The discussion about Indian Neck, whether or not it's divisive, etc. is fascinating. When we started the festrival (and I was only involved for the first few years), we were only interested in getting people together in an informal situation in which we could participate. For this, we were willing to work hard all year producing concerts that created the revenue to put on the festival. As I recall, there was no charge then. We paid for all expenses out of the money we made with the concerts. We rented an old hotel on the shore near New Haven and sent out invitations. I no longer can remember whether "Indian Neck" was the name of the area only or also the name of the hotel. The hotel itself was what is usually described as a big old wooden ark of a place dating back to the Victorian era.

Not everyone who came to the festival was well known. The bulk of the attendees weren't or were just starting to make a reputation for themselves.

During the days, small groups of people coalesced outside, under trees, on the wide porches, just to play and sing. THe music was constant and it was joyfull.

I don't remember that there were really concerts over the weekend but people did draw audiences when they sat down and played. I remember sitting near the Blind Reverend Gary Davis whose clean, poweful and imaginative picking fascinated me. I had never heard of him, or if I had, I wasn't familiar with his music. He managed to sing some moving gospel songs while seemingly keeping an eye on every attractive woman who moved near him.

Later, Fiddler Beers set up his instrument which he explained had come around Cape Horn with one of his ancestors. Somewhere in the middle of this, Gary Davis began a sermon accompanying himself on his guitar. The message was that all these couples sitting on the floor in front of him shouldn't be down there listening to him, they should be up together in joyful beds upstairs in the hotel.

Not everyone invited was a musician. I don't think I met him but Robert Shelton whom we all knew as "the folk music guy from the New York Times" was there but I don't think the fetival ever made the papers. It was a pirvate affair and everyone accepted that.

The concerts that paid for these weekends were all different sorts. Most of them were put on using talent from agent Manny Greenhill's office. Pete Seeger did a number of concerts for us. The second year, Manny would not let us book Pete Seeger unless we also took a young new singer, Odetta Felious, in the same concert with him. I think many of us already were familiar with her but Manny also insisted that we produce another concert with a brand new singer he had discovered. For $50, we hired Joan Baez.

I was sitting in the audience when she came onstage that Saturday afternoon in Woolsey Hall in New Haven. I think the place seated 2,200 but I could be wrong. Anyway, it was not full but the stage there is large enough to seat a symphony orchestra. Out on that stage came a slim, almost insubstantial young woman with long unbound black hair, carrying a guitar, and barefoot. She looked so vulnerable that I think the audience decided before she opened her mouth that it wanted to like her.

THis must have been a big moment for Joan Baez because in the front row were her mother, father and sister. I know she had been playing in coffee shops in Boston and that area but this may have been her first concert. I don't know whether or not her family had made a special trip across the country to see this concert but there they were. I have no recollection of what Joan Baez sang that afternoon but she won the heart of this nineteen year old student who was thrilled by her clear emotional voice, that sounded so approppriate to the way she looked and presented herself onstage. Several years ago, I was working with her on a project that grew out of her wartime trip to the former Yugoslavia and had a chance to tell her of my memories of that first concert.

We hired Joan Baez several more times, each time Manny had moved her up a notch on the payscale. The last time I was involved in hiring her, we paid $2,000. That time, Woolsey Hall was full, it was an evening concert, and the ticket prices were considerably higher.

Not all the Indian Neck concerts (as opposed to festivals) were music. I had the opportunity to set up a production of Mark Twain Tonight with Hal Holbrook. That was a very successful moneyraiser for Indian Neck.

We also had a fundraising concert one year in which we asked performers who had enjoyed the festival to come and give a few songs. Cynthia Gooding came but I don't think Theodore Bikel did. Harry and Jeannie West were there. THere was an old, very thin man who played a fretless banjo and performed a few cakewalks - I wish I knew who he was. There waws a very pretty banjo player who might have been Heddy West. I met Rick and Lorainne Lee that night (I stage managed the performance) and have remained friendly with Rick ever since. For a while we worked together at WGBH in Boston. I wish I could remember the others who were there because it was a wonderful evening with perhaps fifteen or twenty acts. I couldn't pay full attention because I was dealing with the problems of a wonderfully appreciative audience. Perfomers kept sneaking in an extra song and the evening grew longer and longer. SOme of the performers, with trains to catch and other places to go were getting impatient and I had to smooth a lot of ruffled egos that felt they were not being properly appreciated. Harry and Jeannie West were the most refined, patient people there. I had never heard them sing until they walked out on that stage that night where they turned me and a lot of people into the audience into fans.

The reason I have gone on at such length is that I am a little disappointed at the charges of elitism and the epithet "Snob Hollow". We loved the music and were willing to take on the financial burden of a concert, the effort of promoting it and running it in order to finance that one weekend a year. The idea that we were being divisive would have been both foreign and hurtful. Of course, I don't know what Indian Neck is like today but that isn't how it started out.

Sourdough

Allan S. Thanks for the tapes of "Heritage" as well as for the earlier ones. I enjoy them immensely.