The Coffee House Reunion has been my major project for this year's Folklife. I've been working on it for almost a year, with much good advice and help from Deckman, Don, and others. It's shaping up to be a fine afternoon.

It's long past due that we pay some attention at the Folklife Festival to the people who laid the foundations of the folk music community around here. If it wasn't for the seeds they planted 40 or more years ago, there wouldn't be nearly as much and as many kinds of folk music around here today.

As for record sales, I don't think Folklife ever had anything to do with Tower, except for the year that they donated a lot of bags. We started to sell performers' records in about 1979 or 1980 along with the festival's own highlights collections, as a way to let potential purchasers find them all in one place (and sell more records than a performer would sell off the stage). And we'd accept credit cards, which most individual performers could not.

The festival takes a relatively small percentage of each sale (it used to be 15%; don't know how much it is now) to help cover the cost of the festival. That's a lot less than what a retailer or distributor would take off the top, so the musician still makes good money. For almost twenty years, festival volunteers ran record sales. Eventually, it got so big that Silver Platters, a local chain (two stores), signed on to run it. I don't know how much Folklife makes on record sales every year, but like the t-shirts, buttons, crafts, food and everything else that's sold at the festival, that revenue helps keep the gates wide open all weekend.

If (guest) can sell a hundred CDs at the festival, that's great -- just as long as he remembers why those people were there to hear him, and he throws his fair share into the common pot so the festival can cover its expenses.