This one time, at Banjo Camp...

Well, Dear Readers, it so happened that last week I was at the Appalachian String Music Festival, known to those in the know as "Banjo Camp". Now, just to be clear, there were fiddlers and guitar players, and five verified accordions (I was one of those, God help us), but Banjo Camp is a much more compact and satisfactory moniker, so that's the one we used, and is therefore the one that I am going to use.

Now, this blog is sort of an amalgamation of Facebook statuses that I was unable to post, because there was no cell reception at Banjo Camp. Well, that's a lie. In previous years, there has been no cell reception at Banjo Camp, but there was at least some this year, because I saw people walking around with cellphones in their ears, showing no respect for the music, the bastards.

In any case, I turned off my phone before we left and didn't turn it on again until we got back. Probably even if I tried to update Facebook it would not have worked; maybe there was voice reception, but data reception I sincerely doubt.

So one fine day (I have no idea what day it was, and that condition will persist throughout. I'm absolutely terrible with dates.) we arrived at the campground, and immediately began to add to the tent city that was rapidly forming. There are no assigned camping sites; it's strictly catch as catch can. And, once one catches, one immediately begins to lay things out on the ground, trying to save as much space as possible for one's friends. The result is a layout that is both crowded and frenetic, as vehicles, tents, screen rooms, and canopies all vie for a few more square feet of precious real estate.

Having set up with our friends, we naturally proceeded next to have a drink. There is no alcohol allowed on the camp grounds, but in a de facto sense that was far from true. The reality of the matter is that the "no alcohol" injunction is meant to make it easier for the sheriff to haul you away in the paddywagon if you become a drunken and disruptive idiot. We, of course, were perfect ladies and gentlemen, and decanted our wine and whiskey into iced-tea bottles, the less to be obvious. I will of course deny all of this if pressed on the issue, literary license and all that.

And then Banjo Camp started in earnest, our having set up and had our libation. The format is simple. There are contests for banjo pickers and fiddle players and string bands going on all the time, with the finals for these contests being held generally rather late at night. In proliferous addition to these events, jam sessions are going on everywhere all the time.

(For the uninitiated, a "jam session" is an ad hoc musical event in which at least two and possibly as many as twenty musicians gather together to play various and sundry songs, or "tunes". These have been known to go on for hours at a time. There are famous names in the old-time string-music world that you have never heard. To jam with one or more of these is a very prestigious honor.)

My Banjo Camp buddy was my beloved Aunt Barbara, and we ran around together most of the time, having similar interests and philosophies concerning what it's all about, so to speak. Every morning, we would wake up around seven and immediately have a Beefeater's Instant Breakfast (again, for the uninitiated, a gin and tonic; of course, I hate tonic and won't drink it, so we just pass the opened bottle over my cup in the name of Big Daddy, Junior, and the Spook) which we would enjoy until our friend Rosemarie emerged. At that point, I would make up some coffee (she liked to call me her "Coffee Minion"), which she would have black and I would have Irish.

And pretty soon it was time to go and make baskets. In retrospect, I find it amazing that I spent sixteen or seventeen hours of a music festival making arts and crafts projects. Of course, the baskets we made really weren't what you would call arts and crafts; we didn't use any macaroni or glitter. They turned out looking quite nice.

I will admit, I was really struggling with basketry. It wasn't until the fourth day and the final project that I really began to get with the program, and I had the help of Aunt Barbara and this great kid named Ollie who we met to boot. It is a humbling experience when some kid is just going to town on something about which you are writhing futilely.

But wait! While we're making baskets, aren't we missing all the great fiddlers and pickers and bands and jams? Along comes Paul, riding a white horse.

Who is Paul? (Who are any of us? A deeply existential question for another time.) Paul is the man with the recording machine who went around making field recordings of all the music he could find. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Paul was a recording machine. The man was up at the streak of dawn, went out recording, and didn't stop until he had found and recorded some of the really great jams at two or three in the morning. And the next day, on four or five hours of sleep, he was up and at it again. It's thanks to Paul that we'll all have old-time string music in our cars and on our stereos until the angel blows his trumpet.

As a complete aside, we noticed an abnormally large number of redheads in attendance. So large, in fact, that it inspired us to take some random samplings of individuals passing down a road. We included strawberry blondes in the redhead group, and of course we had no way of knowing who was naturally of that color, so we counted the doubtfuls as well. Our results were staggering: based on several random samples, we calculated that between ten and sixteen percent of the population of Banjo Camp were redheads.

To put this in perspective, only two percent of the population of the United States are natural redheads, and only about twelve percent of countries like Ireland and Scotland are natural redheads. We have yet to come up with a satisfactory explanation for our results.

I will add, just in case someone was wondering, that there were people from all parts of the Eastern Seaboard, the Upper Midwest, and the eastern provinces of Canada in attendance. So if you're coming up with an explanation (which I would love to hear), take that into account.

Finally, after a solid week of dirt camping (camping in tents, pitched on the bare ground, as opposed to RVs or cabins) it was time to go home. And with tears in our eyes, we rode off into the sunset (fine, sunrise, but it lacks the same poetic force) to spend another year away from the chaos and drinking and music and fun that makes Banjo Camp so worthwhile.

Meanwhile, we watch and wait. Many of our Banjo Camp friends we will see again: Paul, Keith, and Rosemarie, for starters. Some, like Mike who just happened to pitch his tent too near too our compound and got sucked in, we may never see again. And we will always have the memories of the times that Banjo Camp luminaries like J.C. stopped to jam with humble little old us.

But, until we meet again, and paraphrasing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the circle will be unbroken, by and by (Lord, by and by).

(The end. The enlightened will understand.)