The first folk festivals I ever went to were the Berkeley Folk Festivals in 1960, '61, and '64. Those were outrageous experiences. During the day there were workshops on a whole variety of folk music related subjects. In these workshops I heard people like Charles Seeger, Frank Warner, Archie Green, and Sandy Paton discussing collecting folk music, Almeda Riddle, Jean Redpath, and Joan Baez talking about singing ballads, Mississippi John Hurt, Mance Lipscomb, and Lightnin' Hopkins talking about singing and playing blues, Doc Watson talking about and demonstrating various aspects of playing the guitar, Bess Lomax Hawes talking about teaching folk guitar in classes (which I was just starting to do at the time), and informal sessions with Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl, Marais and Miranda, Sam Hinton, Merritt Herring, and a host of other performers. Then in the evenings, these same people would be singing in concert. Along with this, there were a lot of unofficial late-night parties, and you never knew who might come walking in. I had a long chat with Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl at one of these. And at the 1964 festival, they had made provision for some of the 'visiting firemen" such as me and a few other people from Seattle to do a little performing in some of the peripheral venues during the festival.

I attended and performed at a number of the Northwest Folklife Festivals in the late Seventies and early Eighties, including, on one occasion, sharing a stage with Elizabeth Cotton. Talk about a tough act to follow!! There were also workshops at the NFF, but where the Berkeley Festivals, had maybe eight or ten featured performers such as those mentioned above, the Northwest Folklife Festivals are wide-ranging and often have a couple of thousand performers. Events include everything from Australian sheep-shearing contests to Balinese gamelan orchestras to Taiko drummers to Irish step-dancing to Martian tentacle-clapping. Sea chanteys are usually sung off the Seattle Center grounds down at the south end of Lake Union and sometimes you can actually find someone singing ballads up in one of the meeting rooms around the Northwest Court. The late Merritt Herring, Stewart, Paddy Graber, others. Some of the best events at the NFF are not listed in the program. They happen spontaneously, occurring when a small gathering of singers find a nice echoey stairwell. Or when several people get together, defect, and go to someone's house for a song fest.

The last time I sang at the Northwest Folklife Festival was at the Coffeehouse Reunion (Geezer's) Concert at the 2003 festival, where about a dozen or so of us wrinklies got together and regaled the assembled multitudes with sounds from the distant past. Lotsa fun! Ran into people I haven't seen or heard for decades.

The problem with the Northwest Folklife Festivals within recent years is that they are such a freakin' mob scene. I like to go to them, but bucking the milling crowds can be a real hassle. Personally, I like smaller, more dedicated folk festivals, like the Moss Bay Sail and Chantey Festival in the late Seventies or the Berkeley festivals I attended early on.

Don Firth