fellow poster Bohemond noted in a thread that he plans to attend Merlefest (Wilkesboro, NC - end of April) again this year. We'll be there for the third year & got me wondering whether any others will be also. Might be an opportunity to meet -

Merlefest is an extraordinary four day gathering of 100+ Bluegrass, Americana, Gospel etc. artists on a dozen stages. Sure gets one's mind off cancer....

Wilderness -

I didn't know this existed...I'd be interested. My only concern is that it looks unwieldly-big. I saw Doc and Merle and the boys back in the late 70s several times, including both an bar in Raleigh which may have had 100 people in it and an outdoor festival a couple years later on the side of Grandfather Mountain, just up the road from Wilkesboro, and there might have been 1,500 people there...this event looks like 10X that number, which would be a hot mess that I'm not sure I'd be up for.

JackH,
Yes the festival is seriously big - 12-14 stages. But it's a long way from Woodstock. We pay for the reserved seats in the front 50 rows or so at the main stage. We keep our same seats every year back in row 28. This gives us large comfortable Adirondack-style plastic lawn chairs. The reserved seats are open to anyone before 5 p.m. though if the rightful owner turns up you are expected to move. During daytime hours when we've found people borrowing our seats from time to time, we don't ask them to move, we just tell them to stay put and squat in other nearby empty seats. We also bring a couple of padded folding stadium seats so we can be reasonably comfortable at other stages if we are on the ground or sitting on folding chairs (which are provided at most of the other stages).

If you don't want to pay extra for the reserved chair section, there is a large field behind that fills up with folding chairs. You can store your chairs overnight at a checked-baggage trailer so you don't have to carry them every day. And as I say above, you can move up front to the reserved section before 5 p.m.

Festival living accommodations tend to become smaller festival clans of a sort. As I said, we have regular neighbors every year at the VFW campground and always meet a few new people also. We always arrive a day early and don't leave until Monday morning which means Wednesday and Sunday night usually turn into campfire nights. All of the local campgrounds will have multiple musical jams going on, which means even if you don't play yourself you can sit in and listen. Another popular popular camping venue is the North Wilkesboro Fire Departments campground, which is near the sewage treatment plant. You will see people on the festival grounds wearing "Sewerfest" t-shirts. There are also a couple of local hotels and other campgrounds set up around around the festival area. Remote campgrounds run shuttle buses -- the VFW runs buses every half-hour or so for the 4-mile trip to the festival. We always rent a parking space next to the festival grounds. This costs us an extra 90 bucks, but it means we can use our truck as a base-camp where we can stow rain gear, warm jackets for the evening etc. so we don't have to tote it with us when we don't need it.
Jim

Who is, or was, Merle? Haggard?

Merle Watson was Doc Watson's son. He died in a tragic tractor roll-over accident in 1985. Doc, who was blind since childhood became one of the all time great flat-pick guitarists-also no second banana at fingerstyle. And he was a keeper and sharer of hundreds of old-time (and new-time) songs. One of the guitarists Doc especially admired was Merle Travis so he named his son Merle in his honor.

Though Doc Watson is usually categorized as a bluegrass musician, at least for the purpose of where to find his records in record stores (remember records? remember record stores?) he was way, way more eclectic than that. I first knew of him as a southern mountain folk musician on the coffee house folk music circuit back during the great "folk music scare" of the 1960s.

Doc, being blind, usually traveled with a second guitarist who doubled as his driver and guide, and once his son Merle was old enough he hit the road with his dad from about age 16 until Merle's death in 1985. Merle also had his own band "Frosty Morn" and after Merle's death Merle's friends and band-mates often traveled with doc, and other friends of Merle's such as Sam Bush (one of the founders of "Newgrass" music that merged bluegrass and rock, annoying the heck out of a lot of traditionalists until they saw the error of their ways), always made it a point to sit in with Doc musically and became almost surrogate sons and are regulars at Merlefest every year -- T. Michael Coleman, Joe Smothers, Jack Lawrence.

When Merle died Doc and his wife Rosalie, agreed to have a one-time musical event to fund a memorial garden on the grounds of Wilkesboro Community College in North Carolina. Musicians all over the country dropped what they were doing to turn up for the event -- the stage being flat-bed trucks parked in the field. It has since become an annual event and fund-raiser for the community college -- funding programs such as automotive technician training etc. And because of Doc's musical tastes and guitar styles - ranging from Elizabethan murder ballads to Gershwin - Merelfest's musical style became "traditional plus" and ranges from 3-chord folk and bluegrass to rock (Robert Plant), to jazz fusion (Bela Fleck and the Flecktones).

I could go on and on, but I won't. I'll just say that though I never new Doc personally, I've seen him on stage many times. I never heard him say a cross word. I've always seen him being generous to any other musicians who were on stage with him. And I have personally seen him introduce newer younger musicians to his audience to help launch their careers -- Michael Cleveland, Old Crow Medicine Show...

Jim