I am supremely bad at remembering to take pictures while I am in the middle of an experience, even familiar ones. So, when I went looking through my google photos for pictures relevant to my topic today, I had very few to choose from. I know there must be more pictures out there, but either they are not digitized (yet) or in some other storage. Even pouring through Facebook albums only produced a small handful more.
So, you will have to take these next few words on faith and trust.
I grew up attending a small music festival called Old Songs which takes place each year on the last full weekend of June. It is a family-friendly folk and traditional world music festival, with your standard issue variety Celtic groups – either Irish or Scottish, occasionally Manx, Welsh, Bretony, or Cape Breton (yes there IS a difference) – and the rest of the performers are a mix of genres, styles, and traditions, or singer-songwriter. There is also dancing, mostly contra dancing, but also other styles, depending on the year’s dance bands. The Old Songs festival has been taking place since 1981, and even in the pandemic years the organization found ways to make that same weekend special. The first year, 2020, was a weekend-long radio show where some of the repeat festival performers submitted an hour set to the Folk Music Notebook. The second year we organized a zoom virtual festival. While there were some special elements, including the after-concert Sea Shanty Sing video, we all breathed a sign of relief to dust off the old crew folders and jury-rig an in-person festival in 2022.
I attended my first Old Songs Festival when I was two weeks old. I do not remember much from that experience, but my parents tell me it was one of the rainy ones. On Saturday, there was a break in the rain, and since we lived roughly fifteen minutes away, Mom and Dad raced over with the new baby in tow. The story goes that it was in the following year, in another mid-concert rain stampede that I would have lost my favorite dolly if it had not been for the care of our Old Songs Family.
There are a few constants about the Old Songs Festival.
It always rains, even on the sunniest, hottest weekends, unless my uncle attends. His hatred of the heat keeps the rain at bay, ironically, and if it happens to rain while he is there, it is the warm, humid, sticky kind of rain, not the refreshing breath of fresh air.
There is always at least one group, usually two to three, that are a complete surprise in the best way. This has happened to me even when I have poured over the performer list and made a playlist of the musicians, even when I have been involved in planning and selecting artists, there is always a stand-out.
As a corollary to the last one, those surprise gems never have enough inventory in the sales booth.
Just as church goers have their pew in the sanctuary, not because they have paid for that specific spot (anymore), festival attendees tend to camp their chairs at the main stage in the same area each year until communities develop – our Old Songs Family.
The Old Songs festival has been described as, “the family reunion you want to attend,” and it is true. There are people there who have watched my sisters and I grow up, just as we have grown apace with several others, hitting milestones one after another, but always coming home to the festival. In some ways, this little patch of ground in Altamont is more home ground than any other place I have lived.
To be fair, the Old Songs Festival is not the only festival I attended on these same grounds; on Labor Day weekend in September the Capital District Scottish games takes place at the same location, but it uses the space differently. While I knew these two events took place on the same grounds, it never seemed real until I was part of the competition bagpipe bands, which warm up and camp out on the “Old Songs” side of the grounds. Without the Old Songs trappings, though, the grove was just a tired, dusty place. It was not home.
The Old Songs Festival is a celebration of music, yes, but more importantly, to me, it is community. The four hundred volunteers and staff, even the artisans and vendors who come back year after year, the campers who make tiny tent villages with their neighbors, always requesting to be next to their friends whom they met randomly their first year, and now they cannot imagine camping part from, and everyone who comes. Some of us want to be active the whole weekend, some of us want to sit still and take it all in, absorb the vibes. It feels like each year the weekend is shorter but that is a function of too many people to talk with.
This year will feel different. I know this, there are days I can accept it, and days I cannot think about it. There is a hole in the community, but there have been other holes over the years, and this time it is our turn. I am still looking forward to being there, this folk music Brigadoon, but I know there will be sad moments, there will be times we will say, “Sheila would have loved this, she would have been dancing to that group.” We will have our community around us, this family brought together by love of music and the mutual appreciation of that specific spot of the main stage grove.
I hope you come, too.
Also, if you know of an artisan, sales, or food vendor who would be a great fit, please share their name with me or pass along the vendor application found here: Old Songs Vendor Application.
Old Songs Festival is my favorite festival to attend because of the variety of performers & vendors.