Gateway Dulcimer Festival 2007 Post Mortem

Boy, I have a good life! What a great (if exhausting!) weekend at the Gateway Dulcimer Festival in Belleville, Illinois.

Thursday night was when all of the early registrants showed up along with the folks presenting workshops and performing at the Friday and Saturday night concerts. There was a pretty good jam session going on and I got to say “Hey!” to many friends that I only see at these festivals; Jack and Mary Giger, Mike Anderson, Aubrey Atwater and Elwood Donnelly, Rick Thumb and lots of other folks. Traveling to the festival must have worn everyone out, though, as the jamming was done by about 10:30.

One of the high points of the evening was getting to meet Shari Wolf, the guitarist for Sweetwater. She’s a real hoot and her guitar playing really helped keep the rhythm going in the big jam! I hope I run into her again soon.

Friday, Dan and I got to the festival around 11:00 in the morning. More “Hi, howyadoin’ ” followed and we shortly sat down to play tunes. We jammed with an ever changing group of people all afternoon, only stopping for dinner and the evening concert.

The concert was top notch. It was great hearing performances by Jack and Mary, autoharpist Alex Usher, the lovely and charming Princess Harris (I think she’s my favorite hammered dulcimer player), beautiful songs by Katie Waldren and Candace Kreitlow, and Atwater/Donnelly to close the show. Probably the highlight of the concert was an eight or nine minute unaccompanied clog dance and story performance piece that Aubrey Atwater did seamlessly slipping between different clogging styles from different parts of the U.S. and Canada and who taught her each. She finished it up by clogging singing a French Canadian song while frailing the banjo all at the same time. The whole thing was sort of like the folk music equivalent of a drum solo. Sort of like the Grateful Dead’s Rhythm Devils in one pair of feet!

After the concert it was back to fiddling for me at another big jam session. Played a ton of tunes until around 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. Friend Neil showed up with his button boxes and added a whole different feeling to the tunes. A fiddle, an accordion, a mandolin, a couple of banjos, a harmonica, a couple of guitars, three or four hammered dulcimers, and maybe twenty mountain dulcimers. What a racket! Beautiful!

Saturday I had the great pleasure of playing guitar to back my good friend, terrific fiddler, and the director of the Folk School of St. Louis, Colleen Heine for the evening concert. Our set was great fun and seemed to go over pretty well. We played about a half hour of old-time fiddle tunes and songs. I hope we get to do more of it.

Others on the bill that evening were Barb Ernst, the aforementioned Sweetwater (who did a great set of funny songs with beautiful vocal from all three of the members), Mike Anderson, and Rick Thum.

After the concert it was back to jamming with the big bunch of dulcimers again. This time it broke up (pr at least I pooped out) around 1:00. By then my fingers had had about enough punishment and I was starting to forget which tunes I was playing. Sure signs that I’d been having far more than my share of fun over the last couple of days.

So, today (Monday), I’m still running on fumes, my hands are less sore, but there’s a smile on my face. Can’t wait ‘til next year!