It's been with us for 16 years now, this folk festival. My T-shirt collection tells the tale of its shifting names: the Eli Whitney Folk Festival, the New Haven Folk Festival and now the Connecticut Folk Festival.
Call it what you want, it's a hoot.
I'm still thinking about last weekend's fest (Sept. 12-14) and looking forward to next year.
The best thing about it: they do it at Edgerton Park, the fabulous green space on the New Haven-Hamden line, off Whitney Avenue. Other events of the festival now are held at Southern Connecticut State University and the First Presbyterian Church, but I just want to go to the park, which is in my neighborhood.
The organizers always set up two stages: a small one beyond the top of the hill, past the big fountain; and a big one in the "bowl" of the park, near where kids go sledding in another season.
The small stage is for the Saturday afternoon free show; the big one is for Saturday night, with bigger name acts, paid admission.
The main performers during the afternoon: the Ronny Cox Band. You might remember Cox as the guitarist in the movie "Deliverance" (1972) who did an amazing duet with a banjoist kid, the song "Dueling Banjos." It was all downhill and down river for Cox' character and his pals after that, but let's not go there...
At Edgerton, Cox told a lot of funny stories between songs and kept apologizing because his luggage had been lost and he was using a guitar he'd never seen before. That meant it had to be tuned before every song. It was still a fine, relaxing, intimate show, played for about 45 people on a warm afternoon.
Oh, there were clouds and that worried me. I didn't want the evening show moved indoors. But an organizer told me they had already committed to staying outside. Yee-hah!
I came back that night for the headliner, Steve Earle. Folk purists will be horrified to hear that I missed seeing everybody ahead of him: Ruthie Foster, Harry Manx, Allison Moorer, the Holmes Brothers and the Professors of Bluegrass (Yale guys). But I had other stuff I was doing and Earle was the guy I wanted to catch. He's got political passion.
When I arrived at about 9 p.m., I was dismayed that still there were no booths with political buttons and bumperstickers. Do you think maybe they could have sold a few Obama items to this crowd? The only such booth-holder was New Haven's Stephen Kobasa, who was surrounded by stickers and buttons protesting the death penalty. He said Earle had made sure he got in and got set up.
Earle began his set with "Come Back, Woody Guthrie," which set the spirit. He tossed in a few songs about drinking and women and carousing but he mixed these with fare such as "The Revolution Starts Now" and made comments such as "Whenever I come to this town, I wonder: how the hell did George W. Bush ever get into Yale and graduate? He's the original no child left behind!"
When it was time for his encore, the crowd called out for his radio hit, "Copperhead Road," but he wanted to concentrate on singing about redemption. He's a recovered drug addict and he told us it was a "miracle" he was there on stage. He said he doesn't believe in "hopeless situations."
After he finished, he charged off that stage and strode in a big hurry to his tour bus, nodding as people along the way thanked him for his show. He seemed to have given his all and needed to retreat into solitude.
That's another great thing about this folk festival: you get these intimate glimpses.
As the organizers said, the "weather gods" let it all happen.