For a long time the Roots Festival and the San Diego Folk
Festival was a homecoming for performers. There would be a whole series of
festivals and concert bookings that lasted throughout the spring, summer, and
fall with a layoff through the winter months and then it all started again. For
many of the regulars in the 1970s through the early Oughts, our festival here
in San Diego was a chance for many musicians to get together again, swap
stories (good and bad), rebond, and along the way make some good music together
for a much appreciative audience. It was also a chance to meet new people and
carry the word about the San Diego music scene across the country. If someone found
a new fiddle tune, or guitar tuning (ask Mary McCaslin about that), or a really
exciting new or old set of lyrics to a song, or the telling of a story, it was
going to come out here, and for the next year people would be singing it or
playing it or telling it and each one in the doing adding their bit to the Folk
Process.
That
homecoming has sort of dropped off during the past few years, but it's making a
kind of comeback this year at the new processed Adams Avenue Roots and Folk
Festival. Some of the people who played some of those early festivals are
coming back and hopefully bringing some of that homecoming spirit with them.
Kathy Larisch and Carol McComb will be back with us again. In the very
beginning the festival was sort of born in Carol McComb's living room behind
the old Blue Guitar on Midway Drive. That was back in 1967, and Kathy and Carol
would play at the first three festivals, help with the founding of Folk Arts
Rare Records, and then move on to other things, getting back together three years
ago and now back with us again this year. Ray Bierl was also part of the
festival that first year and he is back with us this year both solo and with
the all-star aggravation High, Wide and Handsome. That group will also include
Clark Powell and his dobro guitar (Clark played with Ray at the third San Diego
Folk Festival in 1969). Another returnee who first played at that 1969 festival
is Mary McCaslin, who has been at many Folk and Roots Festivals over the years.
She has expanded the western songwriting genre to new limits and pioneered a
unique and much-copied singing style not to mention those ever present unusual
guitar tunings into a unique career. San Diego folksinger-songwriter Bob LeBeau
was writing and singing his own hand-crafted songs before most anyone talked
about singer-songwriters and was an established part of the San Diego folk
scene when he first played at the fourth San Diego Folk Festival in 1970. He's
been back too few times over the years, but he'll be with us this year. Curt
Bouterse has been with the festival since the very beginning and it wouldn't be
a festival without his banjar, hammered dulcimer, and Southeast Asian pipes (on
which he plays Southern Appalachian fiddle tunes naturally). Curt has finally
gotten around to recording a couple of CDs (for the Dancing Cat people). The
new one is a duet with old buddy Bob Webb and Curt ought to have some to sell
at the festival. Expect Curt and Kathy
and Carol to team up for a duet or two as they did in the early days.
Tom
"Tomcat" Courtney will be with us as he often is. Tom first played at the fifth
Festival in 1971 (the first year he was in San Diego) and has played a pile of
them since. He's another one with a new CD out finally after 35 years playing
around San Diego (he did record four sides on the old San Diego Blues Jam LP in
1974). This is the best he's done and he's booked for national touring and
European Festivals in the fall. See the CD review in this issue on page 18.
Martin Henry also first played at the fourth Folk Festival in 1970 and he'll be
back this year. Walt Richards (of Trails and Rails who'll be here this year)
played at the first festival in 1967 as part of another group. Patty Hall
joined us in the mid-'70s for a festival or two and she's with us again this year
with her songs and stories. Those are most of the folks who are coming home to
the annual Homecoming, which has taken place on Adams Avenue for the last 17
years.
If you are
reading this after May 3-4, you missed it, but you can inquire about next year's
dates by getting a hold of the Adams Avenue Business Association and telling
them you want more of the same and want to bring your uncle down from Enumclaw,
Washington, so you need those dates now.
Now there
are lots of good people who have come to these homecomings more recently (some
of them for the first time this year even), and I've been talking them up in
previous columns so you'll know who to check out. So do it, and enjoy it.
Digital
Update
Now this
process I'm currently working on, thanks to the Grammy grant to digitize the
reel-to-reel tapes from all those early concerts and festivals for inclusion in
a Lou Curtiss Collection at the Library of Congress and the UCLA Department of
Ethnomusicology Archives, has been very gratifying for me. For one thing, it's
put me back in touch with a lot of musicians who played at some of those early
festivals like Ray and Ina Patterson who aren't playing professional anymore
but still like to talk about the real old time country songs. (Ray will be 82
this year and I know they'd love to hear from San Diego fans who remember their
11 visits to San Diego.) You could probably get an address from Fred and Cathay
Zipp (good friends of the Pattersons) at this year's Festival. I also heard
from Sue Draheim and then Mac Benford about a reunion of Dr. Humbead's New
Tranquility String Band (who, along with opening for the Grateful Dead at the
Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms, played at the third San Diego Folk Festival).
That would certainly be special.
Right now
in the digitization process Russ Hamm and I are up to the 7th Folk Festival,
which featured Wade and Julia Mainer, U Utah Phillips, Norman Kennedy, Michael
Cooney, Hank and Sandy Bradley, Fiddlin' Red Simpson and the Old Scratch Band,
Dr. Avery P. Snootful's Medicine Show, the Sweets Mill Mountain Boys, the Old
Hat Band, Jim Ringer, Otis Pierce, Mary McCaslin, Sandy and Caroline Paton, and
a whole lot more. That was the 1973 Festival and along with that, we were doing
concerts at Folk Arts Rare Records, so all of them will be digitized too and
added to the collection (some of those concerts include Sam Hinton, Tom Waits,
Wayne Stromberg, Johnny Walker, Sam Chatmon, Ringer and McCaslin, Martin Henry,
Holly Tannen, and even the Oak Farts Ramblers). Some of the stuff is being
posted at Folk Arts Rare Records.com for your listening and downloading
pleasure.
There's so
much of this material that we've even talked about an online radio station that
would play nothing but material from these festivals and other live stuff from
the Sound Library, recorded and collected by yours truly. Considering that no radio station in San
Diego is willing to play any kind of folk or traditional music (Shame! Shame!
Shame!) and hasn't for a long, long time, playing it on line might be the only
way. I've sure got the material. I just need a few people to speak up and tell
folks what kind of music you want to hear.
A
Final Thought
I've put 20
San Diego Folk Festivals together (mostly at San Diego State), 17 Adams Avenue
Roots Festivals (whether I got credit for them or not), four Blues Festivals
(with varying degrees of success), and 13 Adams Avenue Street Fairs (from
1994-2003). So that makes 54 music festivals I've organized. I'd like to see
THE 55th LOU CURTISS OLD TIME SONG FESTIVAL. Anybody want to help me with that
one? Blues, jazz, folk songs, doo wop, rockabilly, honkytonk country, old
timey, bluegrass, vaudeville, i.e., all the old time songs that Lou Curtiss
likes to listen to and none that he doesn't. Is that only a dream? Probably.
Have a good musical month.
Recordially,
Lou Curtiss