Laytonville California Clerk Of Courts

The 2011 Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival, Laytonville, California 6/24-26

It’s not a new concept: We honor the dead by indulging the living. We keep the dead alive by being alive, ourselves. We remember the dead in song and to that song we dance, wide-eyed and illuminated. But, when it comes to the memory of the late folksinger Kate Wolf, it’s a little more complicated than all that. Honoring a musician — even one you may not have heard of before — is a little bit different than honoring other dearly departed. In some ways, it can be easier, because they left us their songs, their catalogs, their life’s work. And so we play the albums, we view the videos and — like watching “Thriller” on YouTube — their voice still echoes in the air and in the ear. But, regardless of how it may have started during its humble beginnings 16 years ago, the Kate Wolf Memorial Festival doesn’t do it like that. At least, not exactly.

Held over three days at the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville, Calif. — the home of Wavy Gravy’s infamous Hog Farm hippie commune and his Camp Winnarainbow for children — the Kate Wolf Memorial Festival is far, far away from being a 72-hour memorial service. With a marquee lineup that, this year, included Los Lobos, Mavis Staples, Taj Mahal, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Bruce Cockburn, Todd Snider with Great American Taxi, Jorma Kaukonen, Houston Jones (feat. former Waybacks guitarist Glenn Houston) and others, the festival is a bona-fide three-day mom-and-pop music fest — except, perhaps, this one might just have a little more heart. It’s everywhere you look.

The moment I arrived, this was clear: “This property is part of an actual commune, so there’s some magic right there,” a volunteer told me at check in. “It’s definitely a hippie festival.” And that, it is. Wavy Gravy sat on a couch backstage reminiscing about the land, while friends of the festival staff sat around a campfire teaching each other Beatles tunes on the ukulele. A giant peace sign illuminated the backstage kitchen. The food court featured vegan crepes and mate-lemonades. And rather than fight for space in the field, most people brought low-back chairs which they set up early in the morning, on top of identifying blankets, and then left openly with an open invitation for strangers to keep their seats warm until they got back. If you didn’t have your own chair, you almost always still had a chair. As you know, it usually doesn’t quite work like that. But it sure does work.

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