It's how people should relate to each other throughout the year, the longtime festival performer tells KMUW's Jonathan Huber.
You're listening to Walnut Valley Festival: The Early Years. I'm Jonathan Huber. A lot of people who go to the festival say it's like coming home each year when they arrive to the campgrounds. The same goes for performers when they get into Winfield. I ask John McCutcheon, who's performed at each Walnut Valley Festival since 1983, what coming home to Winfield means to him.
John McCutcheon: There have been a number of things over the course of the years that have really proven that this is a... this is more than a music festival - it is a family reunion. It's a gathering of the tribe. It's as I've said many times, it's where city folks and country folks and hippies and rednecks and Republicans and Democrats all get along for one weekend, like we should the rest of the year, and it's brought together by that common love of this music in all its many forms. Because even though a lot of local people still call it "the bluegrass", there's really... not a lot of real traditional bluegrass that goes on at that festival, and it's much to the credit of you know the early people who were guiding it - the Redfords and Art Coates and Stuart Mossman, who would go off to these festivals. And I remember Art talking to me early on... I came back from this festival in in Canada, and my goodness, they had workshops! And people would sit around, and you know, two or three people would talk about how to do this or this particular kind of music that you... I remember being a part of a Carter family workshop at the festival many years ago, a Jew's harp workshop for crying out loud, and it was a way to really delve into the musicians and what... how to do certain skills, and you know, fleshed out the music enough that it created a deeper relationship, so it wasn't just a show that you were doing. People got to ask questions, there was interaction. It's-I've always been a great lover of collaboration, and one of the things that festivals offer is an opportunity to see things that you're never going to see again, and musicians love it, audiences love it, and it's festive! Hey!
What have been some of your favorite collaborations or most memorable?
Let me give you three. Bob Franky, who was the guy who wrote "The Great Storm Was Over", which is a song that's really gone deep into the heart of the Winfield audiences. Was there one year, and I invited him to come up on stage one and sing that song with me. Linda Tilton was signing it, and he had no idea what that song meant to the Winfield audience. And I, I have a picture of him, sort of discovering what that meant when the chorus came and half the audience was signing and everybody was singing and it was sort of like him being reintroduced to his own song. And it was a... it was a really special moment, even more special now that Dot, that Bob passed away this last fall. I remember hanging around backstage with Nickel Creek back in about 2000, and they were kids then, and like it happened so often at Winfield. I remember seeing Allison Kraus as a kid. You know, you see these kinds of things, and we were just fooling around before their set, and I was on right after them, and so they came off, and I said, "Hey, come on up, and let's do some of that stuff that we were doing here." And they went, "Oh, really?" And I just thought, "Oh, you don't even know, do you, that you guys are about to explode. You're that good." And then the same thing happened with Tommy Emanuel. You know, Tommy will play with anybody, and we were playing some kind of banjo and fiddle thing. And I said, "Come on up and let's open the show with my set with that. It'll, you know, the people will dig it because they've never seen us play together, and we'd never played together before. And so he came up, and at the end of it, I said, "Everybody, please thank Tommy Emanuel." And he didn't leave the stage. He said, "Well, what's next?" And he played my entire set with me, just completely extemporizing some of the tastiest and most understated guitar stuff, and it was a great introduction to the Winfield audience. To me, certainly, what a terrific musician he is! How tasteful and appropriate, because when he's on his own, it's you know the Fourth of July, and this was just perfect, and it was. And I've done so many collaborations across years, and we have some in our back pocket for this year. So yeah, I think it's fun for the audience to go, "Ooh, this is happening right here, right now, and we get to be a part of this, and it may never happen again." And that's one of the things I really love to see happen at festivals. And luckily, Winfield has been pretty accepting of that.
You're listening to Walnut Valley Festival: The Early Years.
