Triad City Beat editor Brian Clarey can’t believe that not everyone is jumping for joy over this weekend’s National Folk Festival in downtown Greensboro:
Everybody I know is pretty pumped about it.
Or so I thought. Turns out I know a lot of people, and they’re not all on the same page.
In the course of my ordinary life, I became a member in a local chapter of a benevolent and protective civic organization, which offers benefits like a barroom I can smoke in, a gym (that I think I can also smoke in) and a wonderful pool where my family and I spent much of the summer.
It was over last weekend at that very pool where I started asking people about their plans for the folk festival. And none of them knew what I was talking about.
How, I wondered, is that even possible?
Just so happens I’m familiar with the “benevolent and protective civic organization” to which Clarey refers and honestly it’s no surprise that the at-large clientele isn’t fired up about the National Folk Festival. Let’s be real here—while folk music might be a big thing among Gboro’s intellectual and media elite, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Kinda like when the Grateful Dead would come to town back in the day—hey I was fired up, my buddies were fired up, but not so much the vast majority.
Reminds me of a story my father-in-law liked to share when rubbing elbows with Charlotte’s liberal elite in the early ’70s—-they couldn’t understand how McGovern lost the election to Nixon, because everyone they knew voted for McGovern. Go figure.
