I've Been a Havin' Some Hard Travelin'

So this weekend I went to the Clearwater Festival. It's a festival where famous folk singers, bluegrass bands and story-tellers from all over the world come together for the cause of cleaning up the Hudson River, which is still pretty dirty by the way. It was still beautiful scenery, but not quite as beautiful as the Columbia River Gorge, probably the most beautiful place on earth, but close. The place looked and smelled like Saturday Market and the crowd didn't look much different. I would say probably 80% of the crowd was over 30 years old. And everyone was wearing bright colors and tie-dye. It was a 2 day event, so I camped out in my tent, which leaked, and soaked my sleeping bag. Oh yeah, p.s., it rained the entire time.

There were 6 different stages with 6 different performances going on simultaneously. There was the main stage where the Old Crow Medicine Band, Susan Tedeschi, and others played. There was a dance tent with all kinds of different styles of dancing going on, a story-telling stage, a children's music tent, the slightly-less main stage where smaller time singers played, and there was the circle of song tent. I ended up spending most of my time at the circle of song tent. Basically, at this tent, people bring their instruments and their voices and play whatever style of music was being played, i.e., Irish songs, sea songs, gospel, rounds, etc.

It was a pretty awesome thing. To make it more awesome, Pete Seeger just showed up a few times. And he was like a ghost. I never saw him come or go. He would just suddenly be there, singing and playing his banjo. Kind of creepy. Especially since he's like 90 and can't move that fast. So I got to sing in the Pete Seeger Collective, you might say. He was so close, I could have punched him...not that I wanted to, but if I had wanted to, I could have.

I have attached some videos from the circle of song with Pete Seeger and a few with some British/Scottish guy. Warning: the video quality is not that great, because I recorded them on my phone and because there was a significant amount of toe-tapping going on on my part, making the picture a little shaky. I'll be honest, in most of them you can't even make out the words, but that's ok, because one is in an African language and another is in Gaelic. Enjoy!...Alright, Blogger messed up the videos, so I'll try to fix them.