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While Texas may seem like an unlikely location, the Kerrville Folk Festival is the biggest and longest-running event of its kind. The highly anticipated festival kicks off this Thursday, remaining one of the most important gatherings in folk music.
“This will be our 54th annual festival.," said Deb Rouse, the executive director of the festival. "We started in 1972 and in 1975 we moved out to Quiet Valley Ranch, and that has been our home ever since."
Rouse said most people who attend have been doing so for decades, dating back to1972. Rouse herself started taking part in 1972. “We are the longest continuously operating music festival in North America,” she said. “We're really one of the few long-time festivals in North America, and not only are we one of the oldest, but we're by far the longest in terms of how many days the festival takes up, because we are an 18-day festival with 18 solid days of music programming.”
Over the decades, the Kerrville Folk Festival has slowly become the folk music festival of Texas, and really, the world.
Rouse said that through the years, they’ve made changes and improvements, all with keeping the quality of performance high, and inviting new musicians to the Folk Festival to strut their stuff.
“We do something called Yappy, which is a young artist performance incubator, where anyone under the age of 18 can get up on our stage and tell a joke, or play a song, or read a poem, and we really work very hard to teach young people just a little bit of stagecraft to give them a little bit of confidence to maybe think about becoming songwriters.”
While the level of music is quite high on the Folk Festival’s stage, many of the most interesting songs will be heard around the campfires. And that’s a tradition that dates back almost to the beginning.
“We are a camping festival. Once our nighttime stages are done, people will be up to all hours picking and singing songs around song circles and campfires in the campground, and when you buy a ticket, you get free camping if you want, but you also just get access to the campground,” Rouse said.
That really great music being played live on the campgrounds in front of campfires is one of the festival’s unexpected surprises.
“It's a really kind of magical experience to be out there under the stars with just a bunch of people sitting around with their guitars playing music,” she said.
The Kerrville Folk Festival runs from May 21-June 7. Read more about ticket purchases and the festival here.
