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Rain has been forecast for today, heavy rain with possible thunder showers. We get up around six, both having slept pretty well. Our gas hot water heater won’t seem to ignite. Our other appliances indicate that the batteries are pretty well run down. We need to get several hours of the generator running in order to recharge them.

Today is the first full day of Merlefest activity. We head down the hill at about 9:00 AM to sit in on a variety of sessions. There are thirteen venues where performances are going on. Most are outdoors on this day when misting is the nicest thing I can say about the weather. We walk down a steep hill through another lovely garden to the Hillside amphitheater. A good acoustic bluegrass band called Backstreet is playing. We sit down and listen for a while. Earlier we had seen a number of school buses dropping off Wilkes Country school children. The kids begin to arrive and then troop through the site and on down to the main activity area. As Backstreet finishes, we go inside the student building to the Lounge venue to listen to the banjo competition. Merlefest features competitions in banjo, guitar, mandolin, and song writing. The first twenty people holding tickets to sign up are judged by experienced judges. The winners will perform on the main stage on Sunday. We listen to three or four performers before moving on.

We walk onto the main campus and stroll past several of the vendors. The school kids seem much more interested in the food and merchandise than they do in the music. We go into the traditional music tent where a group called the Wolfe Brothers Band is playing and singing. Again, the quality is clearly professional. As the Wolfe Brothers close their set, we move on walking across the campus to the sponsors’ tent where dozens of vendors are selling instruments and paraphernalia. Guitars, banjos, and mandolins sell at prices up to around $4000. People are trying out instruments, chatting, and, perhaps, buying.

We come out of the sponsors’ tent to the sound of Cajun music coming from the main stage. We go to our reserved seats there and listen to a group from Eunice, LA play and sing a variety of musical styles. When they finish we head for our trailer for some lunch and a rest. On the way we stop at the Americana venue and the Austin stage to listen briefly. We walk through the Walker Center and are reminded that several performers will be there within an hour or so. After a quick lunch, we return to the Walker Center to be sure we will have seats to hear Doc Watson later on. We hear George Hamilton IV, a member of the Grand Ol’ Opry, reminisce and sing songs from Hank Williams and Patsy Kline. He is a very polished country music performer. Dixie Dawn follows him and they then call Hamilton back out to join them for a couple of songs. The set is lively. Dixie Dawn is a local group which performs in western North Carolina and again shows how difficult it must be for even very talented performers to become big successes in the music business. The quality of performance here is extremely high. While not all the music is necessarily to our taste, it is almost always presented at the highest standard.

The stage is reset for David Holt and Doc Watson. Holt comes out and places a variety of guitars and a banjo on stands before Doc is led to his seat. Their format for this presentation is one in which David asks Doc a series of questions and Doc reminisces about his childhood and plays and sings with David providing strong and interesting support on guitar, banjo, and slide guitar. They play traditional mountain songs and blues. Doc is both humble and a vibrantly electric performer. At age eighty his hands are steady on the frets, the sounds are strong and clear. He hits the notes dead on. He comments that he has lost a lot of speed and then trips around his strings at an amazing rate. He thanks the sound technician for making his voice and his playing sound so good. The room is completely full and pays rapt attention to Doc and David who have made this style of playing and talking into a successful road show as well as a Grammy winning three CD album called Legacy. Doc and David need to move on to another venue, but the audience rises and cheers, forcing an encore, an unusual event at this carefully scripted and most well managed festival.

They are followed by a duo of traditional singers named Norman and Nancy Blake who are competent enough but lack the charisma of the act we have just seen. We listen to a few songs and then head back to the trailer to run the generator some more, rest, and prepare for the evening’s events at the Doc and Merle Watson Stage. We’ll need to work to keep both warm and dry, but the program promises to be worth the effort.

In the late afternoon we bundle and drape ourselves for both warmth and dryness. We put on sweaters, fleece tops and bottoms, and cover them with weather resistant warm-ups. Irene has a new Gore-Tex suit her mother bought her which will keep her dry, if not cozy. A light misty rain is falling as we walk down the hill, through the Walker Center, which is rocking to the sound of Laura Love and her band, and on down the winding pathway through the dripping azalea

gardens. Music is already coming from the main Watson stage.

The Jerry Douglas Band is fronted by Jerry Douglas, a renowned session musician who plays the Dobro (also known as the slide guitar or steel guitar), an instrument not known for its solo qualities. The program notes say that Douglas has appeared on over 1000 recording projects, often working with headliners like James Taylor, Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs, and Reba McIntyre. Playing with his own band, his music carries none of the sounds of big time Country and Western music. It is somber, wailing stuff showing virtuoso qualities a session musician would never be allowed. While he clearly is an excellent musician who has surrounded himself with a talented fiddler, bassist, and guitarist, the sound wails and cries. It’s almost as if these frustrated alternative musicians have been forced to make a living compromising their musical urges to the commercial demands of the music industry. Their sound mixes with the mist and rain to depress the entire audience, sitting and dripping in their seats.

At the Cabin Stage Jim Lauderdale presents the winners of the Chris Austin song writing contest, each of whom sings his or her winning song. Finalists submit their songs in written form and on CD early in the year. This work is judged and finalists are invited to Merlefest for the competition. Three finalists perform for the judges and perform their winning songs on Friday evening. Proceeds from the entry fees go to a Wilkes College scholarship fund for a deserving music student. The finalists were selected from 793 initial entries and judged by a panel of music industry professionals. As Jim Lauderdale introduced the song writers, he emphasized that each had CD’s available in the Merlefest Mall tent. We found only the winner in the gospel music category to have a moving song backed by an interesting voice.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore comes on the stage with his lead guitar partner. Jimmie Dale is a thin, sharp-featured man with long stringy gray hair. He

has a nasal, high baritone voice quite reminiscent of Willie Nelson. His first song doesn’t impress me much. It seems like another downer song on a downer evening. But as he moves into his performance, Jimmie Dale’s power of lyric and music grows. He mixes his singing with pungent comments on his life and the “disaster” of his music which has never fit well between rock, folk, and country.. Since Merlefest frequently showcases musicians who successfully bridge this precise gap, his music fits perfectly in a bluegrass festival. He is a sometime member of Flatlander, a group Don Imus has pushed, as well as a solo performer and member of other groups. His patter about the sources of his songs and his use of the works of other singer/songwriters like Townes Van Zandt is interesting and often amusing. In the end, his performance was quite satisfactory.

The focus changes to the Cabin Stage again where Lightnin’ Wells is playing in accompaniment to Algie Mae Hinton, one of the few black performers we have seen. She is an elderly woman who speaks in a deep country dialect which I can barely understand. She sings lowdown blues, country preachin’, and holler type songs. Near the end of her set, she rises from her stool and starts to dance as well as sing, her stiff old body swaying and moving with the music. Unfortunately, while she is performing, the tech crew is trying to balance the mikes and set up the main stage for the night’s feature act. Their work is nearly as interesting as the singing of Wells and Hinton. As they perform I reflect on the nature of the audience and performers at this festival. While the music is wonderful and diverse, the diversity seems limited to mostly white performers and a largely white audience. Since Merlefest seems to have widened its mission from being a purely bluegrass festival to American music in a very broad range of formats, it seems a shame that more people of color and ethnic music isn’t heard from the stages. While the audience here is hardly a raging red-neck bunch, it would be nice to see broader diversity represented in both the audience and the music. Perhaps the location of the festival contributes to this, as western North Carolina is pretty white. I guess I’m not suggesting overt discrimination here, but rather a slant towards white Americana which could be unfortunate as this festival continues to broaden its appeal and become more famous.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band opened with high energy, which it maintined for its full ninety minutes of so. This bluegrass influenced rock band has been around for more than thirty years. Their songs range from rock gospel to who knows what to call it. Guitarists Jeff Hanna and Jimmie

Ibbotson move back and forth from lead to bass and rhythm guitar in a seemingly seamless mix. In an unusual combination, the drummer doubles on mouth harp, playing both simultaneously. Their biggest hit, Mr. Bojangles, was smooth and melodious. Other songs raucus, funny, and very high energy. Banjoist John McEuan, who has recently rejoined the group after a nearly fifteen year absence, adds spunk and character to the group’s performance. Often he turns his back on the audience, In one piece he plays a rousing fiddle in Hanna’s face. He also plays a mean mandolin. As their performance rises to its climax, Hanna takes pleasure in introducing Doc Watson, who is led to his chair accompanied by his grandson Richard and fiddler Vasser Clements. They join the NGDB for a fabulous set. Doc’s flat picking style fits as well with this rock band as it has in the quieter setting of Walker Auditorium earlier this afternoon. The audience comes cheering to its feet as the session ends.

After a too long session at the Cabin Stage with the Rowan Brothers Band, the main stage is reset for Bela Fleck and the Flectones. Neither of us was prepared for the band that erupted from the dark as attention returned from the Cabin Stage. Fleck has a banjo in his hands, but it doesn’t sound like a banjo, or any other instrument we have ever heard. To his left, a short, fat black kid plays the fastest electric bass I’ve ever heard. A third member plays a variety of woodwinds – saxophone, clarinet, flute. On the far right, beside an odd looking drum set the bassist’s brother stands holding an instrument neither of us has ever seen or heard before. Futureman plays drum-itar, a percussion synthesizer he holds like a guitar, which looks like something out of Waterworld or some other post-apocalyptic film. Its complex rhythms cut right through us, creating an almost visceral sense of sound we can feel as well as hear. While we recognize the quality of the musicianship, the pure artistry, the sound is not to our liking, it’s nearly mid-night, and the rain is falling harder. We pack up and head over the feet of the other people in our row for the exit and climb back through the azalea gardens to our trailer.

As we walk into the campground, we hear people jamming somewhere in the center of the campground. I reassure Irene that they will all be quiet at midnight, when quiet time begins. I take my Tylenol PM and go right to sleep. Irene says they didn’t stop until about four.