Reportage

Today we present can­did images from my first year as a vol­un­teer pho­tog­ra­pher for the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. I

In 1977, twenty-six-year-old vagabond singer Larry Long wrote Pope County Blues in sup­port of farm­ers fight­ing a high volt­age power

My friend RT Valine and his wife Jackie were vis­it­ing the Bureau one evening and we got to dis­cussing food and cook­ing. The Valines live in rural Allen, Oklahoma. When the con­di­tions are right, they have access to wild morel mushrooms.

My first encounter with the music of My Brightest Diamond was a track on a RED + HOT com­pi­la­tion. During the sum­mer break, my neighbor’s teenage daugh­ter and her friend used to hang out in my liv­ing room and spin CDs on my hi-fi. One day she brought over Dark Was the Night, the fif­teenth entry in the RED + HOT series.

This writer had only one offi­cial assign­ment (cov­er­ing gritty soul-singer Opal Agafia) at the big out­door stage on fes­ti­val Saturday. Red Dirt leg­end Randy Crouch pre­ceded her. Unfortunately, his set coin­cided with my only chance to eat din­ner before I had to be back

I took the same medium for­mat gear to the Pastures of Plenty back­stage as I had on Thursday and Friday. I’ve already writ­ten about the facil­i­ties improve­ments to the out­door venue. Unless you care to read about them, I

The biggest musi­cal influ­ence in Opal Agafia’s life is her mom. Agafia char­ac­ter­izes her­self as a “life­long seri­ous shower singer,” say­ing that she grew up singing with her mother, DeAnna Smith.

I first met singer-song­writer Ken Pomeroy on New Year’s Eve, 2015. Her father, Skippy, builds rac­ing motor­cy­cles in the large shop behind the fam­ily home and occa­sion­ally hosts con­certs on the small stage inside.

In my sopho­more high school year, my fam­ily moved from the house we had been rent­ing in the sub­urbs to a five-acre home­stead in the coun­try. Whereas pre­vi­ously we had lived within walk­ing dis­tance of pri­mary, mid­dle, and high schools, hence­forth my sib­lings and I would ride the bus.

At first glance, one could be for­given for dis­miss­ing twenty-five-year-old singer-song­writer Josh Okeefe as a mere pas­ticheur. An inter­net image search reveals his pen­chant for dress­ing like a cer­tain Robert Zimmerman (a.k.a. Bob Dylan),