Only at Camp
Some experiences can happen only at the gatherings of
diverse personalities and musical styles that occur annually at summer
guitar camps around the globe. We asked some of our camping contributors
to tell us about their favorite summer camp encounters.
Just Desserts
When Oregonian Rick Hulett signed up for the California
Coast Music Camp in 1997, his biggest concern was that he had to take
his brand-new Collings guitar on the plane. He had heard all the horror
stories of flying with guitars: baggage handlers hurling the instruments
across the tarmac, musicians opening up the cases and finding the
necks broken or the tops pulled off, guitars getting shipped to San
Antonio instead of San Francisco. Determined to avoid such misfortune,
Rick decided his best bet was to come up with a good excuse to preboard
the plane, so he could store his ax—too big to fit in the overhead
bin—safely in the garment locker before it filled with luggage. He
made a quick trip to a medical supply store, and on the day of departure,
he limped up to the gate with an aluminum cane. Feigning injury, he
was ushered onto the plane in front of the other passengers and stashed
the guitar and cane in the locker.
Rick and his new Collings made it safely to camp, and
the story of his escapade soon made the rounds. Two days later he
played in the annual softball game, an event pitting the fingerpickers
against the flatpickers. He got on base, and the next batter hit a
rocket line drive down the third-base line. Rick rounded the bases
and slid hard into home just ahead of the throw. His leg twisted under
his body and erupted in pain. Fortunately the camp doctor was playing
catcher and bandaged him right up. The diagnosis: a sprained knee.
Rick had to hobble around on his aluminum cane for the rest of camp.
—Chris Grampp
E Chord Stomp
I am a teacher at the National Guitar Summer Workshop.
One year, my friend and fellow instructor Dave Weintraub had his classroom
directly beneath mine. We were constantly playing practical jokes
on each other. One day, I told my class of eight teenage electric
guitar players to turn their amps up and put them face down on the
floor. I gave a signal to my students, and they all hit an open-position
E chord as hard as they could. I found out later that a couple of
students in Dave’s classroom fell off their chairs during the blast.
—Karen Hogg
Sweet Harmony
One of the pleasures of bluegrass music is that it has
a sort of collective memory that allows its players to create spontaneous
arrangements effortlessly, and on a balmy night during the British
Columbia Bluegrass Workshop last year, a group of us made this particular
magic. Of the five-person jam ensemble I found myself in, I’d played
with only one person before, exchanged a few words with two, and never
even met the other until he walked up and began singing with us. Yet
somewhere in our memory banks reside dozens of classic 1940s and ’50s
recordings of bluegrass gospel quartets. At 2 a.m. the songs were
flowing freely with all their verses intact and perfect four-part
harmony. Regardless of one’s religious persuasion, or lack thereof,
the songs created a feeling of community, especially welcome on the
night before we all dispersed, not knowing when or if we’d meet again.
—Sue Thompson
Camp Romance
One year at the Swannanoa Gathering in western North
Carolina, at about 4 a.m. on the last day, a few of us left the picking
circles and headed for the pond. Tired but exhilarated after a long
night of percussive jamming, a dip in the dark waters beneath a full
moon seemed like the perfect ending to a perfect week. As we relaxed
a bit before heading back, a young couple came bounding down the hill
shedding articles of clothing and then jumped into the water screaming,
"We just got engaged!!" And then, "Please don’t take
our clothes!"
—Al Petteway
The Human Songbook
In my troubled youth, I found comfort in the radio.
Without trying, I learned every word to every ’60s AM hit: "Ain’t
Too Proud to Beg," "Expressway to Your Heart," "Incense
and Peppermints," and so on. This knowledge served no purpose
until I went to music camp. At the rock ’n’ roll oldies jams, my readily
accessible encyclopedia of lyrics makes me a hero. Many people can’t
sing a tune unless they’re singing "along" with it; at music
camp I always have a chorus following me as if I were a teleprompter.
Everyone should have at least one exceptional talent, even if comes
to light only once a year.
—Lissy Abraham
It's Cool in Here
A spontaneous jam session is the hallmark of a successful
guitar workshop, but when everybody in camp is trying to stake out
some real estate for a few tunes with their new-found music buddies,
finding any room, nook, or cranny to play in can be daunting. At various
other camps I’ve sought sonic refuge in broom closets, stairwells,
horse stalls, belfries, and even in the shower rooms. The extreme
came one desperately crowded week at Camp Harmony when I found myself
playing chilly mandolin licks while perched on a crate of carrots
in the walk-in refrigerator. Believe it or not, it was marginally
warmer in that ice box than it would have been in the frigid night
air outside, and the music sounded just fine amongst the sacks of
potatoes and boxes of fruit.
—Paul Kotapish
Blues Boy
Nights are quiet at Jorma Kaukonen’s Fur Peace Ranch
in remote southern Ohio, distinct from the beery boisterousness that
characterizes evening life at many guitar camps. On such a night,
a couple of Octobers back, I was sitting on a porch swing outside
the library/commissary playing "Candy Man Blues." A young
student with baggy pants, goatish hair, and one of the cheaper guitars
on campus sidled up. "Did you write that?" he said. "No.
It’s Mississippi John Hurt’s." I replied. "Cool . . . has
he got any CDs out?" he said. A few other guitarists drifted
up with their instruments, and a John Hurt homage ensued. Jorma passed
by, the gold tooth in his smile flashing in the dark. A couple of
hours later, after discussing the fine points of twang at the outdoor
coffee urn, I was walking back to my cabin when I passed the library.
On the porch swing sat the young goat boy . . . slowly, deliberately
(and beautifully) playing "Candy Man Blues" to the accompaniment
of the season’s last frogs and crickets.
—Steve James
Take Me Out to the Jam Session
At the Lark in the Morning Camp in Mendocino, California,
the community fire circle is where I head when I’m in the mood for
some musical mischief after most campers have staggered off to bed.
Some years ago, I was wide awake at 3 a.m. and ran into Minnesota
accordion nut Dan Newton, who was standing by the embers and playing
a loopy version of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" for his
solitary amusement. I uncrated the ax I was carrying and joined in.
Dan started messing with the time signature, shifting to jig time,
then hornpipe, then reel. Grinning ever wider, we started calling
out tune forms, playing it as a hora, a waltz, a czardas, a racenitsa,
anything we could think of. Dan was now looking positively deranged.
"Minor!" he barked, and launched first into minor, then
into hijaz. We were practically nose to nose by this time.
"I know what," he yelled. "Circle of fifths!"
"What the hell!" I nodded and away we ran. When we finally
wheezed to a stop, the applause was a shock. We looked around to find
that we’d gathered a crowd and had been honking away for 45 minutes.
To this day, when I’m at a Giants game, I hear Dan in the seventh-inning
stretch playing a jig.
—Danny Carnahan
Gospel Goosebumps
In the summer of 1996, 73-year-old Willa Mae Bruckner
came to Augusta Blues Week in Elkins, West Virginia. She was an elegant
woman, wearing a turban, who stood erect and handled her audience
with all the stage skills of a vaudeville professional (from years
of working tent shows and carnivals as a guitarist, blues singer,
contortionist, and snake handler). After hearing several of her risqué
"play-party" songs, a workshop participant asked Bruckner
if she had ever sung any gospel music. Reluctantly, Bruckner admitted
she had. Pressed, she began singing "If I Could Just Touch the
Hem of His Garment." Her voice and body underwent a transformation.
She seemed to crumple up, and her voice got deeper and lower, coming
from a different place in her body. Bruckner only made it through
a few lines before the power of the music had her sobbing and she
had to go outside to recover. Half an hour later, she was restored
to her elegant self.
—Del Rey
Swingin’ in the Lake
I’ve been going to the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop for
about 15 years and credit most of my ability on the guitar to that
camp. One year I met a couple of wild jazz guitarist/swing dancers
and gave up any pretense of sleep, playing and dancing until dawn
every night. We made quite a trio—one would play and the other two
would dance, and we kept swapping around that way. Mostly it was me
on the dance floor with one of the guys, but eventually they got me
to play and the two men did a wild tango that involved a rose between
the teeth—they ended up wrestling over it on the floor. One of the
nights at three or four in the morning we found ourselves in a little
rowboat on the lake and had quite a jam in the dark on the water.
A bunch of campers jumped in the lake and made a jazz chorus around
the boat.
—Kristina Olsen
Feet and Fiddle
In the summer of 1999, I walked into Lisa Ornstein’s
fiddle class at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend,
Washington, mostly to deepen my knowledge of French-Canadian fiddling.
I was also eager to get close to the music of Quebec’s André
Marchand. He was there in the dual role of Lisa’s accompanist and
singer of French-Canadian folksongs. These morning sessions were virtual
trips to a foreign culture as well as discoveries into how a guitar
can give new contexts to century-old fiddle tunes. André managed
to make the Dana Bourgeois dreadnought he had borrowed for the week
sound as if it were in an open tuning even though he never left standard.
He employed creative and unexpected chord voicings and revealed techniques
for adding surprising suspensions to the most common chords. André
is also a master of the foot percussion that is a part of the Québecois
fiddling tradition. Listening to Lisa’s fiddle, his guitar, and their
pounding feet took me from the bright Pacific Northwest morning to
a Saturday night dance hall somewhere in the snowy regions of Quebec.
The guitar became a dancing partner of the fiddle, which, come to
think of it, is the whole idea.
—Clyde Curley
Na Na Na Na Na
Quite a few of the week-long guitar workshops climax
in a gargantuan student concert that can run eight or nine hours in
length. These concerts are wonderful, but they tend to fragment the
camp into scores of tense little ensembles preparing for their performance
slots. One year as the final performer—number 117—finished
up halfway to dawn, a few of the irreverent launched into "Land
of 1,000 Dances" as a way to break the tension. Soon everyone
in camp had pulled out guitars or crafted ad hoc percussion instruments
from kitchen implements, and before long a chorus section joined in
and a limbo line had formed. For over an hour we played an unbroken
medley of hits, jingles, and singalongs as if to remind ourselves
that this simple sharing of music was every bit as important as the
polished presentation on stage.
—Paul Kotapish
