Clifftop, West Virginia

My friend Sarah Fary and her father Dave Fary and his brother (whose name I have forgotten), of Silver Spring, Maryland, once, in the year of 2005, took me to an annual summertime all-weekend old-time music festival (featuring of course fiddles, bass fiddles, banjos, guitars, mandolins, accordions, mouth harps, harmonicas, washboards, etc etc etc etc.), musicians, children and families, caucasian mostly or exclusively, tents in about I would estimate a 75-acre field next to a river. There would finally arrive there I would estimate 500-1000 people. The music festival began on I’d say Friday afternoon or evening with a congregational meeting in the main tent in which some of the leaders gave speeches about the way the weekend was set to go, about the weather forecast, and some child volunteers put on a comedy show, pretty soon the music commenced and it was pretty much a thoroughly musical gathering where the music didn’t stop hardly until Sunday afternoon or evening when people began packing up their belongings and intermittently dissipating. People parked their cars around the periphery of the field. People swam in the river, which was small enough and shallow enough there for children to wade safely, but meandering, underneath an awning of pine trees, down a steep hillside. There were large rounded rocks on the riverbed clearly visible to the swimmer, although the water was rushing through pretty quickly. I think this particular festival has been going (assuming it is still continuing) since O God who knows how long probably since I am guessing the 1960s. I don’t know when it began. There were old couples, old friends reuniting, maybe over a duet. The was a lot of improvisation, but mostly the players tried to keep to the classic tunes. These were tunes in most cases of course of Scottish-Irish or otherwise American origin, I guess. Other than I can’t tell you a whole lot more. I brought my guitar and played along in one jam session come Sunday afternoon, but mostly just shouted out vocal interjections of a hopefully musical nature as I sat and observed and listened to the many others play, and there were numerous groups and pairs and combinations all over the place. Mostly my girlfriend and I swam in river, had sex in our tent, hung out with her dad and her uncle in our little corner by the woods, and ate food camp-style cooked. She and her father listened to me play my guitar songs in a triangle on Friday night underneath the moon and stars as they’d just come out, and the ceremony was just getting up and running, excitement was in the environment and in my heart. Later, I would play for her a song or 2 by my own high school band and a song or 2 by a couple of modern alternative rock bands, away from the crowd. I would estimate the dates for the festival that year at least, covered the first weekend of August. Sarah’s dad bought me a T-shirt commemorating the festival, but it has since been lost. I have forgotten where it went. I told her I might meet ‘er at so and so an hour, and we’d break up, and I would go sit in the middle of a musical group for an hour or 2, admiring the dexterity of the players, as I said, humming along, singing along, interjecting verbal/musical commentary, then move on to the next group, and continue in this pattern for a few hours. One woman, a musician in the group I sat in on on Sunday afternoon, asked me in a sarcastic way if I intended to make a living out of playing music. I was kind of a weird cat in those days. Admittedly, I don't have much too much of a musical upbringing, I hadn’t remembered my clip-on guitar tuner, had to borrow Sarah’s uncle’s, had only tuned my guitar thereby once in the weekend, and my guitar was cheap, likeable, in tone, to a cardboard box. I hope this is enough to be going on: where do you think this could have been?