pre-order price is still $30.)
I think I'm going to go. It feels kind of awkward going by myself (Karen doesn't want to go), but it's also kind of nice... I can spend my time any way I want without worrying about boring someone else.
Non-discrimination gone to far!
As part of learning the guitar, I've been listening to some folk music... a nice place to start was the Chicago Old Town School of Folk Music Songbook, in three volumes. (Yay, emusic.com.)
So... women are a part of folk music, so it's only right and proper that they be represented here. But why do so many of them sing songs that are implied and even explicitly from the male perspective? It's rather jarring at times. It's one thing to hear a woman singing "Wild Rover" or "Sportin' Life" about hard living. It's another to hear a woman singing "East Virginia" about the singer meeting a fair young maiden and longing to lay her head on said young maiden's breast.
But there aren't any songs sung by men about other men. (Granted, there aren't that many folk songs from the female perspective... but there are a few on this collection, and they're all sung by women.)
I'd say that over half of the songs with a traditionally male perspective are sung by women. It's a weird skew. It's like they've gone overboard trying to give women an equal part in the work.
Patrick Costello links…
Someone at work asked me for a link to the How and Tao books, so I put this together for him.
I'm very seriously considering putting together a comprehensive link list to all this material.
Patrick Costello, Pik-Ware Publishing...
http://www.pik-ware.com/
Patrick's blog...
http://tangiersound.wordpress.com/
Just search for the titles of his books to find links to the free copies.
His DVD workshops for banjo and guitar are also CC licensed... links to them are in a comment on this post...
http://tangiersound.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/pik-ware-retires-dvd-workshops/
Folk Song of the Day videos...
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=Dobro33H
(They're also available on archive.org in downloadable formats.)
There's more material... a podcast or two, the "Weekly Workshop" video where he and Pat Sr mostly answer mail from fans.
There's a lot of older material out on archive.org which isn't linked from any of his active websites.... at the end of last year, he deleted his old website because it was creating too much work, and in doing so abandoned a lot of old material. It's all in the Wayback Machine on archive.org, but it's painful to pick through. howandtao.com is the domain name.
So he makes all kinds of stuff available for free, but doesn't take the time to make it easy to find. That's why I'm considering putting together a comprehensive list, as I've found most of it already. :)