I have gone to Dave Macon Days, returned with little damage, and am prepared to answer questions. Just in case nobody has any, will give the answers anyway.
Location was very good in a historic park in Murfreesboro with a bunch of old buildings and a decent museum. Attendance was amazingly large considering the program, probably 10,000 people over 2 days. Not much on stage. The show was 90% contests, not particularly well judged contests, and mostly a group of bout 40 or 50 people who made up just about all the entrants. Probably about 20 contests, usually with 5 to 10 entries, and I thing some folks must have been in 8 or 10 of them. Leroy Troy was the only actual professional entertainer on the program. Thus I didn’t watch much, although a lot of people did.
That’s the bad news. Good news was that I went with Jerry Spahn of Lincoln, NE who seems to be close friends with every banjo player in the world as well as most of their relatives. Thus, we spent about 4 or 5 hours in Leroy’s parents’ house checking out their incredible collection of old time music ephemera. Most of it was early Grand Old Opry stuff, with a fairly good selection from Leroy’s Hee-Haw days. Also a good inventory of Duckbill overalls, which aren’t collectible, but Leroy got a good deal on a bunch of them when a local store went out of business. You never know who will need a pair of Duckbills at an odd hour.
Then we got the tour of Goodlettsville on our way over to see Leroy’s new house. On the way, we drove by the churchyard where Grandpa Jones is buried and where his widow Ramona has taken up with the preacher, the farm where Stringbean was killed, (although you can’t see the house from the road due to the brush), and various other obscure things like that. And then we spend most of the festival hanging out in the Boswell tent, (that being Leroy’s real last name), while every ancient musician and backwoods wise man in the world came through. Charley Acuff came through, one of the guys that Jeff Brown interviewed a couple of years ago. He was getting some sort of award for playing a fiddle while living almost forever. Also, Ernie Hacker, an octogenarian (if that ain't right, you spell it) mandolin player. Several people told me that Ernie's claim to fame was that he used to play with the Bailes Brothers back in the 40's and 50's. I haven't yet googled the Bailes Brothers, so not sure how famous he really is. In summary, a load of people came by and they all played (or used to play) twice as better than I will.
I heard some amazing things and heard them at length, since getting to the point is not considered a virture amongst those folks. Most interesting thing I learned was that you can’t keep sorghum in a wooden barrel, as there isn’t enough moisture in it to keep the wood from drying out and leaking. (That's really interesting to me, I don't expect it to be interesting to very many people.) The same old codger who told me that, Jim Stafford by name, also sketched on the back of a festival schedule his method of building a mountain banjo. I will at some future time try to recreate the instructions. For now, just the first line "First, you catch a groundhog....."
In keeping with the spirit of the whole thing I also told them some stuff, some of which was true.
A fair amount of enthusiastic jamming, but it ended early since almost nobody camped there. I have no idea where all those people came from, couldn't have been more than a couple of dozen campers and about that many tents on site and there was only one parking lot in the vicinity which held maybe 200 cars. The place was packed Friday night, so we assumed that we would have to park a couple of miles away when we came back Saturday morning. I was prepared to spend up to $25 bribing somebody to get on the lot at the festival, and up to $50 to get under a pole barn right at the edge of the stage area. We rolled in about 8:30 AM, and the lot and the pole barn were empty. Then the massive crowd appeared, watched, and vaporized. By the end of the show at 11:30 PM, we drove out without a bit of delay.
Something I hadn’t seen before was a tendency to throw down a piece of plywood and have flatfoot and clog dancing right in the middle of the session, usually one person at a time. That seems like a good idea.
Overall, it was a fine thing.
