Every once in a while I get in such a mellow mood that I can actually feel my whole body relaxing and slowing down.

I had one of those pleasant spells for nearly an entire afternoon a week or so ago.  It was the Friday afternoon of this year’s Willfest, the annual Florida folk music festival named after Will McLean, a prolific and very influential Florida folk singer-songwriter. McLean, who died in 1990, is often called “the Father of Florida Folk.”

It was a year ago this month as I was driving along a dirt road in rural Brooksville, FL, that I happened upon a small Willfest sign and stopped in to see what it was all about.

I had no time to spend there last year, but put it on the calendar for 2018. Happily for me the event coincided this year with some paddling events with friends down from New York and with a high school class mini-reunion, all in the same week and all in roughly the same area of Florida.

I set aside Friday afternoon, the first day of the three-day event, for my Willfest visit.  It’s not a huge festival, drawing around 3,000.

On that first day the opening ceremony was at noon and by the time I arrived at about 1:30 there were probably only a few hundred folks around.  And a lot of them seemed to know each other.  In my several hours there I met one person I knew, a Sierra Club volunteer from another part of the state who I had last seen about 20 years ago.

The setting, at the Sartoma Youth Camp, is spectacular.  Comfortably nestled in a grove of big shade trees, the event offers numerous campsites within a stone’s throw of the music venues.

Seating appeared very eclectic to me at first glance, especially in the largest venue, dubbed the Magnolia Stage.  It was a large, metal-roofed, open-air structure with a concrete floor and a stage and enclosed backstage area at one end.

The Magnolia Stage

On the floor, in the audience space, was an amazing assortment of camping chairs, all sizes and shapes, and a handful of standard metal folding chairs.  There were several hundred chairs there, with maybe 20 people occupying them, early that Friday afternoon.

My first thought was, “Wow, where did they get all those chairs,” and then it dawned on me.  Everyone just brings their own and sets them up when they arrive and there they stay, probably all weekend. Whenever you want to drop by and listen to some music your chair is already there.

All the other venues–there were four others scattered about the oak forest–were much smaller and temporary, under various sizes of camping canopies, with far smaller seating areas of course.

I spent several hours there.  Armed with my chair and a book to read if I wanted to

Someone who plays a saw is called a sawist.

multi-task, I sampled all the venues, alternating between very fine music played by

Closeup of the clogger’s feet on her portable floor.  She’s in the red jacket in the photo below.

established Florida folk bands, to a small group of young songwriters premiering their new efforts, to a group of fiddlers and banjo players jamming, with accompaniment from a clogger and a fellow playing a saw blade.  The clogger brought her own small ‘floor,’ by the way.

That afternoon also included workshops in dulcimer, old time banjo, accompanying a fiddler with banjo and folk music and environmentalism.

Even strolling through the camping areas from one performance site to another was a musical experience.  At one campsite a couple of guys were warming up on dulcimers and at another a banjo, a guitar and a stand-up bass player were strumming and singing.

Evenings around the campfire in an atmosphere like that must be really fun.

I left there as the sun went down and a Florida winter chill settled in.  I was pretty happy I had not planned to camp out that evening because it was heading for the 40s.

And fortunately for the mellow mood the afternoon had put me in my GPS took me on a pleasant, country-road course for about 50 miles to a cheap motel near where I would paddle with some friends the following morning.

Most of the campers at the festival were very conventional, so this converted horse trailer caught my eye

This is me at Juniper Springs earlier in the week.