Wayne and Diane Steadham

Keri:  All right, so for starters, I want you to say and spell your first and last name.

Wayne:  My name is Wayne W-A-Y-N-E. Last name is Steadham. S-T--E-A-D-H-A-M.

Diane:  I'm Diane Steadhem. D-I-A-N-E-S-T-E--A-D-H-A-M.

Keri:  All right, great. Okay, so I'll ask, and I guess that we can kind of go back and forth. I'll ask, and you can respond, and then Wayne, you can. If one of you says something and it kind of sparks a bit of a conversation, that's fine. But I'm going to direct them and just let each of you also say what you have to say about them. So, the first one is, when did you come to Winfield for the first time, and have you been coming every year since?

Wayne:  Well, we went to the very first festival, and it was in September – the first of September. No, well mid-September of '72. It was the fourth weekend in September – in '72, and I had an interest in guitar music at the time. I had been a player for a number of years, and knew the legend of Stuart Mossman and his guitar factory. And at my greenhouse, I employed people who also had friends that worked at the Mossman guitar factory. And so there was a lot of talk about what they were going to have at the Bluegrass Festival. We saw the lineup – or I saw the lineup. It was Lester Flat, and there were others on there that I didn't recognize. But I did see the name of a guitarist by the name of Norman Blake. We got to see him, and it sparked an interest that became something that both Diane and I looked at each other and said, "This is something we can have fun doing, and enjoy, and we both enjoyed the music, and we supported it." And we bought tickets for a number of years just to come to the festival. So that was the main thing.

Diane:  Yeah, so the reason we came to the festival was his idea. I was away at college. I was a freshman at K-State. We came home for the weekend, and our tradition had always been going out on a date. And so Wayne said, "Hey, there's a music festival that's down at the fairgrounds. You want to go this evening?" I said, "Sure." So, it was a date for me, and I really didn't know – I don't really remember if I knew that it [the festival] was occurring or not. I'm not sure that I was aware of it. I lived out of town, I out of my element, and so I wasn't really keeping up with what was going on in [Winfield]. So, came home, and that Friday night we went to the festival. [Looks at Wayne] Did Mother send the blanket the first night or the second night?

Wayne:  Well, Saturday afternoon. That's when the Bluegrass shows were on. And we decided we were going to come back to the festival for the evening.

Diane:  And your mom gave us the woolen army blanket.

Wayne:  Yeah.

Diane:  And Wayne said, "Do you want to go back tomorrow night?" I said, "Yeah, that was really good." It was a little cool because it was the fourth weekend of September, and it was a little cool, but Saturday the weather was really forecasting it to be pretty chilly. So, Wayne came over to pick me up, and Mother said, "It's going to get really cold up there in those grandstands. Don't you want to take an army blanket?" And it was like, "Mother!" And she said, "You really need to take this." So we said, "Okay."

Gosh, we're glad we had that thing. You know what an army blanket is?

Keri:  Oh, yeah. Where it's wool?

Diane:  I have olive drab wool, and so for a while we sat on it, and that was really nice. And then the wind picked up. We ended up wrapping it around our shoulders, and then it started snowing. There aren't very many people that have that recollection. But there were snow flurries. I mean, it swirled and snowed. I mean, it wasn't like it piled up or anything, but it was snowing. And we sat up there in our army blanket, and that was -- we were more comfortable than most people there. It was wonderful. I don't recall -- I went back to school. And I don't even know if it went on Sunday.

Wayne:  I did. On stage that Saturday evening, we saw, of course, Norman Blake. And then Stuart [Mossman] had the idea of pairing these -- him with Doc Watson and Dan Crary, just as a guitar ensemble. And so, they got up there and played fiddle tunes. Oh, my God. And the flat-pick style and the crowd went crazy, just ate it up. And the band that was really popular at that time was the early New Grass revival – had Ebo Walker playing bass with them, and Courtney Johnson playing banjo. And we're not talking a large crowd, but there was a nice -- there was a nice group of people there.

Keri:  Nice, I love what's coming out naturally. There's a lot of stuff here. Okay, so I know you said that you were getting into guitar. So, I was going to ask, “did you or do you play an instrument, both of you, and if so, what? And, you know, tell me about it.”

Wayne:  I play guitar and have, like I say, most of my life. It's something . . . I tell people, you know, you're not going to learn guitar and suddenly be good. It's something that's like swimming or running or anything else. It's something you pursue and have fun with. So that's what I do.

Diane:  But he got a guitar when he was a kid that he had.

Wayne:  My parents bought me a guitar when I was 10 years old, I think. I had it when we got married and didn't get a real guitar until several years later.

Keri:  What year did you get married?

Wayne:  '73.

Keri:  Okay. And so what kind of music mostly do you play?

Wayne:  I play mostly singer-songwriter folk music. I play with a loose group of guys and we tend to play some rock and roll and such. And we just play music – we have fun – music we like to listen to and challenge ourselves with.

Keri:  Very cool. You play harmonica some?

Wayne:  Yeah. It's different at the festival. Our campsite has always been known as a picking campsite. The way the name came about was really spontaneous and we developed a reputation for attracting known players and they would come and just hang out at our camp for food and camaraderie and telling jokes.

Keri:  What was your campsite name?

Wayne:  Well, it's called the Picking Parlor Branch Office. It got that name in about '75 or '76. Anyway, the sign painter at the festival was a man from Fargo, North Dakota. He and his wife came here just to paint signs. He was a really, really fun guy. He had done most of his work as a set designer in TV world. So, he was all about “step back and look at the picture.” And prior to that, the festival had never emphasized that we're having this contest and the winners of the contest, that should be a springboard for them. And most of the guys that entered the contest, what they really wanted was their friends to see them on stage playing with these other people in the horse race. And so Norman – His nickname was Rat:  We all called him Rat.

Diane:  Vicki made us call him Rat because she said he's such a rat.

Wayne:  But he would step back, hold his hands up and say, "There's the stage." And we just had two stages at the time:  Stage one and stage two. And as he's painting signs, and I was volunteering to help do painting and anything I could to help the festival. And we all hung out at our friend Kenny and Joe Glasgow's house at Rainbow Bend. And that's where we would meet to have jam sessions. And he and Joe always just called it the pickin’ parlor. It was a room that was just about this size, but often it would hold eight, ten, twelve musicians all playing the same tune at the same time.

Keri:  And this was at the fairgrounds?

Wayne:  No, this was at the house in Rainbow Bend. And when Rat came to town to paint signs, we invited him and said, “Hey, we're going to have a jam session at the pickin’ parlor. He came out and he was just enthralled. He said, “This is the best music there is. We're going to call this the Pickin’ Parlor Branch Office. He painted us a sign, and we've hung that sign at our camp ever since . . . had it restored once.

And Jimmy has the original Pickin’ Parlor bench. Rat painted a little sitting bench just so he could hire a player or something to sit on. So that's the original pickian’ Parlor bench. And then Rat dubbed our camp ‘The Branch Office – the Pickin’ Parlor Branch Office.

Keri:  So you're sort of getting into something I wanted to touch upon and that is a sense of temporary home. You know, when I would be around the fairgrounds, it felt like, you know, that kind of you weren't on vacation.

Diane:  Oh, exactly. I noticed that in your questions and you really, I'm glad you picked up on that. Yeah, it becomes a separate community. It does. And for a while – during the early festivals – the town people didn't respect the festival. They resisted us coming out to the festival because they thought we were all a bunch of hippies just out there, you know, getting drunk and smoking marijuana.

Wayne:  They missed the whole thing:  that it was all about the music and it was a national contest for guitar players. It quickly became international. But we think about guitar music – or any kind of music – used to if you knew somebody who played piano or they were your hand or somebody in your family played piano. Nowadays, everybody knows somebody who plays guitar. It is America's most important instrument. And to think that it's taking place here in Winfield, there were a bunch of us that got behind it and said, “Hey, y'all, we got to wake up. This is happening here. It's not going away. Let's embrace it” Slowly, people started coming out and now and then they brought campers and motorhomes and scheduled their time off on vacation.

Diane:  And well, I'm going to add something – Keri, it took 25 years for the locals to be okay with the festival. And it wasn’t until the end of 25 years, that people started to accept it. That was alarming and maddening to Wayne and I. So few people in Winfield participated. The early years, it was mainly people from out of town or just not diehards, but just people that had more insight and enjoyed music for music's sake.

But the townspeople – and partly because some of the city leaders didn't embrace it at all – just thought it was kind of a pain in the butt, quite honestly. And so there was a lot of resistance and then, you know, how it is:  Repeat, repeat, repeat, and all of a sudden it becomes fact.

Originally, the festival was at the end of the of September. The weather would turn cool and campfires were the norm. The fairgrounds kind of set down in a little bit of a valley and we have all these natural pecan trees and everything around. And yes, there was smoke in the air and it was a whole lot of campfire smoke. I mean, pardon me, but if everybody was dumb enough to think that that was all pot smoke . . . I mean, you're talking catching bales and bales and bales on fire. I mean, it was just stupid. But that's the way it was. We're talking the late 70s and early 80s. And so, they thought it was you were either drunk or you were high. And that that's the only reason that you were there. No other reason. You weren't there on account of the music. There was a motorcycle crowd and they would rev their engines up. And anyway, nothing ever got out of control.

Personally, I've never ever, ever heard of a fight there ever. Rowdy behavior, yes. What's really funny is that most of the so-called trouble was caused by teenagers from here in town. Because they’d sneak off and go into the campgrounds. There's one of that is very, very, very closely associated with the festival today. It just cracked me up when, a couple years ago, he said, “Yeah, I was one of those kids running through camp, swiping beers out of coolers.” That was a great story.

Wayne:  But it was such a home feel. That was our community that developed very quickly and you lived it for a good solid week. Now, people live it for several weeks. It used to be people didn't go down and set up a camp until pretty much, you know, the day before it started. Also, our group would go to the Tulsa Bluegrass and Chili Festival. That was the week before . . . that started the week before Walnut Valley.

Diane:  One Sunday, a week before the Festival, we all said, “Hey, you want to grab a hamburger and meet down at the fairgrounds?” And so we were sitting down there on the fairgrounds and somebody said, “We should go ahead and bring our campers down early.” So, we started taking our campers down the week – actually the Sunday before – and then it became the week before. And then lots of people started their own organized lineup. I remember when that first woman parked her motor home down there by the power plant and put a number one in the window to claim her spot. Everybody was like, “I can't believe she did that.” And that was kind of the beginning of Land Rush.

But, to go back to the idea of community – Walnut Valley is that. I'll just go ahead and lightly touch on this. Every single solitary person at that festival has met and made friends that are just like family. People said, “Well, how about we meet here next year?” And so they did. We've got friends from the festival that are lifetime friends.

Wayne mentioned our camp and all the pickers. Our campsite became known as a pickers’ camp very quickly. There's so many stories. A young guy, Barry Patton – His uncle is Byron Burline, who is a world-renowned fiddler. Looks at the ceiling. Rest in peace, Byron. He died from COVID several years ago. But Byron was part of our camp. I mean, everybody knew Byron Burline's name. He's like a celebrity. And so people would think, “maybe I could come over to the ‘pickin’ parlor’ and catch a glimpse of Byron Burline.” Then other musicians who were contest pickers and wanted to be around Byron or listen to him came to our campsite. We always made everybody welcome.  All the best of the best pickers ended up being at our camp because they always knew they had a chair . . . They always had a place.

Wayne:  We also had community meals at our camp. Everybody was welcome. It really was a home away from home, and that's what all of those people would tell you. And they still come. We had people there this year that we hadn't seen in – I don't know – six, seven years and they came back and they knew exactly where they were going and they know they're always welcome at our campsite. And it just goes on from there. So, it's very difficult to describe, but every single camper down there shares that same feeling.

Diane:  It is a community that forms easily a month before because there's the Pre-Lineup. And then there's acutal Lineup and that’s when the sense of community starts on the fairgrounds. Well, the community never ends.

Wayne:  If you look online right now, there's a countdown. People are already looking forward to next year. There's also the famous bumper sticker that says, ‘I can't. I'm going to Winfield.’

Keri:  Yeah.

Diane:  And [before the festival] people who live at the Carp Camp send out the year’s music to their people that play at the Carp Camp – they jam there. So, the Carp Camp people – they pre-arrange the music they're going to play and they send it out to the everybody signs up. They send an email that says, “Here's the tune we're going to play.

Did you get to go to Carp Camp?

Keri:  No.

Diane:  Oh shucks. That's an amazing camp and they have these big fish hanging out front.

Wayne:  Coy fish.

Diane:  Yeah.

Wayne:  They just do like fiddle tunes. Hammer dulcimers are primary – and mandolin. It's an orchestra. It really is. There'll be 40 musicians playing there in the Carp Camp at one time all playing the same tune. And they're under a big tent. It’s amazing. They have a parade the Tuesday before the festival starts. That's one of the traditions that's developed from the Carp Camp.

If you come to the festival early, you get a wristband that's one color and that allows you to go do whatever you have to do. And then, on Tuesday, that wristband has to change to what they call the permanent wristband. And so, you have to go up to the front gate and get your wristband cut and have the new one put on. Well, the Carp Camp people have already gathered by then and are playing tunes. So, they decided to put together a parade. They wear silly hats and costumes and play crazy instruments. And they all trapse all the way through the West camp ground and then snake their way up to the main area and they stand in line and get their ticket bands exchanged. 

Then, from there, they walk right down through the main drag of the fairgrounds, go into the Pecan Grove and end up over to another camp that Greg Tucker and his wife have, where they have what they call a “band scramble.” Now, keep in mind that this is all pre-festival. If you want to participate in the “band scramble” and you play an instrument – say you play banjo – you just write “banjo” and your name and contact info. on it and you put it in a jar. Then Greg Tucker and his wife pull these names out and they organize a band just randomly. Then you're expected to get with your guys and you get 30 minutes to put together a show and a song. They also have a theme you have to follow with your music. It has to be thematic and the theme usually has something to do with a rat because they call that area the “Rat Camp.” And so, then the Carp Camp parade comes through there interrupts their little presentation . . . Walks right through the middle, and they stop. Everybody claps and then they turn around and walk out. They do this every year and it's all timed and people in the camp go, "Oh, it's almost time for the Carp Camp parade." The parade probably takes not quite two hours from start to finish. It's probably an hour and a half. I mean the people that come to the festival are very genius at thinking of things. And then those things that became so much fun, they said, "Let's do this next year. Let's do this next year."

Diane:  Well, you've done your scavenger hunt. Wayne does a photo scavenger hunt. This is like your fourth year.

Wayne:  Yeah, fourth year.

Diane:  He makes a list and you take a photo.

Wayne:  I try to get you to be observant of what's out there. And before the festival starts, if you walk around to the different campsites, you see things that you may not think. Things that are unusual. But I might say that what I want you to look for something like a camp with all teenage players, or a group of all pickers and no hats, or a guy playing not wearing shoes. Or a bumper sticker from, you know, a certain year of the festival. And you take a picture of it and you come back. We get it all verified and put your name in a jar and then we draw it for a little...a little camper clock I make every year out of some landfill walnut and put picks on it.

Diane:  People have done that kind of thing at the festival for years. There was this lady – she hasn't been there for a long time – but she had a chocolate bar. You can't sell anything out of your individual campgrounds. So, she had this all lined up and you'd get, you know, a little cup with pretzels in it and go down the line to the chocolate. She did that for several years. And one of our friends that's well known, Lucy, does yoga every morning at 9 or 10. And then, on Tuesday nights, they have like a sock hop and she would change the theme every year to the different kinds of music and people dress up.

Wayne:  All that's just in our general vicinity on the fair grounds.

Diane:  Tandem Bicycle Race?

Wayne:  Oh gosh, yes. I forgot about that.

Keri:  Why do you think tradition is such a thing that develops out there?

Wayne:  It's because of the friendships.

Diane:  Yeah. It's because of the community. You really nailed it on the idea of community. People will see someone and say, “Hey, I saw you last year. You and I, we were sharing a beer, man. We had so much fun doing this and this and this. Oh yeah, let's do that again.

Wayne:  And I think it's people trying to relive experiences. The young people, that's what's always fascinating to Diane and I is that we'll be sitting in the audience listening to somebody and I'll look and see a young person wearing a really faded T-shirt that says, "Sixth annual festival." And I'm going, "That young kid's not old enough to have it." And I ask the kid, "Where did you get that?" He says, "It was my dad's shirt." And it's still a prized possession to the family and to that kid.

Diane: We’re coming into the third and fourth generations now. I remember – and I know both of us do – like the very first wedding, which was years ago. It was like, "Oh! There's a wedding!" That's like old hat now. There are several weddings every year. People even get buried down there.

Keri:  Wow.

Diane:  Yep, yep, yep. And babies, I don't know of any babies that have been born down there, but I'd be surprised if a baby hasn’t been born during the festival at the hospital. But our good friends that you met – Orin and Becky Friesen – Their daughter, Annie, was two or three days old and Becky was at the festival.

Wayne:  And Orrin's been a long-time emcee at the festival and had Annie up on stage with him when she was three days old. There are people that bring their babies that are really young because they are not going to miss the festival.

Diane:  I don't know how I would feel if we would ever have to miss a festival.

Keri:  Really?

Diane:  No, and we've got really, really close friends that don't live here that have had to miss. And you know, your heart just breaks for them because most people like us, I can't imagine missing a festival. I just, I can't. And we're so fortunate that we live here. I mean, at the festival, we always let people know when we're visiting over a lunch or something under the tent and somebody will say, "Where do you live?" And we'll say, "Right here." And we're fortunate to be able to do that.

Keri:  Because it is quite a tradition for the two of you.

Diane:  Yeah, for sure. The first few years, we did not camp. I think the first camping year was either '77 or '78 – for me. Wayne started camping the second year of the festival. I've got to clarify that. So, the first year was '72. And the second year, Wayne’s brother-in-law and his brother-in-law's brother set up a tent over in the Pecan Grove.

And his brother-in-law said, "Hey, Wayne, you want to camp?"

And Wayne said, "Yeah."

So Wayne asks me, "You want to camp down at the festival?" He said, "I've got that Army pop tent that I've had for years."

And I said, "Hmmm . . . does he have a bottom on it?"

And he said, "No, but I can lay down a piece of plastic."

And I said, "No thanks."

Wayne:  Yeah, I did that to, I camped two years over there. Just two, because that'd be '74 or something. And that was when I started playing my guitar at a campsite. And what I noticed was all the campsites there were playing John Prine songs and newer kinds of songs. I appreciated all of that and enjoyed playing it. But what I heard that, in the West Campground, there were old fiddle guys. And even a bones player over there. And the person told me, "And they all sit around and pick. In the jams:  That's where something's happening."

So, the next year, I decided we were going to the West Campground. And that's where I went. I remember the Saturday afternoon that I went down, and here were all of these older guys. Some of them, you know, were in their traditional white cowboy shirts and khaki pants and playing fiddles and guitars. And we just went around the circle playing fiddle tune after fiddle tune. And it got to be about lunchtime. And rather than stopping playing, the guy in the campers says, "Hey, I'm going to make tomato sandwiches. Does anybody want one?" 

And I started seeing these white bread mayonnaise and tomato sandwiches coming out. Not my cup of tea. I said, "You know, I'll have one." And the jam session never stopped.

So, after that, our core group used an old horse barn and it had hay on the ground. But, it kind of a leaned to the side. It had some older campers around it, too. And a place to jam. And I said, "You know that food thing:  That's going to be important."

Kenny and Joe says, "Yeah, let's eat together." Well, one lady in the group was from an Italian family. She was used to cooking. And it just kind of happened where one of our earliest traditions was that Joe would make meatballs all summer. And on Saturday night at the festival, we had a huge traditional spaghetti meal, Italian style. And she would serve almost 100 people. It got to be that big. And we all pitched in with other things. And nobody charged anything for the plate. It was just so much fun because people were eating and playing music and telling stories.

Diane:  And musicians always love a free meal. That was the ideal community for us. So, yeah, if we can be a part of helping that happen, yeah, we were all in on that.

Wayne:  Certainly, when the festival needed help to get more people coming, we would go by the festival office, pick up a stack of flyers and we would traditionally hand them out to everywhere. Everybody would stop in the gas station and put a stack up on the top counter.

Diane:  Early on, Winfield had that same reputation of “oh, that's where all those hippies go.” So, our group did a lot for changing the overall view. And we worked really hard on saying to people, “Why don't you just come sometime and see what it’s like?” I remember when it was the Kansas bluegrass association and the fiddlers and pickers – these two groups that were highly traditional – were not going to take part. They would not think of showing their face there. And then gradually, I think it seemed like one person would go and say, it's okay. It did take 25 years for the community to buy in.

Then the festival was successful, and there were some corporations that were interested in doing, you know, like all these stadiums now have corporate names on them. And there was a couple that was interested in owning the festival. I think they said, “yeah, we might do this.” Well, all of a sudden, the city started doing some simple math of, yeah, but if we lose this festival . . . All of a sudden, merchants and the city started becoming a lot more acutely aware of what would happen if this (the festival) went away. How many dollars in our pockets are we going to lose?

I think some of the business people spoke up first and said, “You better do something and you better do something quick.” And at this time, Wayne had become very involved and was co-directing with Bob and they had made numerous and numerous and numerous presentations to the city. We had a city manager – and he was a young guy – and he was just so opposed to it. I don't know why. Because he was a golfer. So, they did everything they could to ask for some improvements at the festival. Wayne put together a lot of numbers about how much the fairgrounds are used. And so finally, the city started taking note of, “Yeah, we're going to lose some revenue off of this and not a little bit, but a lot.”

Finally, they got on board and there was some paperwork done and I think some commitments made, but it literally took 25 years.

And I can always tell how long somebody's been around the festival or not been around it when they call it bluegrass, because those are the late-comers from here. But the bonus benefit to all this has been not just in small circles, but in large circles. If you mention the name, Winfield, Kansas, be ready for a response. We were just amongst musicians and we were in Tokyo, Japan, and its known there. We have people from Japan that stay with us every year that this that started 30 years ago, probably. And we've been to Tokyo. Wayne's sister and her husband live there. We were fortunate enough to get to go to a bar there where they play bluegrass music. Wayne played with them. But we were, we met some of our Japanese friends.

I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And you can say “Winfield,” I think, anywhere in the world, without fail, and somebody within 20 feet is going to go,

“Did you say Winfield?” So it really spreads. Oh, it's huge.

Keri:  You had said though that people at first thought it was kind of like a hippie Woodstock thing. Was it at all counterculture-ish?

Wayne:  No. We never saw that. I mean, the counterculture was, they kind of made fun of traditional bluegrass groups. Some of the acts that came here, I'm thinking of Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers. They became absolutely famous for making fun of these old-fashioned country honky-tonk bands. The “Old Hank songs” is what they called them.

Diane:  I never thought of it as them making fun of.

Wayne:  It was tongue-in-cheek.

Wayne:  I went to one of the largest music festivals in the country, and it still has been. It was after Woodstock, but they had the Atlanta Jazz Festival, or like 650,000 people there. I was like, eighteen, seventeen?

Diane:  No, you were eighteen. It was after you graduated.

Wayne:  Yeah, I was eighteen. So, I had always been interested in festivals just mainly because of the music and not the countercultures, although that was a part of it. And I had become involved in helping with the festival here. One of my good friends from here in town was the editor of the paper, Dave Seton. And Dave and I used to swim laps together, and we'd talk about various things. And he always wanted to know my point of view. One time we had a serious conversation about the fact that there's not any protest that goes on during the festival. And there weren't any – no anti-military or pro-military or any of that that took place.

It was the start of the Iraqi war, and that year, during the festival, I had that same thought. I was walking past one campsite and there were two guys sitting right by the bank of the river, and one guy was standing up over the top of a young guy who was sitting down, obviously listening to what he had to say. And the guy standing up was loudly speaking, and I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I kind of walked over there like, "Is this a problem or what's going on?" And I asked him, "What's going on here?"

"Oh," he says, "I'm an ex-Marine, and I'm telling this young guy who's getting ready to ship out what he's going to be in for."

And I went straight to Dave, and I said, "Dave, this is the kind of thing that happens here because this is our community. It really is a community."

Diane:  One last note on the community thing was another reason that townspeople got up in arms or had such a negative feeling was there were very few facilities down at the fairgrounds. We had some restrooms, but not the way you're seeing it now. There have been additions and barns and stuff. So, there was no place to shower, no place to bathe. None. And we had all kinds of weather. It was either cold or rain. We had mud years – I don't know how many mud years. I mean, it rained, and it was muddy, and people were dirty. I mean, there was no place for anyone to get clean.

Keri:  And so, then, if it was warm enough, did people swim in the river?

Diane:  Yes, they did. So, you can only imagine the stories and why it always involves women. You know stories like, “Oh, there are naked women, you know, there are naked women down swimming in the river. But who cares? You know, it was hotter than all get out and they might like to kind of sort of rinse off. But the only people that were bothered were the locals that went down to the river so that they could try to catch a glimpse. Then they would tell stories to locals that would just run rampant, you know:  “Oh, they're flocking to the river so that they can all get naked. And who knows what kind of orgies they're having?” But that's what we dealt with for 25 years.

Keri:  Right. It sounds like though in a way you were free spirits. It just wasn't a counterculture type of free spirits.

Diane:  No, it wasn't. And there was no theme or any type of protest-type activity at all. The only thing was, you know:  Who's going to win the flatpick contest? Who's going to win the fiddle contest? Have you seen this group? Have you picked with this guy? Hey, so and so is here.

There was the other thing I was going to add:  When Wayne and I very first started going, we sat at Stage One in the grandstand from morning until night. And the grandstand was always packed back in those days. Because, like Wayne said, starting out there were only two stages. So, we would get our spot. And plus, if you got there and got a good spot, you were on a bench with a back. So you had something to lean back on. We would stake out our spot and we did not leave. Then my brother started joining us, so the three of us were perched there. Only one of us would get up and go get something to eat and bring it back or go to the bathroom or go get something to drink and come back. But we were there from morning until night. And that's how Wayne has such a mind for remembering all of these different acts and who we saw. And, you know, I remember other things, but not that. But Wayne was just so enthralled with the guitar players and it was just amazing. And the festival did an amazing job of bringing in so many iconic musicians. You know, we were just so fortunate. And so, we perched ourselves there for several years – well, 72 through 77. That was our place.

Then we met this other group, the family that we were with from then on out. And so our lives kind of evolved. We weren't just perched in one spot because the nice thing about camping at the festival is, you can get away for a while. You can go over to your camp and put your feet up, sit and visit with other people. Or Wayne would do some pickin’ with other people. But I look back and think now those first years where we were just sitting there watching from morning to until night was just some of the best. Sitting there and listening.

Keri:  Yeah. Okay.

Wayne:  Well, you had to have listeners. laughs

Diane:  But you asked if I play. I've tried. People will ask, “Do you play an instrument?” And I say, “No, I'm the listener. I'm an avid listener.

Keri:  Now at the time, of course, you know, there was stuff going on nationally and worldwide. And, at Walnut Valley and at Winfield, it was all about the music. Did people at the festival show thoughts or opinions or feelings about what was going on at the time?

Wayne:  You know, I never remember it. I never remember it being a priority subject until maybe, I guess, 9/11. Well, even before, which one of the Seegers was there – Mike Seeger. Then we had the Mid-Law City Rappers. And then John McCutcheon. Of course, that's way later. And, you know, they have some political views, but they're not in your face. It's just in words and song. And we had the Little Roy Liz. Sunday mornings were gospel, and so they did the Sunday show. Yeah, but there, nothing in your face at all.

Diane:  But, you know, that music means a lot to them. I think particularly people who like folk music – they just, they have that affinity for caring for people and causes and things. But it doesn't have to be, you don't have to preach it.

Keri:  Right, right.

Diane:  In our camp, there is a wide variety of views. And we all know what everybody's views are. It's not discussed. I mean, but, that's your family.

Keri:  Yeah. I was going to say you're so close like you are family.

Diane:  Absolutely. I just know how Wayne and I have approached it and said, not talking about it. And it's not that important to disrupt things – not down there. That's not why we're down there.

Wayne:  Diane and I have often paid tribute to our friends Bob and Kendra and, as Diane mentioned earlier, our friend circle would not be near what it is if it weren't for the festival. I mean, the festival has directed us to so many important people, people who are really important in our lives. And we have other people who are important, people we grew up with and friends that I've known since kindergarten, they're important people. But these other folks are too. It’s like trying to explain what love is where you have a child and you love this child so much. You think, “How can I have more love for any one thing?” Then suddenly you have another child and guess what happened? Your love grew. Right in front of your eyes. And that's the same thing that happens at the friendships at the festival.

Now there are people that I've come to know over the years and I'll say, “Oh, I'm not going to pick with him right now” – particularly in the last few years because, because there may be something offensive said. And we've experienced it. But we don't draw attention to it. We just say, “Oh, okay, you know, we'll go to someone else.” There's not confrontation like that. Very, very little.

Diane:  When we camped down at the festival, so people stayed at our house. So, we’d just say, “okay, you stay here.” And then for whatever reason that kind of went by the wayside and we started staying at our house again. And somehow or another, we evolved into having musicians stay at our house.

Wayne:  It was because of who we knew.

Diane:  And so they would say, “Well, I'm going to bring so and so to stay at your house.” And they were all musicians.  We would all pile under our front porch and drink coffee. I didn't fix breakfast, but we always had coffee and we always had cinnamon rolls and stuff like that. And then they could shower. So, it just got funnier and funnier because somebody would say, “Well, is it okay if I bring so-and-so?” or “I'm bringing so and so.” The funniest year was when we threw pallets down on the floor. We had two rollaway beds, a double bed upstairs and a rollaway up there, too. I think we had six guys downstairs, and we don't have a large house. It's an old Victorian style, and Victorians have small rooms. And so, I moved the dining room table out of the way, made pallets on the floor. Somebody was on the sofa. Somebody was on a rollaway. I think the most we had one year was seven or eight. Everybody was as happy as they could be.

So, we made several really, really, really close friends just on the happenstance. This one guy's van had broken down and a friend of ours fixed it for him, and that's how we met them. This group was from Alabama. In 2018, we had a family member that was having some health problems and lived in Florida. We said, “Okay, we're going to do a ‘Friends and Family’ road trip.”

We started out here and we saw two of our really, really . . .  [crying] Let’s see if I can get through this . . . really close bluegrass fans. We stopped and saw Harry on the way down, and he died two months later. Then we saw Dick Langford on the way back, in Alabama. He died a year later. We saw Wayne's brother-in-law. He died a couple of years later. And we called it the ‘Friends and Family’ tour. But those were several of the people we saw that we met at the festival. We needed to see them before their lives were over. And we did:  We called it the ‘Friends and Family’ road trip. That's what we did.

Keri:  That's wonderful.

Diane:  We'll do it again in heartbeat. It's the best feeling in the world when you get to see somebody, when you know their lives are getting short. And it had been so long because we hadn't seen Harry in several years because he couldn't travel. Dick was the same way:  We hadn't seen Dick since 9/11. So anyway, that’s just – we aren't the only ones like this.

Keri:  Yeah.

Diane:  They're family. And this is throughout the Winfield community. This is what happens. This is just an example. You can talk to anybody and hear stories like this. Anybody.

Keri:  That's amazing. That's the hunch I got just from people that I talked to.

Diane:  But here's the bonus that Wayne and I have always talked about. We're the lucky ones because we live here. And so, we get to really be part of the whole thing. It's our town. Even at these other bluegrass festivals, everybody knows how unique Winfield is. We've been to a lot of other festivals with our friends and they are all unique in their own way. But Winfield – it's a utopia.

Keri:  That was another thing I was going to ask you about. I was actually going to say, what do you think makes it so utopian? Winfield.

Wayne:  I think it's the people.

Diane:  It is. It's the whole aura of the festival because, you know, the whole town for months beforehand gets ready for it now. And it's just a good thing.

Wayne:  I've never met somebody that goes to the festival that says, ‘Well, I'm never going back.’ And people who haven't been – some don’t understand how special it is. I just look them square in the eye and say, “If you come to the festival, it can change your life.” And people come to me afterwards and say, “You were right. I'm never not going.” It is such a phenomenon how much it does. I mean, I hear this stuff from people all over the place. It has some kind of a magic flavor.

Diane:  Yeah. It's difficult to explain. My sister is 87, and it was in the early 2000s, I think, that they came up three of years. And my sister – she's not a happy person. And she's just really uptight. I thought, oh, she doesn't like to get dirty. She doesn't like to be hot. She doesn't like to be sweaty. She doesn't like to be in this environment. She just loved it.

Keri:  I have heard stories that have to do with tradition at the festival. Are there any others at your specific Pickin’ Parlor Branch Office? Other traditions that you could touch up on?

Wayne:  Well, we've kind of let some of our traditions slide because of our age and the fact that we don't have the participants that we used to have. And the main one was we no longer have group meals. That was really important to all of us. Diane and all of the spouses would cook and cook, and we would serve the food. It was always fun. I mean, we never had a not-good time. But then the girls missed out on some of the shows or miss out on being able to go to the Pickin’ Parlor.

Diane:  Well, and COVID hit.

Wayne:  We decided that we're just going to start buying food at the festival. Those people come here to sell food, and we’re going to start supporting it that way. And that's what all of us at our camp have done. Now sometimes there'll be a little group or family that is going to have an individual birthday meal or something like that. But, that's one of our traditions that we've let slide that I think.

Diane:  We were all in agreement, though:  It was time for that tradition to go. We [still] have margarita Monday and so we have Mexican food and margaritas and that's still really fun. And we discussed doing another one but decided, “You know what? We could buy pizza and do that rather than cooking because everybody's families are so much larger now because the kids have had kids and the kids’ kids have had kids and everybody's doing so many things.

Keri:  Do you all have children?

Diane:  No, we don't. And so, there’s another couple that are the elders – elders of our group of the original bunch. The other ones both have passed on in the past few years, and then the next step down is Wayne and I.

Keri:  So yeah, you're the top – the older generation.

Diane:  Almost. Not quite, but yes, we are. Which is a little bit hard to get my head around. I kind of liked being the baby.

Keri:  You mentioned Mike Seeger. Are you talking about Pete Seeger?

Wayne:  Yep. His brother – Pete Seeger's brother, Mike.

Keri:  Okay. And what was your experience with him?

Wayne:  His band played here as a trio. Seeger, Cohen and . . . I'll think of it in a minute, or maybe not. Anyway, they played old-timey music, you know, like what Pete played. Well, not the protest stuff that he did.

It was like, this is the so-and-so tune, you know, and they played on the banjo and stuff like that. But the main thing I think they did for me was they directed what certainly became the initialization of picking etiquette. When you're in a group of people, maybe you don't know all of them, but you're playing the same tune that they are. There is an etiquette base that you have to do. You can't overplay. You can't underplay. You know, there are things that you do. Those guys taught us all that from their stage show. And I thought that was really important for them. They came a couple of years, I think, is all.

Keri:  And did he go on then, other places?

Diane:  He wasn't nearly as famous as Pete, but he had a strong following.

Wayne:  Oh, yeah, they had a strong following. Mostly up in the northeast Vermont-New York area. Happy Traum – I don't know you've ever heard of him. He was a contemporary of Bob Dylan and actually one of the ones that taught Bob Dylan to play as good as he was as a guitar player. He just passed away the last year or so. But that whole community up there where Rolly [Brown] lives – and one of our dear friends that comes every year – you talk about protest.

Diane:  Yeah.

Wayne:  Rolly [Brown] was at Kent State. He was at college – as a musician and in college there. And he was there on the grounds when it happened. He doesn't mention it often, but when something like that comes up, he still springs forward to the fact that, you know, they attacked our students. And that wasn't right. It affected his life, I would say.

Keri:  Oh, yeah.

Diane:  Going back to this one last time, you know, our big tent that we have. So, the first one we had was a red and white one. And it was a second-hand tent that we used for a long time. The tent always was raised with a group effort and everything, and a lot of the tents started wearing out. Well, our good friend, Harry Coleman, the one that we had seen on our ‘Friends and Family’ tour, had suggested to me, he said, "Let's talk about the tent. We've got to get a new tent. Let's do a fundraiser like they do on PBS, and we can do different categories."

And so, we did. We had tent-themed categories. So, like if you had a $20 donation, it could be a “rope” – It's the “rope level.” Or you could do a $50 donation. It was called a “post” level, and this and that. And we raised about $2,500 bucks. Maybe 30 people. I mean, we didn't have any trouble. And a lot of these guys were pickers.

And we had people like Rolly that he just wandered into our camp because there were other good pickers at our campsite. Rolly was a finger-style champion one year. And he would hang out in our camp because there were other pickers and people. And then he brought pickers in that he knew. We always had food, and Rolly wasn't going to turn down a free meal. And he was welcome there. And Rolly said, “Good. Now I know where I can always come to get a meal because this is my tent too.” And I said, “That's exactly right.” And so, we had this big group and everybody took so much pride because it wasn't somebody's tent:  It was our tent.

Keri:  And that's your family coming together right there in your home.

Diane:  That's exactly right.

Keri:  Wow.

Diane:  Yep. Pretty cool.

Keri:  That is really, really, really cool.

Wayne:  And that Winfield family was just one of them there. That's probably one of the biggest utopian homes. And you know, Diane mentioned it, but I truly believe it's true:  You can talk to any of the campers that come every year. You're going to get the same thing. They do it the same way. The food is important around their camp. The picking is important. At every single camp, those people do that. They've got their own traditions going on. Their own traditions, their own style. Some of the guys that I play music with here in town put up a camp in Pecan Grove and they've always called it the Monkey Camp. The band name that we play under is Driven by Monkeys, which is really kind of a wild thing, but there's no set list or anything. And, you know, their community is their community. And it interacts with ours. They'll come over for Margarita Monday.

And then there's a spinoff camp because one of the originals – their kids had kids and they kind of ended up being on the peripheral of Monkey Camp. And so, they said, “Well, we're the Back Porch camp.” So, they set up their own site, you know, and they're right there next to Monkey Camp. But they said, “Well, we need our own name.” So, they just did a spinoff and said, “We're the Back Porch camp.”

Keri:  Wonderful.

Wayne:  Yeah.

Diane:  And then – now, there are stages everywhere. We don't consider ourselves a stage, but this one camp started calling themselves “Stage Six,” and that was a very informal camp. And, well, stage five over the Pecan Grove – that was first. And now there's stage 11. Wayne's cousin is in “Toe Hippie Toe” camp.

Wayne:  Yep. Hippie Toe camp. Like the toe on your foot. Some other friends are Avalon. I mean, we could go on and on. Carp camp is a wonder. It's phenomenal. It's like listening to an orchestra of hammer dulcimer. You can play anything, but somebody has the honor of being in the center. It's called the spotlight.

Diane:  And they all wear those kinds of jester-like, hats, you know, with the little bells.

Keri:  Oh yeah.

Diane:  And so, whoever's in the center gets a ceremonial one and they sit there and pick, but they are the center for the evening. They're on a little bit of a pedestal and I don't know how they choose those people, but . . . Well, if it's their birthday or they’ll put you up.

People will ask, “Are you ever afraid for your safety?” No, never. They’ll ask, “Are you ever afraid to be out walking by yourself in the middle of the night in the dark?” No, never. “Have I ever heard of any thefts?” I haven't. I mean, the main thing is if somebody sets an instrument behind their car and backs up and forgets it’s there. That's about the worst thing that's ever happened to an instrument that I know of.

Keri:  When you talk about that, the festival comes across as very much a “peace and love” feeling.

Diane:  Everybody is, but it's more real. It's not necessarily tied to the hippie generation because the people you get come from one end of the [political] spectrum to the other, and everything in between.

Keri:  Yeah.

Wayne:  That's the coolest part. You could be on any class system or political group or anything. You know, I've seen people with a near bum income playing a really nice guitar sitting next to a doctor or a lawyer and they're sitting there just exchanging tunes and asking each other, “How do you do that? What do you do there?”

I remember over at the Mando camp, we were talking about, I can't remember his name right now, the guy from Tulsa. I’ll call him Tom. He's an attorney that is like filthy rich and it's like – I mean – nobody cares. Really. Nobody cares.

Keri:  What does that tell you then about the power of music?

Wayne:  Yeah. Exactly. You know, I heard Stuart Mossman say it years ago when he was alive and we'd be talking politics and he'd say, “Instead of sending them weapons, I wish we'd just send them the Bluegrass Festival. Just send them a bunch of our guys and show them how to just sit there and pick and have a good time and eat the same food.” He said, “You know, we've got a Methodist sitting right here next to a Baptist. We’ve got Catholics and Jews, and ain't nobody arguing about nothing.” That is exactly right.

Keri:  That's amazing. The words that he said there, that’s powerful. That's so true though.

Wayne:  Yeah.

Keri:  Well, I've got a few questions specifically for you, Diane. Were there very many female performers that you remember early, early on?

Diane:  Boy. Well, Claire Lynch was the front porch string man. Who else? I've got to think about it. There was a band that we were heavily involved with called South Wind that had two strong females. I'm trying to go back and remember, you know. Aileen and Elkin.

Wayne:  There you go. Aileen and Elkin.

Diane:  Did Robin and Lynn ever come here?

Wayne:  No. No, they never played the festival.

Diane:  I'm trying to think, oh, Alison Kraus. Alison Kraus was here at the festival. It was more male dominant back then, not now.

Keri:  Then what other roles did women play? I talked with another person over from Wakiwi-Inn campsite:  Martha Hale was the person. She tried to play with Jam sessions early, early, like in '73, I think. She was talking about it and said that there were some implied roles that women were expected to take on.

Diane:  Could have been back then. There just weren't as many pickers. In our camp, that definitely was not the case.

Keri:  Oh really?

Diane:  Oh no.

Wayne:  Oh, the men cooked as much as the women did. The men did cook. Kenny did.

Diane:  Not as much as the women did.

Wayne:  Maybe not as much. Well no.

Diane:  But as far as pickers, because Kenny’s daughter, “T” – she was 11 when we met them. Her name's Theresa and we called her “T.” She could play anything, any instrument. And so she would pick in our camp and there were female pickers in our camp. Patsy Campbells. I mean, so that was not an issue ever in our camp but I could see and understand that it likely could be in some other more traditional places. Like if it was a traditional bluegrass festival, there could be that whole male/female thing that's been around for years and always will be.

Keri:  But at your site even early on it wasn't really a thing.

Diane:  Never was. Ever. Yeah.

Keri:  All right. Well, is there anything else? I mean, I know there are a million stories probably that could come up but for right now is there anything else that you think is really pressing that you want to make sure I get archived?

Wayne:  I just think that, if Walnut Valley organizers were never to have another one – and I think that if the official festival stopped – it would not stop people from coming out the third weekend in September and the organization of music would still happen. That's how important this thing has become.

Diane:  But probably the main thing what Wayne said is the city knows – our city knows – that if the festival ever disbands for whatever reason, the third weekend in September, there are going to be several thousand people no matter what. It's a guarantee that will show up.

Wayne:  I mean we already have it. It'll become a pilgrimage.

Keri:  It will?

Diane:  Oh, there's no doubt. Oh yeah. And there is an event called “Halfway to Winfield.” So, the celebration is when we're actually halfway through the year until we get to come back to Winfield. So, we ask, “What are we going to do?”  We're going to come to the fairgrounds and we're going to camp and we're going to pick. We're going to eat. They have it – It's usually St. Patrick's weekend, so they do corn beef and cabbage. It's all spontaneous just done by the people that come here. And that was started by people at Rat Camp years ago and, oh my God, it doesn't matter what kind of weather it is. More often the weather is bad than it is nice. But it doesn't matter. I mean it's “Halfway to Winfield,” right?

Keri:  Wow. Everything about the festival is so grassroots.

Diane:  It is.

Keri:  You know the stuff that started up this “Halfway to Winfield.” It was like just kind of happened, which kind of goes along with the whole mentality of that you go and you jam.

Wayne:  Right. And you're jamming in and of itself. She mentioned we've been to lots of other festivals all over the place and there's not near the jamming that takes place at the other festivals like it does at Winfield. And people bring their instruments down there too and that's what they want to do. Some people never go up to the stage. They may go up to get a bite to eat but they may not even go listen to a stage show because they are there to jam out in the campgrounds. There are some festivals that you can’t go into the campgrounds unless you have paid a separate fee to camp and be in the and so they control the entrance and exits. Oh, there's so many rules and so you know that going in. But Winfield is unique in so many ways. And I'm just so glad that this is my hometown.

Keri:  Wonderful.