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July 26, 1998
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Despite my desire to stay in bed until the millennium, Nancy coaxed me to the Lowell Folk Festival, the largest free music festival in the US. We had listened to the live broadcast from the festival on WGBH yesterday and decided we had to hear The Campbell Brothers live at all costs and anything else was gravy. So after a quick breakfast at Val's we headed on over. My first surprise was the fabulous job the city of Lowell had done re-routing traffic making some streets one way and directing traffic that way so it was so easy to get into the John Street Garage that I thought I must be in the wrong city or at the wrong festival. It was a breeze! (Getting out again later was too.) Huzzas to Lowell for the traffic management. We could hear soul music blasting from the Boardinghouse stage and made a beeline for it: Marva Wright and the BMWs. They rock! Marva Wright can shout with the best of 'em. After 45 minutes or so of Marva, on came the Campbell Brothers. They play gospel music in the Keith Dominion style,which features pedal steel as part of their worship. On brother played the pedal steel, another played lap steel, and the third played a regular electric guitar. The 13 year old son of one of them played drums. Katie Jackson sang. She can shout with the best of 'em too. People were swaying and dancing and singing along and raising their hands in a show of faith just like a spirit-filled church service. The Campbell Brothers were so intense that I couldn't just go on and listen to the next act (Barachois from Prince Edward Island, an Acadian group) so we wandered toward JFK Plaza where the culminating set of the day, Little Milton, was scheduled for 5:00PM. We stopped and watched kids playing horseshoes and box hockey. Box hockey confounded me. Nancy asked if it was indigenous to the Merrimack Valley. I'd never seen it before in my life. It looked kind of like Knock Hockey (or Nok Hockey as it is sometimes spelled) only in a box with a narrow hole between the two box halves instead of a hole at each end. (I need to polish my descriptive powers especially since 9/10ths of the readers of this journal won't have heard of Nok Hockey either and the other 10th is my family who most definitely has heard of Nok Hockey and played it infinitely). I even did a search on "box hockey" on the web tonight and found nothing except a few articles about ice hockey that happened to have the word box somewhere in them (penalty box, box seats, etc.). Anyway, we watched kids playing Box Hockey in the games area and then continued our trek. At JFK Plaza we heard Marva Wright and the BMWs again at maximum volume while we waited in a very very long line at the Afro-American society food booth for black eye peas and rice and sweet potato pie. A woman in line behind us was anxiously counting the slices of sweet potato pie and the number of people in line in front of her. We got our pie. She got her pie. The black eye peas and rice was transcendent and needless to say so was the sweet potato pie. After our lunch/supper we walked over to the national park visitor center to use the rest rooms and see what was at the Market Mills Courtyard stage. We listened from inside the air conditioned comfort of the visitor center and then shopped in the small bookstore (I showed Nancy a copy of one of Julie's books, the one about child labor. Nancy asked if it was controversial. Yup, I said, banned in at least two states.) for a present for former Lowell resident, Charla, and some postcards to send to Lizzy at 4-H camp. (Lizzy's only going to be at camp a week, so I kinda hafta mail the postcards and letters today or tomorrow to make sure she gets some mail from me while she's there. The camp encourages that.) We decided to skip Little Milton since we'd heard his entire set live-on-tape on Blues After Hours last night, and after the intense high from the Campbell Brothers, we needed to let the music breathe a little. |
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