I’ve been thinking about the first time I went to Okemah, Oklahoma for the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. It was a new festival and I went on a whim, without any information on festival activities or schedule. I drove down Broadway, Okemah’s main street, but didn’t see anything going on. I saw a building labeled “Historical Society” so I went in to see if they had a brochure or something.

A little gray-haired lady named Mrs. Edgmon welcomed me and we started talking. We were both Southerners so naturally the conversation soon turned to our family histories, and I learned that Mrs. Edgmon was, in fact, Woody’s baby sister Mary Jo. She introduced me to some other family members who were hanging around, and even got one of the cousins to show me around town in his pickup truck.

I have a set of four posters that Mary Jo drew to illustrate Woody’s life in my office. I asked her to sign one for me and she insisted on signing all of them. Later on when I was framing them I noticed that she had written a different personal message on each of the posters.

Once, in the wee hours of the morning, I stopped at a convenience store out by I-40 in Okemah. Their computer crashed and cash register wouldn’t work, so I sat in a booth eating ice cream cones with the two other customers in the store at that hour. One was a star in the tiny Australian bluegrass scene (I used to work down under) who was in town for the festival and the other one was Mary Jo. No point to this story, I suppose, but how often do you get to chat and eat ice cream with an Australian bluegrass star and Woody Guthrie’s sister in a ‘Stop-n-Rob’ out by the interstate in dead of night. Hasn’t happened to me since, anyway.