Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
WALNUT VALLEY FESTIVAL
fiddle in a kansas campground
WINFIELD, KANSAS
Life has slings and arrows enough for us all.
Winfield is where we go to heal.
—Dan Bynum, longtime attendee of the Walnut Valley Festival
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Not only is Winfield—the proper name is the Walnut Valley Festival, but everybody
calls it Winfield—the national championship for just about every acoustic string instrument
known (flatpick guitar, finger-style guitar, autoharp, mountain and hammered dulcimer, banjo,
fiddle, and mandolin), but it's also probably the best place in the world to learn to play one.
Held every September on the banks of the Walnut River, the festival draws 20,000 or so
campers, most of them musicians. And since most of those musicians spend the better part of
the 5 to 14 days (some stay as long as three weeks) jamming with other musicians, it's an in-
credible place to get lots of practice. Anybody's welcome to sit in.
At any given time, day or night (midnight is when the fun really begins), there are hun-
dreds of camp circles with people singing and playing their instruments. Even if you're still
trying to remember which of those six guitar strings is a C, you're heartily invited to pull up a
hay bale, a bucket, or a stool and join in the fun. The bass player for Spontaneous Combustion,
a Winfield favorite, claims he learned everything he knows about playing his instrument from
watching other bass players at Winfield. Suffice it to say, music here is not a spectator sport.
Oh sure, there are formal workshops on, say, the finer points of hammered dulcimer play-
ing, but lots of people do go to Winfield just to listen—after all, Winfield features five days
and five stages of live acoustic music with such performers as the Dixie Chicks, Laurie Lewis,
John McCutcheon, Tom Chapin, and hundreds of others. But why pass up this rare oppor-
tunity to jam with the likes of Alison Krauss (this Grammy Award winner won the fiddling
competition in 1984) and Beppe Gambetta, who was quoted in a prominent guitar magazine
as saying that his favorite place to play was at the makeshift Stage 5 at Winfield. (Stage 5 is
not one of the official stages—it's basically an elevated wheat truck with a tie-dyed backdrop
