HARWICH — A rarely used and little-known wooded hollow just steps away from the heart of Brooks Park will soon be filled for two days with folk music as part of the Harwich Cranberry Festival.
The music will feature up to 20 performers, including the locally popular Parkington Sisters, the Ticks, Randy and the Oak Trees, Squidda, the Flakes, Katie Flynn, and Cape Cod bluesman George Grizbach.
The first day of music, on Saturday, Sept. 18, is called Cranberry Jam.
Sponsored by radio station WOMR (Outer Most Radio, 92.1 FM), the event celebrates the construction of its new radio repeater antenna in Brewster, which will be known as WFMR (Further Most Radio, 91.3 FM).
On Sunday, Sept. 19, a second day of performances, organized by Cranberry festival staff, will feature established as well as up and coming local performers. (The music events are just one piece of the Harwich Cranberry Festival. Turn to Page 2 for details.)
The hollow, a dried ancient lakebed, is part of Brooks Park.
While it is town owned, it has been used very little for recent public events and is mostly filled with mature trees. A public works cleanup of the overgrown brush in the heart of the basin was performed to open up a performing space, roughly 175 yards long by 75 yards wide.
This natural amphitheatre is considered an excellent space for a musical event because of the way sound is cradled by the sloping basin.
"When I first went down, I thought this was really excellent place to have an event," said John Nelson, station manager at WOMR, which organizes similar events across the Outer Cape, including one called Boogie By the Bay in Wellfleet. "Acoustically, it will be quite unique."
Nelson said the Cranberry Jam on Saturday includes six performers, spanning from noon to about 8:30 p.m.
"We'll be adding about 80,000 possible listeners (with the new repeater) to our (radio) programming and this is very exciting," he said, explaining that the repeater cost almost $100,000 to install. "It has been about 10 years since the project began."
Cranberry Festival organizers Ed McManus and John Bangert noted that the creation of the folk festival signals a shift in emphasis to highlight musical abilities in the community and move away from the traditional emphasis on a fall carnival, which for years had been held each September at the high school fairgrounds.
McManus explained that his vision for the new folk concert is "to give a new start to the Cranberry Festival for the community, something that can be built on in the future and done in a way that involves Harwich and Cape Cod rather than importing people from around the country."