For a one-of-a-kind music experience that's both family-friendly and cutting-edge 'cool' with progressive values, look to Virginia's backcountry:
FloydFest walks the walk: Like the town whose name it carries, its blend of old-time Appalachia and global progressivism is one of a kind. Relix Review re: FloydFest 2005
DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with FloydFest but I'll be there in '06 'cause '05 was just beyond belief!
More below the fold...
FloydFest is a three-day World Music Festival held annually in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, showcasing the best in World, Bluegrass, Reggae, Folk, African and Appalachian music, as well as quality Arts and Crafts.
Glide Magazine's rave review:
Some larger festivals boast a similar peace, love and music philosophy, but Floyd actually lives it, not just for one weekend, but throughout the entire year. Long renowned for its artist communities and unique roots music drawing power, Floyd often seems like a place from another time, a vaguely recollected dream from which most of the world woke up decades ago. Though the festival focuses mostly on acoustic sounds and neo-hippie sentiments, it holds a sway that even the hardest heads and hearts can't resist. Once experienced, the overwhelming sense of fellowship and serenity haunts the soul through the falling leaves of autumn and the suffocating snow of winter until finally, when spring rises again, there is an irresistible longing deep in the chest for open air and open hearts that cannot be quenched until ... the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia sing once again.
Acclaimed for its eclectic line-up and family friendly vibe, FloydFest features World, Bluegrass, Folk, Afrobeat, Old-time, Reggae, Cajun, Americana and Jam genres. Some of the stellar performers scheduled to appear at FloydFest 2006 this year include Los Lobos, Cyro Baptista & Beat The Donkey, Donna The Buffalo, Iris Dement, Eddie From Ohio, Tim O'Brien, Drew Emmitt Band (of Leftover Salmon), Gabby La La, Jake Shimabukuro, Avett Brothers, Akoya Afrobeat Enseble, Garaj Mahal, Toubab Krewe, Dirk Powell, Balfa Toujours, David Bromberg with Angel Band, The Lee Boys, and many more!
Below: Ani DeFranco at FloydFest 2005
Why Floyd?
Blue Cow Arts Foundation presents an annual festival called "FloydFest" in Floyd County, Virginia, to showcase an international array of performance artists who come together on the same three-day stage to celebrate cultural diversity and aesthetic innovation in a setting conducive to inter-personal and community collaborations among world citizens. In naming the event four years ago and articulating its theme, the Foundation paid homage to Floyd County's historic reputation as a true anomaly among Appalachian communities for ecological balance and social tolerance.
According to testimony recorded at Confederate `court-martial' proceedings, throughout the Civil War, Floyd's court days provided a `safe place' or free space at which soldiers wanting to reach Northern lines or to simply get `home' could abandon old garments of either blue or gray and find sympathetic aid. Such help was only available from true `rednecks,' certain local farmers in attendance who would have been recognizable by some bright red element in their regalia - a bandana, string-tie, even a scrap of yarn looped through a buttonhole. Floyd's `rednecks' collaborated through kinship and culture with a larger red network of quiet resistance in the South. Acting either individually or collectively, Floyd rednecks represented a dangerous threat to the vulnerable white underbelly of the Confederacy, e.g., that set of contentious `customs' commanding that communities prove their complicity and commitment to the basic tenets of white supremacy.
The rednecks of Floyd offer a conduit into alternative cultures and hint of other antebellum histories of color for western Virginia. Many of those wartime farmers descended from racially diverse ancestors who had established and managed to retain homesteads in Virginia's western hills, valleys, and ridges despite regular lethal confrontations between native America and white Virginia. Some had, in their own day, waged both individual and collective acts of resistance to the entrenchment of white supremacy. Escaped slaves reported life-saving experiences in rural western Virginia, recalling colorful details such as that the pattern and orientation of quilts hanging on front porches signaled to the dark traveler that shelter was available or gave directions for next best pathways to the underground railroad.
After the Civil War, rural Virginia again felt the bloodied backhand of white supremacy in the turmoil of Reconstruction and political re-segregation. In the 1870s, Albion Tourgee captured the essence of an emerging Ku Klux Klan in his phrase "the return of white-winged justice." Western Virginia's rural watersheds once again supplied sanctuary to those marked, according to their politics or social connections, for white-winged payback - a broad-based, explicitly gendered, terrorist campaign conducted in both act and threats of beatings, lynching, torture, and death.
Appalachian Virginia has a well-documented history of race-drenched brutality and turmoil, especially where labor and ethnicity intersected in public and politicized venues such as Roanoke, Norton, and Bluefield. Appalachia can be defined as that place where people are never going to get white enough despite an incredibly ugly history of trying. In all fairness, though, the development of Appalachian culture and society simply reflects the typical 2 and 2 pattern for American social organization: two classes - men and not-men - and, two castes - people of color and the un-colored. The rednecks of Floyd offer one more opportunity to re-compute that social bifurcation.
Since the Civil War's end, throughout the region, redneck women and children (including adult `boys' who were marginalized in popular press and literatures by promoters of industrialization as being somewhat less-than-white-enough) survived and served as place-keepers for communal `free spaces' in sparsely populated valleys and ridges. A list of the formal and informal 'labels' applied to those communities suggests other transcripts testifying to ethnic diversity and social mobility. These communities - often erroneously represented in documentary history by state-level officials such as Walter Plecker in his quest to define and document Virginia's true racial profile and prevent miscegenation - were dismissed as tri-racial isolates by white-winged America and thus concretized into permanent underclass status. The quest for the right to self-identify has proven a long and continuing struggle for many descendents of that early resistance network: the Monacans of Amherst County, VA, and neighboring ridges, the Melungeons in southwest VA, east TN, and southeast KY, the Guineas of West Virginia, the generic Ramps of various New River-linked communities, Turks, Lumbees, and Brass Ankles in the Carolinas, as far south as the Redbones in Louisiana and several clans of cajun cousins. There are dozens of such communities, all muted but hardly silenced due to their inscription into cultural legacies and other under-valued texts of vernacular history.
Recorded in the hidden transcripts of art, music, and material culture, these voices supply evidence of intensely local customs and traditions surrounding race and social harmony that are under-scrutinized in mainstream historiography. The court days of 19th-century rural Virginia offer but one example of syncretism in the merging of festival and communal rites common to many cultures: opportunities for trade and reunion, to become reacquainted with neighbors and community, to seek spiritual, personal, and/or communal reaffirmation. Like the gathering of clans and trade conferences, court days provided a platform for the adjudication of social problems and marked the evolution from clan-based justice to the white-winged patriarchy of Euro-American law and order.
FloydFest illuminates Virginia's contributions to a rich archive of alternative vernacular histories and performing arts with a vast capacity to explicate the historical dynamic of syncretism best described as 'cultural fusion, dif-fusion, and con-fusion.' Continuing its goal of providing a multi-cultured musical cornucopia, the upcoming FloydFest 2006 event interrogates the multi-ethnic echoic history to be found across music genres.
Founded in 2002, Blue Cow Arts Foundation is a public non-profit in support of increased social awareness through music, art and cultural education. In an increasingly and perilously homogenous culture, BCA supports diversity through event promotion, cultural exchange opportunities, and by hosting and providing a forum for educators and advocates of sustainable living and cultural preservation.
Based in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, BCA seeks to showcase the wealth of local music, crafts and customs, tracing the heritage and rebuilding the bridge between Appalachian culture and its historical roots elsewhere in the world, ultimately building bridges between communities and countries. Blue Cow Arts utilizes festival revenues to preserve art and musical heritage locally and globally, and to support the communities of Patrick and Floyd counties and the work of regional non-profits.
The above passage is taken from a grant proposal I wrote for BCA in 2005
As I stated above, I am not affiliated with FloydFest in any way but the 2005 event was so unbelievably inspiring, uplifting, and just plain fun that I have to recommend it to anyone in need of some spritual rejuvenation and an ass-kicking good time.
For more info, send e-mail to: info@floydfest.com or visit the FloydFest website at: www.floydfest.com.