Falcon Ridge
Jul. 31st, 2007 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficMy job is sucking a whole lot right now, so instead of talking about that, I'm going to talk about my fabulous weekend!
I went to the Falcon Ridge Falcon Festival this weekend with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
veryschway and her friend Jill. (Her other friends had to leave early, unfortunately.) Details behind cut, but here's the cliff notes version. Two days sitting outside on a farm listening to hours and hours of music! Mud liek woah! Camping! Electric sitar! Learned sign language for wedgie! Sacred harp singers! Wine in a water bottle! Sunburn eeeeverywhere!
Falcon Ridge is four days long, so veryschway and co. had been there since Thursday. I drove up on Saturday, which turned out to be a good thing since it poured all Friday night and Saturday morning. When I got there, it was a mud pit. Over the tops of your shoes in the high traffic areas. The previous night, veryschway had actually sat in the open in just a poncho in the pouring rain. That's dedication.
There were tons of performers, and I'll be putting up mp3s from my favorites later. What's great about something like this is you see some people you know and a lot of people you don't and discover great new groups. In addition to the musicians doing hour-long sets, there were workshops where three or four groups would be on stage at a time, and they'd take turns performing, and jump in on each other's songs. This leads to things like The Strangelings picking up an electric fiddler for their set that they'd met that afternoon. You hear some songs played a couple of different times—like Mary Gauthier's "Wheel Inside a Wheel" which she did acoustic and then later in the day with a whole band jamming.
Plus, this whole festival is handicap accessible, which means for every act, there's a sign interpreter on the stage. These people are amazing. They're not just signing, it's like dance or poetry or something. One act, Eddie from Ohio, brought the interpreter into the act. They kept saying "wedgie" just to make her sign it (yes, it's amusing). They had a song about carp, and they threw the word carp into some other songs to make her blub like a fish. … Maybe you had to be there. It was amusing though, to watch the signer interpret Richard Shindell's lyric, "flipping the bird" from "Transit" by…flipping the bird. I thought this was a family show!
On Saturday evening, veryschway brought cheap Riesling in a water bottle and we took turns sipping it from the squirt top. Classy.
Folk encompasses a lot of different influences—celtic, blues, traditional songs, gospel, rock, and the classic sort of hippy folk popularized in the sixties. There was some of that, not all of it good. At one point, they had people dressed in dove suits walking around on stilts, and then circling around someone dressed as a falcon in some sort of symbolic something. During a workshop, one singer sang the most horrible, naïve, self-centered song about Vietnam. But for the most part, the music was good.
Veryschway also reported that the first aid tent's main purpose appeared to be distributing free condoms. They apparently had a poster that said: "Stealth condom: They'll never see you coming."
We camped on Saturday night, and because of the rain, veryschway had pitched the tents on the top of the hill. Good for flooding, not so fun to haul stuff up to. When I woke up in the morning, I'd slid down to the bottom of the tent. It's been a long time since I went camping—the last time I did I was significantly shorter. I'd forgotten how pup tents turn into little saunas as soon as the sun rises. Crawling out of there in the morning you feel like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis—or more likely a caterpillar, given the lack of running water for showers and tooth brushing and things.
I managed to burn my knees on Saturday, and everything else on Sunday (including my lips). I spent a lot of Sunday in search of shade.
Sunday morning when we went down for breakfast, we passed a group of people singing—I realized that they were singing Sacred Harp. !! I'm writing an article on Sacred Harp singers right now. So I went up to listen, and then they asked me to join in. I got the full experience. There's no leader in Sacred Harp, someone will just call out a hymn. Then someone sings a quick scale to establish the key—C, in this music, is whatever the person sings, not a fixed note. Then you run through on shapes (the music is written in shape note) to learn the melody, then on words. It was a whole lot of fun. If you've never heard Sacred Harp, I do encourage you to find some. It's unique and takes some getting used to, but has its own beauty. It's become more popular lately since it was used in the movie Cold Mountain.
We stayed till a little after 4 on Sunday, just long enough to hear Richard Shindell. I also heard Dar Williams perform for the first time since she played at my summer camp in the early nineties, just after she released "Honesty Room."
It was a whole lotta fun, but I tell you, nothing makes you appreciate things like chairs like sitting on the ground for two days straight. I don't know how veryschway managed it for four.
I went to the Falcon Ridge Falcon Festival this weekend with
veryschway and her friend Jill. (Her other friends had to leave early, unfortunately.) Details behind cut, but here's the cliff notes version. Two days sitting outside on a farm listening to hours and hours of music! Mud liek woah! Camping! Electric sitar! Learned sign language for wedgie! Sacred harp singers! Wine in a water bottle! Sunburn eeeeverywhere!Falcon Ridge is four days long, so veryschway and co. had been there since Thursday. I drove up on Saturday, which turned out to be a good thing since it poured all Friday night and Saturday morning. When I got there, it was a mud pit. Over the tops of your shoes in the high traffic areas. The previous night, veryschway had actually sat in the open in just a poncho in the pouring rain. That's dedication.
There were tons of performers, and I'll be putting up mp3s from my favorites later. What's great about something like this is you see some people you know and a lot of people you don't and discover great new groups. In addition to the musicians doing hour-long sets, there were workshops where three or four groups would be on stage at a time, and they'd take turns performing, and jump in on each other's songs. This leads to things like The Strangelings picking up an electric fiddler for their set that they'd met that afternoon. You hear some songs played a couple of different times—like Mary Gauthier's "Wheel Inside a Wheel" which she did acoustic and then later in the day with a whole band jamming.
Plus, this whole festival is handicap accessible, which means for every act, there's a sign interpreter on the stage. These people are amazing. They're not just signing, it's like dance or poetry or something. One act, Eddie from Ohio, brought the interpreter into the act. They kept saying "wedgie" just to make her sign it (yes, it's amusing). They had a song about carp, and they threw the word carp into some other songs to make her blub like a fish. … Maybe you had to be there. It was amusing though, to watch the signer interpret Richard Shindell's lyric, "flipping the bird" from "Transit" by…flipping the bird. I thought this was a family show!
On Saturday evening, veryschway brought cheap Riesling in a water bottle and we took turns sipping it from the squirt top. Classy.
Folk encompasses a lot of different influences—celtic, blues, traditional songs, gospel, rock, and the classic sort of hippy folk popularized in the sixties. There was some of that, not all of it good. At one point, they had people dressed in dove suits walking around on stilts, and then circling around someone dressed as a falcon in some sort of symbolic something. During a workshop, one singer sang the most horrible, naïve, self-centered song about Vietnam. But for the most part, the music was good.
Veryschway also reported that the first aid tent's main purpose appeared to be distributing free condoms. They apparently had a poster that said: "Stealth condom: They'll never see you coming."
We camped on Saturday night, and because of the rain, veryschway had pitched the tents on the top of the hill. Good for flooding, not so fun to haul stuff up to. When I woke up in the morning, I'd slid down to the bottom of the tent. It's been a long time since I went camping—the last time I did I was significantly shorter. I'd forgotten how pup tents turn into little saunas as soon as the sun rises. Crawling out of there in the morning you feel like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis—or more likely a caterpillar, given the lack of running water for showers and tooth brushing and things.
I managed to burn my knees on Saturday, and everything else on Sunday (including my lips). I spent a lot of Sunday in search of shade.
Sunday morning when we went down for breakfast, we passed a group of people singing—I realized that they were singing Sacred Harp. !! I'm writing an article on Sacred Harp singers right now. So I went up to listen, and then they asked me to join in. I got the full experience. There's no leader in Sacred Harp, someone will just call out a hymn. Then someone sings a quick scale to establish the key—C, in this music, is whatever the person sings, not a fixed note. Then you run through on shapes (the music is written in shape note) to learn the melody, then on words. It was a whole lot of fun. If you've never heard Sacred Harp, I do encourage you to find some. It's unique and takes some getting used to, but has its own beauty. It's become more popular lately since it was used in the movie Cold Mountain.
We stayed till a little after 4 on Sunday, just long enough to hear Richard Shindell. I also heard Dar Williams perform for the first time since she played at my summer camp in the early nineties, just after she released "Honesty Room."
It was a whole lotta fun, but I tell you, nothing makes you appreciate things like chairs like sitting on the ground for two days straight. I don't know how veryschway managed it for four.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-31 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-31 09:30 pm (UTC)I've seen Richard a couple of times--sometimes he's great, sometimes he just sucks. This time was great (though I'm told Friday was teh sucks).
It was great fun, but quite an ordeal. I'm not sure I could do it again, knowing what I'm in for.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 12:06 am (UTC)