Time to try and start daily blogging again. I probably won’t succeed but I definitely won’t if I don’t try. Yesterday I went to the Hudson West Folk Festival. I’m on the advisory board and have been volunteering there since it started. I work the merch most of the day but get relief to go to hear a few of the performers. Here’s the list of performers, do you know me well enough to figure out which two I had to see?
- Ed Snodderly
- Paul Sachs
- Allison Strong
- Adam Falcon
- Jared Tyler
- Jenni Muldaur and Teddy Thompson, with David Mansfield
- Joe Crookston
- Christine Santelli & Heather Hardy
- Lily Henley
Did you guess Joe Crookston and Lily Henley? I should have messed with you and said two other acts but no, those are the two I couldn’t miss. Joe is a longtime favorite musician and a friend. I think of Lily as being a favorite of more recent vintage, but she helped organize the Folk Fights Back concert in 2017 and I already knew her well I will never understand how this time thing works. A friend recently had her 46th birthday and as I always think of her as half my age that would make me 92 but that’s not right. I blame COVID-19. I at least blame COVID-19 for making it so long since I’ve seen Lily. I’m not sure I’ve seen her since she went to France on a grant to make an album. What I regret is not seeing any of the people I wasn’t familiar with. Oh well, that’s why I got to NERFA, to find new musicians to love.
I always have fun socializing with the audience, the musicians, and the volunteers. I spent the most time with Elisabeth, Joe’s road manager who sat at the merch table with me. I’ve known her for years, but I finally found out about her sons. One is an ornithologist, and I was able to impress my sister Sue, a bird watcher, by telling her that he worked on the bird ID app Merlin. I also met Kathryn’s son. She’s one of the festival organizers and a long time friend, how did I not know of him? He said we’ve met so the answer is that I’m an idiot; that is not news.
I didn’t have any revelations seeing Joe, but we made plans to see a Met game, … next August. That’s when his team the Cleveland Indians Guardians come to Citi Field to play the Mets. The reason I used the strikethrough was that I slipped yesterday and used their old name, The Indians. That’s one of the million things I want to blog about. At the height of Black Lives Matterwhen people were going out of their way to be sensitive to the feelings of people in discriminated against groups, they changed their name. I thought there was no need. I don’t believe the explanation that they team took the name Indians to honor Louis Sockalexis who played for the NL Cleveland Spiders. He was never a star and had only one good season and played only 66 games that year. He was popular but it would be like the Knicks changing their names to the Chinese to honor Jeremy Lin and Linsanity. I suspect that they came up with the explanation long after the fact. But that’s not my point. I didn’t think they needed to change because in surveys most Native Americans like the name. Pride was the one word most often used to describe how they felt about it. But that’s not my point either. My point is that I don’t mind that they changed the name, it was certainly done with good intentions, and there were some that were offended by the old name. What I am offended by the is the reactionaries who are infuriated by the name change and feel the need to mock it. That’s what I feel strongly about, the rest is me being a nerd.
OK, now back to the festival. I’m not going to name all my friends that were there as it was a gathering of the tribe and there were many. I sat with Ellen for Joe, and Katherine (not Kathryn) for Lily. I kept on trying to find Lily before her set, she was on last, but kept missing her. I heard guitar playing out of the dressing room and figured it was her, but it wasn’t. It was her husband, Duncan Wickel. I used his full name because he was performing and I use the full name of artists, and more importantly I love his name. It belongs in a Dickens novel. Like Lily he’s a fiddler/guitarist. Backing her up he stuck to guitar. The third member of the band is Andrew Ryan who I know through Kaia Kater. Folk like Ashkenazi Jews is a small interlocking community. I usually use the word incestuous. I was going to chicken out and not use the easily misunderstood term but what’s the use of writing a blog if I can’t speak in my natural language.
I did have a revelation about Lily. I first knew her as a brilliant instrumentalist. Then she started studying Landino, the language of the Sephardic Jews who moved to the Ottoman Empire when they were expelled from Spain in 1492, an easy year to remember. The language is similar to the Spanish spoken at the time of Columbus. As Lily explained there are also loan words from Turkish, Hebrew, and even Bulgarian. Landino is the Sephardim what Yiddish is to the Ashkenazi. So now she was a great instrumentalist scholar who wrote gorgeous songs in a language I didn’t understand. She explains what they are back. Some have interesting takes on feminism. She finished with a cover, a well-known song that through the magic of being an idiot I forgot. She sang it backed by the band, but she just sung. There was no fiddle or guitar, no scholarship, and no poetry. That took away all the lenses I usually see her through and made me realize she’s a great singer. This happened to me one other time, with Jean Rohe. When people knock my socks off, I don’t pay that much attention to their voice.
I just realized that I’m an idiot and didn’t get a picture of Lily on fiddle and I didn’t mention that Duncan also played bouzouki.
We were rushed out of the building when the show was over. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to everyone. The festival is in Jersey City and a group of us live in NYC, so we went to the PATH train together. I always go home with Jim and David, this time we were joined by Karen and one of Karen’s friends that I didn’t know. Jim continued with me on the D train. For the second time in a few weeks, OMNY rejected my half-price fare that connected to Google Pay. I can fix it through a phone call, but I hate having to do that. The City owes me half a subway fare.
I have so many other things to write about. Let’s see if I can get myself to write tomorrow or at least the next day. I hope so. In the meantime, listen to the most recent Gord’s Gold, that is now my prime outlet for creative expression.
Wise Madness 