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Thoughts on our sad summer without RockyGrass and Folks

By John Lehndorff Commentary for Redstone Review

LYONS – It was a perfect summer day for a bluegrass festival by the creek under the cliff. It seemed to me there ought to be picking, grinning and greetings shoulder to shoulder on blue tarps. There should be the familiar summer camp reunion with some of the planet’s finest acoustic musicians. Instead, on July 24, I was essentially alone at Planet Bluegrass except for the ghosts of Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, John Hartford and Charles Sawtelle shimmering in the last place I saw them alive. The field, the stage, the campground, the Wildflower – all empty. Even the Great Flood hadn’t stopped the music. I had hesitated to visit Lyons that morning because I thought it would be really sad. It turned out to be excruciating – such a sense of loss – but the reporter in me thought this historic absence ought to be recorded during the time of COVID. Starting in the late 1970s, I trekked to Telluride every June to attend the then obscure Telluride Bluegrass Festival. I started writing about it almost immediately because I loved the music – plus, honestly, I wanted to sit up front and talk to my musical heroes. At that time RockyGrass – the festival that “the father of bluegrass music,” Bill Monroe, helped bankroll and launch – took place at dusty, uncomfortable county fairgrounds around the Front Range. My first visit to Planet Bluegrass was in 1992 for RockyGrass’ first year in Lyons. The lineup featured Tony Rice, Alison Krauss, members of Hot Rize and Left Hand String Band. As soon as I wandered backstage and saw the creek I smiled. This was a place to hear great music coming through a first class sound system overseen by audio savants. After a few years taking place in Estes Park, the Folks Festival moved down the

PHOTO BY JOHN LEHNDORFF

highway to Lyons in 1994. For its inaugural year at Planet Bluegrass, the cool lineup included Keb Mo, Loudon Wainwright III, John Hiatt, the Drepung Monks, Dar Williams, Greg Brown and Nanci Griffith. That was also the year my son Hans was born and I was eager to infuse him with music. I carried him in my arms onto the then temporary stage to introduce a singer songwriter and to introduce the audience to Hans. He grew up running around the property with people like Bela Fleck greeting him with, “Hey Hans.” He remembers the muddy years. I was thrilled when – as a 25-yearold man – he could be there for Folks in 2019. For many years I had planned my summers around those two festivals. In this year when everything was cancelled, these two made me gasp. I miss all the folks who I only saw at those festivals – the musicians, their families, the ticket crew, the backstage caterers, the vendors, security, and just music fans who were there every time. I always remembered them even when I couldn’t place their names. I miss snoozing by the creek in the shade while listening to live music. I miss the impromptu picking sessions. I also miss the vendors. I miss the dumplings. I miss the Greek salad. I miss the ice cream. I miss eating pizza in the Wildflower while listening to amazing musicians I had never heard of before. I miss the little kids like Sarah Jarosz running around at the RockyGrass Academy and the determined players competing for honors in the contests. I miss the debates between the bluegrass purists and the string music progressives. I’ll miss writing about music this summer for the first time since the mid-1970s. This was the first place I discovered so many musicians and bands – it’s been an essen

Lincoln in the Bardo – serious story written in unique style

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Random House, 343 pp., published 2017

Discussion By Andi Pearson Redstone Review

LYONS – – It’s 1862 and President Abraham Lincoln is dealing with Pearson the agonies of the Civil War and the illness of his beloved son Willie. Political critics decry his wife Mary Lincoln’s ball gowns and a party thrown in the White House as inappropriate when the country is wracked by a divisive war. What those critics do not see is Mary Lincoln quietly ascending the stairs every hour to check on their ill 11- year-old son. Typhoid fever is a terrible death and after Willie succumbs, President Lincoln is haunted by grief; he is inconsolable. George Saunders posits that President Lincoln visits Willie’s grave in the Oak Hill Cemetery near Georgetown, Washington, D.C., in the dark of night. When the president sits alone and sobbing among the gravestones of the cemetery, the spirits are all around him. While he cannot hear them or feel their presence, they speak to each other and their chatter is not just about the first family. Bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist term that refers to the interval between humans’ existence on earth and the next phase of their existence. These wispy souls are suspended and the individual personalities are reflected by the topics of conversation – they may start out being empathetic towards President Lincoln but soon they move on to other topics and they get pretty rowdy. Saunders explores a new style of writing where each sentence is a quote, attributed to a human, or at least, tagged with the name of a human. The quotes comprise the conversation and while the discussion starts out focusing on the president’s sadness, it eventually goes on to reveal that these spirits (for they are now in the bardo) talk about issues they discussed when they were in live human form; topics like clothing (“Didn’t she look awful in that blue dress?”), food and drink, games they played, politics and sex. Eventually, Continue Book on Page 15

Take care and stay safe! XO, The Farmette Family

tial part of my education as a music critic. I miss visiting the familiar restaurants and shops in Lyons and certain foods that were an integral part of attending RockyGrass and Folks. I miss the buzz in town even if it meant crowds and traffic and a certain amount of noise late at night. Families returned to this place faithfully year after year partaking of these rituals and passing the joy to generations of family members and friends. Across the state, the nation and the planet there are thousands of people wishing they were in Lyons. My heart goes out to all of the people impacted by the pandemic – their health, their families, their neighbors, schools and livelihoods. Nobody has been unaffected but so many have been devastated and the community has risen to help. As I was leaving Planet Bluegrass on July 24 in a dark mood on a sunny day, I saw a guy from my generation – a Baby Boomer – standing at the front gate peering over the top in a yearning way. I could tell he was one of us. He said had tickets to RockyGrass and had camped at last year’s festival for the first time. The campsite included some of the talented young acoustic musicians from the Punch Brothers, a memory he will always cherish. He had lodging reservations and decided to use them anyway in July because he loves the town and the area. We reminisced about favorite guitarists and as I was pulling out, he said: “See you next year by the creek.” That made me smile.

John Lehndorff has been writing about music and food in Colorado since the late 1970s. He was the Food Editor, Entertainment Editor, Features Editor and bluegrass music critic of the Daily Camera from 1985 to 2000 and has written for the Rocky Mountain News, Bluegrass Unlimited, Aurora Sentinel and Boulder Weekly. He has hosted Radio Nibbles on KGNU for more than 20 years. He is a pie expert. Read more at johnlehndorff.wordpress.com/tag/bluegrass/.

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