The 46th Kent State Folk Festival
Thu 9/20 – Sat 9/22
By John Benson
Hipster music fans may be just discovering folk music through zeitgeist acts such as Mumford & Sons and The Avett Brothers, but the musical genre borne out of protest has been going strong for decades in Kent.
For proof, look no further than the 46th annual Kent State Folk Festival, which takes place Thu 9/20 through Sat 9/22 around Kent. Just think — dozens of bearded folksters in Priuses will descend onto the Portage County college town to celebrate the spirit of Woody Guthrie, the catalog of Bob Dylan and the modern sounds of folk. Originally produced by Kent State students, WKSU took over the event in 2000 and hasn’t looked back. During the past decade the festival has featured the aforementioned Avett Brothers, as well as The Felice Brothers and Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros.
This year’s bill is just as juicy, with Delhi 2 Dublin kicking off the affair with a free show Thu 9/20 at the Kent State University’s Manchester Field. There’s also the Folk Alley ‘Round Town on Fri 9/21 where 36 venues throughout Kent will feature over 60 bands for free.
Other highlights includes a series of concerts held at The Kent Stage, celebrating their 10th anniversary as a major venue for folk music: John Gorka and Tracy Grammer on Thu 9/20, as well as Cincinnati’s Over the Rhine with Girlyman on Fri 9/21 and Legends of Folk featuring Tom Paxton, The Red Clay Ramblers and John McCutcheon on Sat 9/22.
Cool Cleveland talked to WKSU/FolkAlley.com Marketing and Public Relations Director Ann E. VerWiebe about the prestigious Kent State Folk Festival.
Cool Cleveland: Here’s an easy question to start – why has the Kent State Folk Festival lasted so long?
Ann E. VerWiebe: We do the folk festival every year because folk for a long time has been kind of an ignored genre. And it’s a really important genre because every form of popular music comes from folk music. So, what we’re here to do is preserve and promote this genre. We’ve held on to it long enough that now folk is becoming popular again because people are realizing this is real music. It’s not auto-tune, ridiculous voice track music. This is a person singing real songs about real issues.
How much of the current folk movement can be attributed to the cool band de jour Mumford & Sons?
Mumford & Sons was a really big help but I think we can go back even further with The Avett Brothers. What they were doing predates that. Even Norah Jones. She was a little jazzy, but it was still so acoustic that people started listening. When people started getting their music off their Internet, they started listening to what they liked not what people were telling them to listen to.
We’ve got kids who come in here in their teens listening to old Dylan because they’ve rediscovered it. What we’re doing is offering artists who are doing now what he was doing then and are going forward and recreating the genre again. You’ve got people like Nickel Creek who aren’t together anymore. What they were doing was reinterpreting bluegrass, which was mountain music with jazz added to it when Bill Monroe created bluegrass. He was creating a new musical form, too. What we’re looking at is music that’s constantly changing but all going back to the same place, which is a real place.
It sounds like for one weekend a year the Kent Folk Festival is the patchouli, granola, Birkenstock epicenter of the folk world?
I wouldn’t go so far because obviously that’s kind of what people think of when they think of folk; but what you really have is an interesting mix of young kids who are really into this music and people in their 50s who are businesspeople who just think of this as the music from their college days, but they’ve kept on and held on to it. This is the music they still listen to. You can’t really pigeonhole anybody, but it is filled with folkies. You get down there on Friday night and we are only second to Halloween in bringing people to downtown Kent. This is a huge event. We’ll have thousands of people in downtown Kent.
For the average music fan who has never attended the Kent Folk Festival, what are they missing?
You’ll hear a lot of stuff you’d expect and a lot of stuff you don’t expect. That’s what we try to do every year. We try to bring in bands that are going to make you feel happy because that’s what you want to hear. We also want you to experience new music and discover new bands because that’s what the folk festival has always been about – it’s always been about music discovery.
For more information, visit http://KentStateFolkFestival.org.
[Top photo credit: Reinier@BrilliantEye.ca The Commodore, Vancouver, BC (2010)]
Freelance writer John Benson spends most of his time writing for various papers throughout Northeast Ohio. When he’s not writing about music or entertainment, he can be found coaching his two boys in basketball, football and baseball or watching movies with his lovely wife, Maria. John also occasionally writes for CoolCleveland.com.