But seriously now. . . .

The first festivals I ever attended were the Berkeley Folk Festivals in 1960, 61, and 64. They started at noon on a Wednesday and lasted through Sunday. This was over the Memorial Day weekend (last weekend in May), leaving Monday (actual Memorial Day) for people from out of town to get home again for work on Tuesday.

During the day, workshops of various kinds were held. Instrumental workshops, ballad study, song collecting, you name it: just about any subject that people would be interested in. Then the evenings were devoted to concerts by the featured perfomers. Said performers consisted of people like Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Lightnin' Hopkins, Mississipi John Hurt, Alan Lomax, Sandy Paton, the New Lost City Ramblers, Marais and Miranda, Almeda Riddle, Joan Baez, Alice Stuart, Doc Watson, and other folk luminaries. Sam Hinton did double-duty by MCing the concerts (usually split between a couple of performers, say first half Sandy Paton, second half the New Lost City Ramblers) and acting as moderator on several of the bigger workshops.

Not all of the singers in the above list appeared at every festival, What Barry Olivier (the organizer) attempted to do was have various aspects of folk music represented. Ballad singers (Ewan MacColl), blues singers (Lightnin' Hopkins), well-known concert performers (Joan Baez or Marais and Miranda), folklorist, ethnomusicologist, or other academic (Alan Lomax or Charles Seeger), and so one. All of these people participated in whatever workshops were within their particular area of expertise, e.g., Doc Watson on country-folk and guitar techniques or Almeda Riddle, Joan Baez, Sam Hinton, and a couple of others on ballad singing. One of my particular favorites was Bess Lomax Hawes conducting a workshop on how to teach folk guitar in classes.

These were held on the University of California campus and made use of the university's facilities such as various size classrooms for workshops and concert halls or auditoriums for evening concerts. Apart from the major scheduled events (concerts, workshops), there were other events. Some of the "visiting firemen" (singers and musicians who were from out-of-town, say, such as myself, but not officially part of the festival line-up) could sign up to perform a bit (open mike style). There were private parties going on all week in various homes in the area, and plenty of informal song-swapping in stairwells, in unused classrooms, and outside around the campus.

If you didn't need sleep. . . .

This sort of thing may bust your budget, but at the Berkeley events, I don't think the Big Names got paid all that much. In fact, I got the impression that it was a flat fee for all performing participants, no matter how well-known they were.

Since they did have featured performers and the featured performers were also the ones on the workshop panels, this may sound sort of "elitist," but I don't think anyone who attended, such as myself and several other people from Seattle, found fault with this. We had plenty of informal opportunities to sing, and the whole thing was a real learning experience. Part of this was the accessibility of the featured performers. Being able to chat with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger or attending an informal jam-session with Mississippi John Hurt, or sitting in a student lounge and talking with Charles Seeger were experiences I wouldn't trade for anything!

Folk festivals I have attended since may have been more "democratic" and allowed more participation by attendees, but they also tended to be mob-scenes, and were far less memorable than the Berkeley festivals. I came home from the Berkeley festivals dead tired, but with a head-full of new songs, new knowledge, marvelous memories, and renewed inspiration and enthusiasm.

Don Firth