Nights Under the Stars, Part II: Randy and Barb go to Merlefest
Did you shave just half of your face?” Barb asked me on the morning after our first night of sleeping in a tent near Wilkesboro some weeks back.
“Yes, that’s as much as I got done before the battery died on my razor,” I grumbled.
That exchange came after I had already grumbled about not being able to sleep on a poorly inflated air mattress, about being so cold that my chattering teeth woke me up three times and about the noise of the waterfall that cascaded about 75 yards from our tent.
To make matters worse, Barb awoke from her first-ever camping experience marveling about how well she had slept, how cozy it was in her sleeping bag, and how beautiful the waterfall sounded. Is there anything more aggravating than someone who is cheerful in the morning when you yourself have arisen with the intention of being a grump?
So started our three-day camping trip to Merlefest, the bluegrass music festival honoring the memory of guitarist Merle Watson, son of bluegrass great Doc Watson —and it was all uphill from there. The festival, now in its 21st year, is held annually on the campus of Wilkes Community College in western North Carolina—surely one of the prettiest community college campuses anywhere. One of the staff there told Barb that most of the buildings she was admiring “and just about everything else you see” came from festival proceeds. As a clue to approximately how much money is taken in, there were 76,000 people in attendance this year, and tickets ranged up to $50 a day for the four-day event.
Barb and I and the six real musicians with whom I play in a local band (other East of Afton members are George Brown, Phillip Gravely, Martin Gravely, Jon Marks, Scott Sayles and Brian Sullivan) drove to Wilkesboro for three of those days, enjoying such musicians as Sam Bush, The Waybacks, Marty Stuart, Tony Rice and Rhonda Vincent. Some of the performers we had seen when they performed at the National Folk Festival here in Richmond in recent years, like the Whitetop Mountain Band and Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys, and others had performed locally even more recently—Old Crow Medicine Show and Bearfoot, for instance.
Richmond has definitely been on the circuit for a lot of the country’s best bluegrass performers, but the assemblage at Merlefest was unparalleled. Over the four days, there were hundreds of opportunities to see musicians as varied as Ricky Skaggs and Levon Helm, George Hamilton IV and (originally of Jefferson Airplane fame) Jorma Kaukonen.
What a weekend! I can’t wait for next year to go back and do it all again. The jam sessions were a highlight for me, when East of Afton gathered around our campfire in the evenings to play and sing, while other campers and their families came to sit a spell and sometimes sing along, or other musicians or singers joined in with us, or when we’d all go to the other side of the huge campsite area and join in with other bands and musicians. It was all heady and pure and, for me, uplifting.
My band mates are all far younger than I, so I had great help putting up and taking down our tent, and fortunately one of them is a chef, so we had fantastic omelets for breakfast and delicious gumbo—and even more fortunately, another band member is a physician so I was able to eat well without worrying too much about small things like arteries.
As for Barb, I needn’t have worried about her first campout. She loved every minute of it—though admittedly was less than thrilled with the campsite’s port-a-potty and the ice-cold showers. But she soon discovered that all the campus buildings were open to festivalgoers—with warm water yet.
I’m glad to learn, at our age, that there are still new and untried experiences out there for us, experiences we can permanently add to the list of things we love to do. Barb lived all these years before ever sleeping in a tent, camping out near the sound of a waterfall, sitting around a campfire and singing at night—and these were all immediately things she loved and wants to do again.
As for me, I particularly liked an instant when my bride gave me what I took to be a beaming smile one night across the campfire. I thought we were sharing a romantic moment until she told me later that I had looked so funny in the firelight with that one side of my face still unshaved.
