The words “Fest Baby” aren’t something that mean much to the outside world. But for people who’ve been to the Philadelphia Folk Festival, it’s enough to provoke questions, disbelief, and every now and then, jovial bows of adoration—as happened a few days ago. The bulk of festgoers who’ve spent even a weekend in the campground will look at the careless sea of goofballs and bohemian wanderers and revel in the fearless suspension of norms. When even newcomers talk to me, they understand what an unusual privilege it is to say that “these are the circumstances that made me who I am.”
And once a year, I get to drive through the hills of rural Pennsylvania, park my car in those timeless fields of green, and take pride in that strange and esoteric title. This is a piece I put together last year about my experience of the festival and what it means for so many others as well.
Predating Woodstock and the career of Jimi Hendrix, The Philadelphia Folk Festival is the oldest music festival in the entire country. With origins more ancient than even the first whispers of the Flower Power movement, the event’s enduring tenure within the rural hills of Pennsylvania is a testament to the appeal of the lovably eccentric oddities that define the nearly-week-long spectacle.
While its name may suggest otherwise, it isn’t the folk music that most attendees will claim as the biggest draw. Of course, folk music can be found — and in copious quantities. But as time has gone on, demographics have changed and traditional music has fallen out of favor with younger crowds. Now, few genres of music can’t be found emerging from some disparate corner of the campground, whether from a portable speaker or an obscure instrument that only a handful of people on this hemisphere have heard of.
Recent years have seen discussion over the removal of the word “folk” from the festival’s name entirely.
One of the most emblematic aspects of the event is just how little of its allure hinges on the musical lineups each year. It has hosted its share of greats, and most years’ guest lists will feature at least one or two names that listeners are likely to recognize.
But among the elements that distinguish this musical extravaganza the most are its persevering sense of community and the sheer number of attendees who owe their very lives to the festival’s annual occurrence.
Groups of thirty+ people have been establishing makeshift living rooms within the same made-up plots of land for entire decades. They carry in couches, carpets, and every breed of miscellany one could imagine. Some have married and have children fit enough to help lug in equipment and accouterments, and others have children old enough to be raising children of their own.
Adorning the front of each site like the signs on storefronts are the creative monikers that represent the communities housed within. Some signs are styled from luminary letters; others’ emblems are painstakingly etched onto wood before being embroidered, bedazzled, and painted with a level of care and craftsmanship reserved for only the most diligent of artisans. Other tents sport flags and banners that have lingered through whole generations.
Some of the names written on the displays are of dubious origins, and others may be forever lost to the psychedelic sands of time. Some of the aliases are the drunken byproducts of nearly-forgotten nights, and others spawned from the duly deliberated democratic processes of boards full of hippies hashing it out around campfires with notecards and the ticks and tallies of colored pencils.
But it’s the neon bamboo stalks of “Glow Nation” and the radiant light of “Aurora Borealis” that people use as geographic identifiers throughout the meticulously MacGyver’d metropolis. There’s the “Azzoles Country,” “The Fly Folks,” “Tuesdays,” “Club Ned,” “The Kids’ Table,” “The Neighborhood,” “Canada,” and “The Limbo Room.” Directional posts sprout up from the beaten path and attempt to provide some semblance of navigation between sites within the community of tents.
It was on these muddy, hectic, sleepless, chanting, flailing campgrounds that my parents first met. And if it weren’t for that raucous, musical communion that takes place each year, I wouldn’t exist as I do today. If it weren’t for the comical pitfalls of life within the here-today-gone-tomorrow tent city, I wouldn’t be who I am. At least not in this happily maladjusted form.
In our daily lives, people may be reluctant to greet the passing stranger. But during the yearly pandemonium of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, “Happy fest!” is reason enough to greet passersby, whether face-painted and sweating profusely, mud-covered and proud of it, slathered in enough glitter to reflect neon from the ten nearest campsites, or dressed to the nines in full body Pokémon costumes and moving around a bonfire to the oppressive beat of bongos. The two words punctuate walks through the festival grounds with a greater regularity than the words “Happy holidays!” two days before Christmas.
Throughout my life, I’ve attended the festival every year that I’ve been able. As a baby, my father trudged through mud with a young me sprouting from his backpack like a kangaroo joey from his protective pouch, a dragon painted on my face and a giggling ecstasy emerging from my crimson-popsicle-colored lips with each mud-squelching bump in the dirt road.
As a toddler, I walked at waist height beside him and my mother, music floating between the hammocks that lined the forest of wispy trees and sun-dappled shade. I grinned from ear to ear at musicians and artists and acrobats alike as a woman with piercings and a flowing skirt gave me a temporary tattoo of my choosing.
As a child, I carelessly flailed my limbs through a crowd with glow sticks in both hands to bluegrass songs I’d never heard as I tried to dance to a beat too fast to count. I hunted for crayfish in the trickle of a stream that meandered through the nearby grove. A propulsive bass pounded from nearby speakers that shook the wet stones beneath my feet and spurred the tiny crustaceans out from hiding.
Once I was a teenager, I could roam the grounds free. I experienced the overbearing mystery of the yearly get-together in all of its unshackled, uncensored glory for the first time — independent. For flickering moments, I thrived with the freedom. But in the lulling intermissions between new friends and activities, I floundered. Aimless and cynical.
Beyond the whimsy of childhood and a decade shy of the epiphany that love and levity are life, I sulked the grounds, too brooding to make conversation with the abounding sea of goofballs, affable musicians, and industrious creatives all around me. I remained in an introverted little corner of the lively town of fun-loving hippies, free from the constraint of my parents’ constant supervision, but fumbling for a true community of my own.
The smell of marijuana I was once too young to give a name I could suddenly place my finger on. I soberly pieced together some of the less savory reasons behind this yearly aberration. The rose-tinted glasses of youth began to dull as I realized people could rarely be so good and alive and free without the salve of a substance or three.
Jaded by the realization, I lost sight of the underlying majesty behind the experience. I wrongly saw an inauthenticity in the parade of people that ambled into the campgrounds after the final concert had ended, and to the undying commotion that went into full throttle a few short minutes later.
As an adult, I’ve finally found my place in the frenzied, ephemeral town. Each year that I return, it’s to the same faces and the delightful sense of scarcely a day gone by. Coming back to the same campsite from years prior, there’s a liminal continuity in the ecstatic return to form. Our campsite feels like a home and the eclectic crew that wanders in and out of our humble community feels like a family.
Friday from 2022 floats free from time and connects seamlessly with a Saturday in 2024. Intimate friendships resurrect without a hitch as though hardly an hour within the real world has lapsed. Tents will have shifted a few inches and we might find ourselves traveling down different career paths and resigned to different places in life. But those stresses and trivialities rarely enter into the equation. When we’re in the sustainably lawless sub-society that sprouts like a Phoenix from the scorched grass of the quiet Pennsylvania town, there’s little room for the mundanities of normal life.
Colleges and classes and cars and taxes feel like faraway dreams when we remove our shoes and slink away into the madness. It’s that quirky, hypnotic chaos that shaped me into the shameless nonconformist that I am. Those yearly reminders of all we can be when we walk away from it all — when we let loose with the eccentric weirdos we love the most — have made me into so much of the person I am today.
It was amazing to see just how many Fest Babies were present this year, and how many Fest Babies now are bringing their own, to be baptized in the music and joy that makes PFF a life experience of the best kind.