by Bill Repko

The Kutztown Folk Festival looked deceptively small from outside the gates. The exposed strip of turbines prattling beside dangling wind chimes inducted me into the omnipresence of the old German-American farming community. High school kids manned most of the food vendors, sprinkled throughout the fairgrounds, with expressions preoccupied with boredom. The women wore bonnets and milkmaid dresses with decolletage that exposed the fringes of brightly colored t-shirts they wore outside the job. The men were dressed in weaved hats, overalls and neon track shoes. Johnny Cash played softly in the backdrop through strategically placed speakers setup along the walkway, while tutorial usage of farm equipment drew people to haystack seats, where they watched with peaked interest the procedural steps involved in basket weaving and folk art. Crowd members walked dogs and held hands with their significant others.

It was all very pleasant to watch…and I hated country life – there was too much heart involved in the domesticity o rural farm settings. My cathexis on city life always had me comparing the distinctions from it, but to be fair, an apple would never be an orange. The festival had a sort of soothing effect; the music and pleasant faces added a tinge of calmness not ordinarily found in the ‘real world.’ As I continued to explore the replicated barns and aluminum hangars, I found inventive, well-crafted trinkets. Admittedly, I didn’t buy anything in fear, that if I did, it would disappear like some lost artifact of Brigadoon.

I stopped to watch an older man, whose outfit corresponded to his long wispy beard, twirl a baton laden with molten hot glass at its tip. Thin metal utensils, smeared in beeswax, were used to carve ridges into the glass before being dipped back in the furnace. A narration of the step-by-step process of glassblowing was delivered from a much younger man, who gave thanks to Service Electric for kindly helping to sponsor their event. In fact, everything was sponsored by some local business- Kutztown University made a healthy profit for the use of their space, which was reflected by the price of food and admission.

The smell of cooked Birch beer, bubbling in a giant brass orb-shaped contraption, filled the air with a sweet aroma, drew me inexorably towards it. A wandering Mennonite mariachi band cornered the barn filled with Germanic plates, top-shelf priced bug displays- funny, the things I spent so much time keeping out of the house would be the same things I would have paid $60 to hang from my wall- aluminum plates bearing detailed images of countryside homes, and high-resolution photographs of animals peering stoically off to the side. The trove of big brass instruments complemented the sunny disposition of sightseers, who poked through the bins of lawn ornaments and picked apart pieces of funnel cake under the waning sun.

When I came up to the Acoustic Roadshow tent, I exchanged a few glances with a man I swore was Santa Claus on vacation. After assuring him I had tried to play the guitar once before and failed miserably at it- albeit, I was drunk and in the throes of a melodramatic emotional state over a justified dumping (a woman has to kiss quite a few frogs before finding her prince)- we switched topics and talked about his hand in providing beginners with the chance to fiddle around with music. He taught kids the first few chords of “Ole’ McDonald,” and guessed he had played it 700-800 times a day; by the end of the last year’s festival he had played it a total of about 2700 times. McDonald didn’t just have a farm; he had an entire industry. He also promoted local talent and ran a show on public access television since 1998, so in a way, he was a bit like Santa Claus.

A sweet, angelic voice- not to be confused with the scent of birch beer still lingering in the air – led me to an open stage where a young band, who called themselves The Zepp Family (Z-E-P-P, not Z-E-P), played baptismal soaked folk music. They mainly covered old hymns and Christian-based music, but they crept in a few originals that were still in the inchoate phase of creation. The lead singer sounded like the LeAnn Rimes I remember hearing on the radio in my youth and the crisp work of the fiddle fed into the illusion that I had stepped onto the set of O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?. This sort of genre never much suited my taste, but they certainly performed it well.

A three-fiddled troupe of girls came up on stage after and re-introduced me to a forgotten subset within the bluegrass genre. I must admit they were quite good for their age and I spent a moment checking for invisible speakers to make sure it wasn’t just some mirage. Most of the talent that came up to the stage consisted of kids that displayed talent beyond their years. I, on the other hand, spent nearly two years with a heavy Russian accented piano teacher and barely learned “Chopsticks”- some people have it and some people don’t.

A pleasant mix of music, art, and culture draped the festival with a certain quiet enjoyment. The folks running the entertainment planned out the event well, making it both family friendly and youth oriented. While I wouldn’t recommend this to an anxious lot of wayfaring party-ers, this could be a good place for couples looking to expand their dates to something outside of dross bar settings and movie theaters. And it certainly wouldn’t be a bad place for those looking to learn more about folk art, or music- there’s no such thing as bad genres, only bad musicians.

The Kutztown Folk Fest continues until July 6th and typically lasts until about 9pm each day. For those who don’t mind driving an hour outside of Philly and want to take a break from city life, it might be something worth checking out.