Folk Stars Strum for Love, Fun and Community

The stars were out in Huntington last Saturday night, but they had been conspiring all afternoon and evening. For those who experienced the it was a day-long pilgrimage of folk music that included performers from across the northeast and even the United Kingdom on a cloudless August day.

Beginning early in the afternoon, the nearly 10-hour event featured three "stages" – OK, just tent areas – each with continuous musical performances. The AcousticMusicScene.com stage feature song exchanges and group performances. The Acoustic Live! venue, hosted by Richard Cuccaro, featured no fewer 16 performers and groups. Finally, Roslyn talent Joe Iadanza hosted the Green Palate Open Mic, where anyone could sign up at the park to strum their stuff. 

Despite these modest digs, the weather provided everyone with a pleasant accompaniment, including night co-headliner Susan Werner. In the evening's finale, Werner told the audience that she had imagined Long Island to be flat and sandy. Instead, she found the lush area around Heckscher Park surprisingly lovely – especially the nearby swan-inhabited pond.

As the audience soon learned, though most already knew Werner's music well, even when her lyrics are openly didactic, as in "(Why is Your) Heaven So Small?" her voice is seductive. Werner is equally comfortable on acoustic guitar or piano, and, when interviewed briefly before the show, admitted that she's working on a musical.

Perfectly mated with Werner in a union of equal talents was Vance Gilbert. Gilbert's able acoustic guitar and steady voice demonstrated broad range and a contagious stage presence. Most memorably, his "Goodbye Pluto" bridged planetology and mortality.

The Folk Afternoon

• Spuyten Duyvil's front-man and co-founder Mark Steven Miller remarked upon the festival's "comfortable, homecoming feel and collaborative spirit of performers, fans and promoters." Spuyten Duyvil is a seven person Yonkers group with a big, blended sound behind singer Beth Kaufman's confident anchor. Their tunes included the traditional "Shady Grove," and Miller's "I Hear You Calling" and "Coal Train." Sarah Banks handles the band's fiddle when she's not teaching high school English, a day job that seemed to suit more than a few participants.

• Mark Allen Berube played to more than auditory sensibilities with his "The Way You Smell" and "The Naked Guy at the Gym." "It's humbling to be around such talent, and yet to be considered a peer by those same artists," he said afterward. "And the attentive, appreciative fans."

• Lucky 13's Marci Geller kicked off the Acoustic Live stage as the audience was still gathering. She sang "Surf the Undertow," to which one imagined the Long Island Sound responding not far to the north. She and Lucky co-founder Cathy Kreger revisited traditional topics with "My Last Mistake" and "He's Gone."

• Some of the performers have been at this for awhile. Sayville's Hank Snow grew up in Queens and has been writing songs for decades. His poignant "One Year From Now" was accompanied by flutist Susan Cohen. Annie Dinnerman showed eco-cred when she played "One Planet at a Time." She handed out homemade shakers made of "garbage" – recycled plastic pill bottles filled with pistachio shells. She said she enjoyed playing the festival. "Huntington is an arts-friendly town," Dinnerman said. "The atmosphere is like a house concert held in a friend's back yard under the cool shade of big trees."

• Inevitably, some of the songwriters wrote about their instruments. Carolann Solebello (formerly of Red Molly) sang "Papa's Mandolin." She hadn't played the festival since 2006 when Red Molly opened for John Hammond, but felt the daytime festivities had grown and matured since then. "Long Island's a breeding ground for acoustic music," she said.
• Similarly, Greg Klyma, who drove down from Massachusetts for the event, told a story of  learning a mandolin tune only to be later told it was a completely different song than the one he'd been identifying for his audiences.

• Westchester's Susan Kane performed several tunes from her recordings and added her voice to the mix at the AcousticMusicScene tent, leading the initially tentative Huntington audience through Craig's infectious "Stew and Bubble."

• Prospect Street is a new band with nine members that began as the folk band at St. John's Church. Their vocals, on display in the original tunes "Consider the Lilies" and ""Please Abide in Me," already exhibit a mature sheen that bodes well for their future work. Prospect Street meets every Wednesday, we're told, so listen well as you cruise by on Main Street.

• Robin Greenstein, an NYC singer-songwriter, has been recorded on Fast Folk and Atlantic Records, but now and then gets to sing the national anthem at the Garden for the Knicks. She sang "New York Blues" and covered Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go."

• Two different trios, the YaYas, and My Dad's Truck, offered respectively refined and rustic interpretations of folk music. YaYas' Catherine Miles get deserved attention for her vocals, but Paul Silverman's expert keyboard work shone even in this unplugged affair. My Dad's Truck, on the other hand, has an "old timey" feel for its music that are perfectly wed to the etiology of the band's name (hint: beer figures in the story). Susan Lang ably carries the alto duties for "Truck."

• Joe Iadanza, one of the presenters but also an active performer, said he would like to see the venue move to the main stage for the entire day. "We could give exposure to lots of great artists, attract vendors and boost the local economy a bit," he said. Iadanza performed some light tunes, but also his more reflective "American Dream," which he's performed elsewhere on Long Island this year. His energy and optimism reflects a simmering potential that festival organizer Michael Kornfield, president of the Folk Society echoed.

Quick Highlights

• Best band name: My Dad's Truck. (Second Place: the YaYas)
• Best sing-along: Andrew V. Craig's "Stew and Bubble."
• Best ad lib: Vance Gilbert, upon hearing a Huntington siren in the distance as he began to perform, "Guess they don't get many tall black folksingers 'round here." Then he introduced himself as "Mike Werner," formerly Susan's roadie.
• Most amazing technical feat: Gilbert's two-minute vocal fermata, a note kept in perfect pitch as he kept playing guitar. (How? Look up "circular breathing.")
• Best tune to teach a toddler: "Monsters in the Dark" by Lucky 13's Cathy Kreger
• Biggest challenge for the Festival in 2011: Helping these unplugged acts to be heard (a little plugging-in wouldn't hurt, and you could hear some of those great folk lyrics otherwise lost) while confining the sound in its place near each small stage.
• Best band with no web site (yet): Prospect Street.
• Best Imitation: Vance Gilbert's rendition of Aaron Neville performing Gilbert's own "Unfamiliar Moon."

The festival is presented by the Folk Music Society of Huntington and Town of Huntington. It was produced by the Huntington Arts Council beneath the banner of the 45th annual Huntington Summer Arts Festival with additional support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Suffolk County Office of Cultural Affairs.