24-April-99 New England Folk Festival

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Or maybe it's the New England Folk Festival Association Festival. That doesn't make much sense, but it's the NEFFA festival. It's been going on in Natick, two towns away, every year since the 1940's. We haven't gone in many years, but this year Arlene's (second? third?) cousin Elizabeth, who teaches folk dancing in New Jersey, wanted to come to it, and she and her son stayed with us and we all went out there.

Oh, probably meanwhile I should apologize for not updating sooner. Sorry I didn't update sooner. I was busy with klezmer band Tuesday night, choir rehearsals for the Project Manna concert Weds and Thurs, and out of commission with a stomach bug Thurs and Friday. In fact, I missed out on all the great ethnic food at NEFFA today, staying on clear liquids. Phooey.

NEFFA takes over Natick High School, or a big part of it, for one weekend each spring. By now they are incredibly well organized. I don't just mean that there are lots of signs on the streets directing you to parking lots or overflow parking lots or where to wait for the shuttle busses from overflow parking lots. I don't just mean that there are signs all over the high school telling you which way to which rooms. It goes to the extent that the rest rooms have signs “Please mention that this is RESTROOM <n> if you have to tell Hospitality that maintenance or additional supplies are needed.” It must help that it was school vacation week just before, but they still have to have it all cleaned up by Monday morning, and it's a 100% volunteer effort.

There are folk dancing and folk singing and instrumental music events going on in a dozen rooms Friday evening, from 10 AM to midnight Saturday, and most of Sunday. There are people selling the most obscure ethnic music CDs you could wish for. There are signs “Please no jamming in this area”, and they are needed, because anywhere there's a place to stop walking two to six musicians will gather and start playing. I mean, on stairway landings. Everywhere.

I started at the “International Folk Dance Basics” workshop that was being led by one of my coworkers. I haven't done international folk dancing in years, but maybe it's like riding a bicycle too; I remembered how to relax and let the music tell me what to do, and didn't feel too klutzy. Would you believe me if I said “graceful”? Naah, “not too klutzy” is good enough. I remembered the whole standard steps to “Tzena Tzena.” It didn't hurt that I was wearing the Israeli style shirt I made when I was in the Brandeis Israeli dance troupe back in grad school, with yemenite embroidery that Michal Artzi taught me to do. That shirt doesn't get out of the closet much, but this was a time it didn't look at all out of place.

Arlene caught up with me at the end of that workshop -- she hadn't been dancing -- and we went looking for a gospel singing session. With slight confusion over the schedule, we were in a session of sea songs instead, and heard a song about why a stone tower on a half-tide ledge (a rock that a ship could get wrecked on at half tide, but that can be sailed over at high tide) in Penobscot Bay is called “The Fiddler” The story, perhaps created by the songwriter, is that someone drowned there sailing home from fiddling at a dance on the other side of the bay. Describing the song that way is like saying Macbeth is about someone who wanted to be king of Scotland.

We did find the gospel song session next. It was led by Nick Page, a very large man with a big voice and an astounding comfort with lots of musical traditions. He started with white Appalachian style songs -- “Will the Circle be Unbroken” for a start, and then the style that Elvis grew up hearing -- and moved into black gospel style, telling us in between how he had learned it, and how someone had said to him, “You must be white!” How could they tell? “Because you're thinking about how you're moving” In between he mentioned going to workshops on Jewish music, “Oy! Don't get me started!” sat down at the piano and played four measures of totally convincing klezmer accompaniment, and jumped up and was back talking about gospel without missing a beat. He needs another instrumentalist for a concert he has scheduled. “I'm looking for a good banjo player. I want the kind who can come to a rehearsal.” Before the end of the hour he had a hundred people singing “Every Day is a Day of Thanksgiving” in three part harmony with no music. Don't get me wrong, the Mass. Ave. Baptist Church choir is going to sound better than that at the Project Manna concert, but it wasn't bad for short notice.

The next hour there was a demonstration of drop spindle spinning, and I needed to get some supervised practice at that. It's a long story, involved with the weaver's convention in Niagara Falls two summers ago; you could check this related page of mine. I've never been really clear on these sex role things -- maybe you gathered that what with the shirt embroidery and all -- but I had tried to learn so I could do a good eraser carving of a drop spindle for a stamp. I'm a much better drop spindle spinner now than I was this morning.

Sometime in there we went over to the cafeteria for refreshments. I limited myself to a can of slice, but we hung out around the player piano while we refreshed. I bet there are people out there who haven't ever seen a player piano up close. It's an upright piano with lots more mechanism, and is operated by sensing air passing through holes in a roll of paper about a foot wide. Right? There's a metal plate with row of holes in it, one for each note on the piano; the paper goes from the roll above those holes to a take-up roll below. Where there's a hole in the paper, air can get through the hole in the metal plate, and the mechanism then plays the corresponding string. A person operates the thing by pumping on pedals and moving levers to control tempo and volume, while other people gather around singing along. My knowledge of physics tells me that the people singing along are not essential to the functioning of the player piano, but I can't be sure because there is no experimental evidence of a player piano ever playing without people singing along. The words to the song are printed on the roll and naturally they roll into position next to the sensor holes precisely in time to the music. Yours truly always wondered why the older generation cried at “Sunrise, Sunset” but, sorry, there I was with my voice quavering and my handkerchief out. The people who bring the piano (every year!) bring dozens of milk crates each with three dozen boxes with a song in each; so, who knows? a collection of well over two thousand songs, more than a third of whose names sound familiar? One of the heartwarming (sorry again, but it happens) things of the day was seeing four secondary school kids around the player piano singing all the songs from Oliver! It's just hard to find anyone under fifty who's willing to sing in public these days.

After the lunch break Arlene took us off to a workshop on women's balkan song. We didn't know what we were getting into. Let's just say that now I have more feel for what the singers on La Mystere de Voix Bulgares are doing.

The last workshop we went to was a panel on harps -- four harpers talking about their instruments, the history of harps, how they had learned, and how the harp is played, with a couple of numbers by each. One of them tries to recreate the old celtic tradition of bards reciting poems to harp accompaniment, but with poems like “The Cremation of Sam MacGee.” At the end they invited any harpers in the audience to come up and play. One woman brought up her harp, much smaller than the ones the panelists had been playing, looking like all the pictures of the celtic bards, and we got to hear its entirely different sound.

We met up with Elizabeth and Daniel at the food court after that session and sat down for supper at one of the long school cafeteria tables. Since I still didn't trust my stomach, I wasn't eating and was available to talk to the people sitting next to me -- and there was so much turnover, or my party was eating so slowly and going over so much family history, that that amounted to four parties. I can't figure it out. Normally I'm not that communicative, at least not in person, nor that good at meeting people. It probably helped that I was sitting across from my wife so women knew I wasn't really hitting on them. Also, the first woman who sat down next to me asked when I was performing (because of the Israeli shirt) and the second woman who sat down next to me was the performer who had done the song about the Fiddler in Penobscot Bay, so it was easy to start a conversation by saying how much I had liked that. I think the bottom line, though, is that everyone who comes to that festival feels that they're at home with other people who are considered a bit eccentric for being interested in this stuff, and are more willing than the average person to accept you. For gosh sakes, if you're going to do folk dancing, you're going to have to hold hands with whoever turns up next to you, anyway.