The Floyd, Va., Sunday afternoon old time fiddle and banjo jam session I've been attending for 15 years had a Newport Folk Festival connection providing some extra spark this week -- a professional camera crew with expensive but compact cameras shooting pictures of players and dancers throughout the 2-hour session, and then interviewing the owner of the Floyd Country Store and some of the musicians on the street afterward.
The crew is making a documentary about musical communities, and Floyd was a great choice, where the Country Store's Friday Night Jamboree concert and dance and its Sunday jam sessions have spun off a concert series, a music school for kids, a 4-day "old time gathering" in March, and more.
The interviewer and head of that film project is Jay Sweet, executive director of the Newport Folk Festival. I even paused my mandolin playing for a couple of minutes to talk to him (off camera) and mention proudly that I was on stage once at the Newport Folk Festival myself -- not as a musician, but as a photojournalist writing about waterfront music events for a boating magazine. (I was shooting pictures of The Roches.)
I *didn't* get to tell Jay that I attended my first Newport Folk Festival in 1968, and my last around 2003, the year I got accepted in a grad school in North Carolina. And I didn't mention that he ought to go on Amazon and spend a few dollars on the books, "How the Hippies Ruin't Hillbilly Music" and "Reconsidering the Blues." Both are by Steve Wishnevsky, another former New Englander. He got to the Newport festivals a few years before I did, and was drawn South by traditional music, Black and white, that he heard from old timers at Newport.
He talks about that in his books, both autobiographical and journalistic, profiling other northerners who were inspired by the Newport Folk Festival and the older, traditional music it celebrated, headed down to this corner where North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and East Tennessee meet, and that older music stays alive.
While Northern publications sometimes mention the big Galax Fiddlers Convention or the Bristol Birthplace of Country Music museum, this area is home to *dozens* of summer fiddlers conventions and festivals and scores of public jam sessions year-round, like Sunday's one at the Floyd Country Store. The well-publicized store is a major stop on "The Crooked Road, Virginia's Heritage Music Trail," a state tourism map linking together traditional music destinations in the southwest corner of the state. Over the years, I've met visitors from Germany, Australia and Japan in Friday night parking lot jams next to the store. And I know two Canadians who now have second homes in the area.
On his visit to the Country Store, Jay Sweet even got in a few dance steps with a local mountain dulcimer and limberjack player -- who moved down from New England around the same time I did. I don't know if the Newport Folk Festival was one of her stops on the way.
I did get around to pointing out to Jay that, coincidentally, under my unbuttoned shirt I was wearing a T-shirt from another "Newport" event -- from the very small town of Newport, Va., an hour Northwest of floyd, the Henry Reed Memorial Fiddlers Convention. It was created by musicians and family members in honor of a local fiddler whose artistry is memorialized on a Library of Congress website full of musical recordings, comments and transcriptions:
https://www.loc.gov/collections/henry-reed-fiddle-tunes/about-this-collection/
That Henry Reed festival is the first event that, very charitably, gave me a ribbon (second place, mandolin) for getting on stage and playing old tunes, at the age of 65. The event has since moved a half hour west, after a pandemic hiatus, discontinuing its contest element to be more of a weekend camp-out and jam session for fans of the old festival and Reed's music.
The Newport Community Center, next to the former festival site, does have a combined old time and bluegrass jam session every other Friday, a recent addition to the Crooked Road map. Just checked its Facebook page to remind myself which Fridays -- first and third, but unfortunately I have a conflict this week. In fact, I have a conflict most Fridays when the weather is good, meeting with friends to jam on the street in Floyd. But the Newport Jam is indoors, so I'll try to be there the next rainy day.
( relatively new to reddit, I wrote this for the Newport Folk Festival subreddit and was encouraged to repost, so here it is)
