Red White and Bluegrass

July 16, 2006

This past Saturday, I trekked out to Mineral, Virginia, for the 23rd Mineral Bluegrass Festival.

Mineral is about 40 miles and a world away from Richmond.

Started by the legendary Lester Flatt and now sponsored by the local volunteer fire department, the festival is a three-day convocation of RVs, lawn chairs and bluegrass fiddlers from Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and points unknown up in the mountains. With its big white tents, American flags and gospel quartets spinning homespun homilies - "I am not afraid to stand up and say that I love Jesus!" - the place feels as much like a revival meeting as a music festival.

This was my second year at Mineral, but I make no pretense at being a bluegrass afficionado. I fall squarely into the category of white college boys who don't know a dobro from a dulcimer. But I enjoy the music, and the chance to step into a culture that feels strange yet vestigially familiar.

Besides Mineral, I have only ever been to one other bluegrass festival in my life: San Francisco's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park. The music sounds about the same, but you could not imagine two more divergent crowds. In San Francisco, the kids wear those tragically hip trucker caps. In Mineral, they wear the real kind. In San Francisco, the Haight girls hawk pot brownies by the side of the road; in Mineral, the only herbal stimulants in sight are sitting behind the iced tea bar.

Although if you look hard enough, you can dig up a pot of moonshine jelly hidden in between the relishes and pickled corn-and-beans.

In San Francisco, folks wave peace flags and protest signs (even Frank Chu comes out); in Mineral, it's strictly stars and stripes, shout-outs to the troops, and the occasional Navy Jack.

I may be a thirteenth-generation Virginian, descended from country Baptists, but these are not, let's face it, my people. Suffice it to say I feel more in my element under the wafting clouds of Golden Gate Park. I would have no idea what to say to most of these folks in real life, but somehow, perched in my lawn chair on a hot Saturday afternoon in front of the bandstand, I feel right at home.