Through two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 19 interviews, I synthesize symbolic interaction and a sociological framework of culture to examine the ways in which the Walnut Valley Festival is created and experienced as a unique form of cultural performance, one that is always shifting in response to the emergent cultural creation and reception of attendees. No work to date combines the dimensions of both production and reception of music festivals as a unique form of cultural performance. In bringing back the oftentimes ignored affective dimension in cultural studies, I use Griswold‘s (2004) metaphor of a cultural diamond, examining the definition of the situation and the creation and reception of the Walnut Valley Festival as an always evolving cultural object. In this case, the cultural object of importance is the festival as an emotional cultural performance.

With little exception, most cultural studies focus upon the cognitive aspects of festival that render it meaningful. This work reveals how, through the emotionality of music and narratives, strong feelings of affective nostalgia are produced which render the festival deeply meaningful to participants. Intense feelings are produced during performances that involve the ritualized playing of music where attendees experience heightened emotionality, oftentimes difficult to articulate. Through the ritualized performance of music (arguably the most important aspect of the festival to many attendees) and the resultant feelings of affective nostalgia, individuals evoke the past, reflect on the present, create and receive idioculture, and increase the cultural efficacy of the festival as a meaningful, emotional, and remembered event that is continuously created and recreated throughout the years.

First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Lori Holyfield for her enthusiasm, unyielding support, and priceless guidance in this endeavor. I can say in all honesty that without Dr. H, I would not be who I am today as a sociologist or a person. I have often said that Dr. Holyfield has single-handedly changed my life, both its direction and purpose, and I am overwhelmingly and eternally grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such a brilliant sociologist and a cherished friend. I have no doubt that none of this would have been possible without her.

I would also like to thank both my mom and dad for instilling within me the importance of a quality education. Their open arms, with all the support and encouragement they offer, have always been a reliable port in every storm. Without the support of my mother, I would have surely lost my mind. I will forever be thankful for the effort she put into helping me with this project; she listened for countless hours over the phone as I went on about the frustrations of graduate school, she attended the festival with me my virgin year, and she‘s always been there to wipe the tears and share the smiles. I also owe thanks to my father who taught me, You can‘t hit a homerun unless you come to bat, and without his undying support and words of motivation, I‘m not sure I would have ever come to bat. Thanks goes to my dad for long lunches and sunny baseball games where I was reminded that sometimes there is more to life than work, and I would always return from our ventures rejuvenated, excited, and ready to take on the world. I can only hope that completing this project and obtaining my master‘s is the equivalent of a homerun, and that finally, at long last, I have made them both proud.

I am also forever grateful for one of my best friends and colleagues, Ashleigh McKinzie, who‘s enduring friendship and infinite support made graduate school all the more bearable. I would like to thank Ashleigh for sharing the experience with me, putting up with all my constant ups and downs, and being the equivalent of the sister I never had. I simply can‘t thank her enough for her friendship; I truly don‘t know what I would have done without her and her familiar smile. I would also like to thank Alicia and Jeff Sauls, Allison Logan, Amanda Young, and Evan Brown for their many years of loving friendship and endless words of encouragement; without them there to catch me, I would have most surely fallen.

A great deal of thanks goes to Dr. Zajicek and Dr. Worden for serving on my committee and taking the time to offer priceless advice during many helpful conversations. Both Dr. Zajicek and Dr. Worden have been with me since my first undergraduate semester in sociology and have greatly contributed to my growth as a writer and a sociologist ever since. Their suggestions and encouragement have provided me with an opportunity to flourish, and both of them can be credited for kindling my intense love for learning as well as my passion for sociology. I also owe thanks to my wonderful cohort, especially Kimberly Murray, whose council and friendship has been invaluable throughout my experience in graduate school.

I would also like to thank the members of Comfortable Shoes Camp at the Walnut Valley Festival for offering their home to me while I was in the field, a nervous wreck of an ethnographer. Shoes Camp reminded me of what it was like to feel connected to a community; to feel welcomed, nurtured, and loved. I thank them all for their time spent telling stories, participating in interviews, showing me pictures, teaching me to play the guitar, and becoming my dear friends. This project was completed in large part to the hospitality of Shoes Camp and their allowing me to become part of their beautiful family. I am forever grateful.

Lastly, but certainly not least, I‘d like to thank my partner Zac who took care of me one hundred percent both years we attended the festival, as well as the two years I spent in graduate school. I am indebted to his love and friendship, as he has inspired me and helped me to pursue my dreams, no matter how difficult they may seem to be.

Problem Statement and Study Purpose                                             3

Study Significance                                                                           3

Conceptual Framework                                                                    6

The Cultural Diamond                                                                      7

Cultural Diamond: Social Context                                                      8

Cultural Diamond: Creator                                                                9

Cultural Diamond: The Cultural Object                                              9

Cultural Diamond: Reception/Audience                                             12

Symbolic Interaction                                                                        15

Empirical Review                                                                            17

Background for the Study                                                                 24

Gaining Entry to the Walnut Valley Festival                                       25

Grounded Theory                                                                            25

Sample and Data Collection                                                              26

Analysis of Data                                                                              30

Land Rush or Welcome to Stupidville!                                               33

Pickers‘ Paradise: It Takes a Village!                                                44

The Pecan Grove: What Happens in the Grove Stays in the Grove      48

Band Camp for Grown-Ups                                                             52

Stage Five: The Peoples‘ Stage                                                         57

It‘s Like a Family Reunion                                                               63

Comfortable Shoes Camp                                                                 66

The Musicians‘ Festival                                                                    70

Story Time                                                                                      74

Affective Nostalgia                                                                           77

Walnut Grove versus Pecan Grove: A Tale of Two Cities                   82

Night Life and Porta-Pottie Jams                                                       85

The (Official) Walnut Valley Festival                                                 87

Leaving Home and Back to Real Life                                                 89

Summary of Findings                                                                        91

Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research                                 98

Map of Festival Grounds                                                                  106

Open Ended Interview Guide                                                            107

List of Applied Codes                                                                       110

Example of Coding and Memo Writing                                               115

With few exceptions, there is little research that examines music festivals as a specific cultural performance (Turner 1969) and a site for shared definitions and/or situated identities (Hewitt 1989). Most studies of music festivals focus upon the attendees themselves. For example, Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter (1992) provide an ethnographic study of a folk festival focusing on the perspectives of the participants themselves, while Eder, Staggenborg, and Sudderth (1995) follow a similar pattern in discussing identity, reasons for attendance, and conflict amongst participants at the National Women‘s Festival. Other works examine the function of festivals, such as Snell (2005) who illustrates how festivals can provide a transmission of learning, but does not focus upon the actual cultural performance. Finally, Solli (2006) investigates differences in social class and rootedness found among Norwegian country music festivals. Thus, no work to date combines the dimensions of both production and reception of music festivals as a unique form of cultural performance.

While there is much written on the history and revival of both bluegrass music (Adler 1982; Artis 1975; Cantwell 1984; Carney 1980; Smith 1984) and folk music (Feintuch 1993; Nusbaum 1993; Rosenberg 1993), research concerning cultural performance within festival enclaves is lacking, as is research surrounding the creation and maintenance of shared understandings, or the definition of the situation, within these festival enclaves. Moreover, most studies give little attention to the role of music in creating shared definitions of the situation among musicians.

However, two relevant studies to my topic are found with Kotarba, Fackler, and Nowotny (2009) who borrow Fine‘s (1979) concept of idioculture, focusing upon both place and music scenes, and Gardner‘s (2004) examination of portable communities, focusing upon how they are created, used, and understood by festival attendees at bluegrass festivals similar to that of the Walnut Valley Festival. Other researchers have examined the production of music within bluegrass communities focusing on the actual performance and reception of bluegrass music (Tunnel and Groce 1998).

The Walnut Valley Festival can be viewed as a cultural performance with accompanying rituals, props, and rites of passage, where shared definitions of the festival are created and passed down through narratives and music that create affective ties among attendees. In this research, I draw from symbolic interaction and employ a sociology of culture framework to reveal how the festival is always being created and recreated through emergent social interaction. Describing the festival as a cultural performance, I reveal that cultural production is neither solely created for or by those who attend cultural performances. Rather, cultural performance is where both meet and are understood.

For some, culture is external and we either acquire or learn culture that is somehow out there. This can be thought of as cultural determinism and the sociology of culture includes studies that make this assumption. However, empirically speaking, culture and social structure are mirror images of one another. In other words, we can identify structural arrangements such as rules and established patterns of social life and we can study the expressions of these arrangements and the ways in which individuals and groups participate and/or change these, revealing that culture often forms a seamless part of our worlds (Hall, Neitz, and Battani 2003:10). More importantly, while few sociologists would deny that structural forces influence culture, symbolic interaction informs us that culture is experienced. As Hewitt (1990:70) suggests, culture invites and impedes action but it does not dictate.

and reception, there are those who tend to fall between the two poles of determinism vs.

agency (Griswold 1994; Schudson 1989). In this case, the study of culture is also a study

of cultural objects and their linkage to various social worlds. For the purposes of this

study, I examine the Walnut Valley Festival, emphasizing how cultural performance is

created and experienced at the festival in a context of leisure, how the festival itself

constitutes a cultural object in linking production and reception, and how festival culture

is understood through a dynamic process of creation and maintenance of shared

definitions of the situation (Fine 1979; Turner 1969). I begin with an organizing

framework provided by Griswold‘s (1994) description of the cultural diamond.

Griswold (1994: xiv) employs the metaphor of a cultural diamond by which to

Valley Festival encompasses all facets of the diamond. Griswold‘s work is informative

because it highlight‘s the linkages between the four cultural dimensions that work

together to ensure a holistic approach that is balanced between structure and agency.

culture, one must understand the different linkages between the four dimensions. In order

to isolate and analyze a cultural object, in this case the Walnut Valley Festival, it is necessary to identify and analyze the different characteristics of the object, and how it is similar to other cultural objects within a culture, yet entirely different from others.

In other words, in order to understand the Walnut Valley Festival as a cultural object, it‘s

important to grasp first, the social context in which the object is situated.

time characterized by differing degrees of self-expression and role constraint within a

social context. Samdahl (1988) provides a theoretical definition of leisure that attempts

to lessen the gap between what constitutes leisure and what is simply empty or anomic

free time. Drawing from symbolic interaction, Samdahl (1988:29) argues that

self-objectification, leisure should offer an increased opportunity for true self

expression (p.30). For example, the festival can be differentiated from work and routine

life where roles are regulated and self-expression is constrained by a variety of workplace

norms and bureaucratic structures.

postulates the importance of having a place in which to escape the stress of a rapidly

modernizing society. Gardner argues that the rural location of bluegrass and folk festivals

provides a symbolic break from daily life where participants are freed from daily

responsibilities and are given the opportunity to freely play, fantasize, and express

themselves. According to Gardner (2004:iii),

discourse around themes oppositional to urbanization (e.g., place, community, cultural

memories, and inclusive community). Both Samdahl (1988) and Gardner (2004) present

leisure as somewhat compensatory to work life and modernity. The Walnut Valley

Festival is similar in that it provides a place for attendees, constituting the first

dimension of the cultural diamond, but as this study reveals, it is far more than a

symbolic break from urbanization and work.

performance/object, such as who formed it and why. According to the first Walnut Valley

Festival program, the initial Walnut Valley Festival was held in 1967 when an ambitious

group of self-proclaimed bluegrass nuts attending Southwestern University in Kansas

begged the college for 3,200 dollars to begin the creation of the festival. The festival

planning committee was by no means a group of expert folklorists but rather a group of

highly interested students who wanted to know more about the rich and oftentimes

neglected culture in which we live (Walnut Valley Festival program). While Griswold

focuses upon the origins of a cultural object, this study will reveal that creators are not

just the originators but the participants as well.

object to effect the future actions of participants. According to Schudson (1989:171),

attendees are directed by the program as to what constitutes folk and bluegrass music,

appropriate camp behaviors, what to purchase, and how to conduct themselves.

Contestants are guided in precisely what to perform, how long, and the order of the

contests. Some camps send out songs for fellow campers to learn for the upcoming year,

directing musicians in what to attend to for the next festival. This dimension is also

evident in the utilization of the Walnut Valley Festival website, reading the Walnut

Valley Festival newsletter, and purchasing Walnut Valley Festival products and

merchandise.

Festival combined with description of the festival as a cultural object provide a model for

illustrating the festival. But these components alone would fall short of the goal of

understanding a cultural performance without the last dimension of the cultural diamond

metaphor; that of reception.

receive it (e.g., the reader of a book, the consumer of a product, the viewer of a painting),

reception and audience at the Walnut Valley Festival is far more interactive, resulting in

both continuous reception and co-creation. In order to understand the reception of the

Walnut Valley Festival culture, I draw from both Turner‘s (1969) definition of festival and Fine‘s (1979) definition of idioculture. For Turner (1969), ritual is a crucial live component, or moment of experience, one that offers liminality, described as a temporary break in the rules and structures of routine life. Turner (1969) argues that there are five moments of experience that set festival apart from normal, routine life. These include: 1) a perceptual core of more intense emotions than what would be in routine life; 2) clear evocation of past experiences; 3) revival of feelings associated with past events of symbolic or emotional importance; and 4) generation of meaning by linking the past and present. Finally, the experience is completed when 5) expressed and communicated in such a way that the audience can develop an understanding of the performance. This compliments a symbolic interactionist view that festival is not only shaped through the use of ritual, but received and understood by participants. Turner‘s

work also provides insight into the affective dimension of festival, one that is often overlooked by many sociologists who study culture. In defining cultural performance through heightened emotional experience, Turner (1969), like Durkheim, illuminates an important affective component surrounding cultural reception at the festival, one that emphasizes the importance of emotionality in terms of the creation and maintenance of strong social bonds.

The moments of experience that Turner refers to also depend upon the smaller groups that participate in the cultural performance of festivals. While not speaking to festival culture in particular, Fine (1979) coined the term idioculture to describe a system of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and customs shared by members of an interacting group to which members can refer and employ as the basis of further interaction (p. 734). Fine (1979) describes five filtering elements that may be employed within any group to explain the

Hewitt (1989) asserts that a symbolic interactionist‘s view of culture is one that emphasizes the importance of meaning and the interpretation of meaning as a key component of human activity. Similar to Fine (1979) Hewitt views culture as an environment of social objects, or human constructs, which reflect and shape individuals during their interaction with those social objects as well as other individuals in their cultural environment. Hewitt (1989) argues that culture provides a sense of likeness that is the foundation for identification with others. In other words, culture provides an environment in which individuals can identify with others through shared systems of meaning. Not only do individuals identify with others in a culture through the interpretation of meaning, but also use culture as a mirror in which to construct perceptions of identity and community.

Hewitt‘s (1989) conception of culture largely reflects the main assumptions within the theory of social interaction. The focus of symbolic interaction is distinctly grounded in the examination of individuals as agents of action, as well as the meaning of symbols that are produced through social interaction. According to Blumer (1969), there are three dominant assumptions within symbolic interaction. To begin, we act on the basis of the meaning that things have for us; these meanings arise out of social interaction. We then internalize and modify these meanings through interpretation, or in other words, we think through the meaning of things. We then can use, understand, and rely on meaningful symbols, and in the process, become human through social interaction. Lastly, because humans are conscious and reflexive, we are able to shape our actions and interactions in ways that enable us to make decisions about how to interact with ourselves and others.

According to Hewitt (2007:73), a shared definition of the situation is an organization of perceptions in which people assemble objects, meanings, and others, and act toward them in a coherent, organized way. The attendees of the Walnut Valley Festival create and share a definition of the situation that lends insight into the conduct that is to be expected at the festival, who might be present at the festival, how the festival is located in relation to other social situations, what can be expected to happen at Winfield, and the goals to be pursued by other members attending the festival. Without a shared definition of the situation, we are unable to anticipate the actions and reactions of others, and are thereby confused about how to conduct our behavior. Hewitt (2007) asserts that the reality of the definition of a situation is collective rather than personal;

individuals construct a hypothesis about what is to be expected in the situation through observing the actions of others, and this hypothesis is confirmed when individual actions fit with those actions observed. Once this process is established, the definition of the situation becomes real and meaningful to participants. But how does this definition of the situation get constructed by attendees?

Hewitt (1989:156) understands situated identity as a set of linked perspectives that form a shared definition of the situation, in which there is widespread agreement on appropriate responses to the situation. A definition of the situation provides attendees at the Walnut Valley Festival a social object, the festival, in which to orient their action while the roles of other participants provide the perspectives necessary to order action in a way that is intelligible to other attendees. Hewitt (2007) uses the metaphor of a map that says You are here with an arrow pointing exactly where one is standing in an effort to describe how the definition of a situation is used as a platform in which to view ourselves and others, where we act and react on the basis of shared meaning.

suggests that individuals participate in leisure settings as a way to position themselves in their past and present lives (p. 51) through strong feelings of nostalgia produced through the singing of traditional Yiddish songs. Gvion (2009) posits that through organized leisure, it is possible for various groups to propagate folklorised versions of their culture and practice their liberty by opening up new spaces for the articulation of particular pasts with the dominant culture (p. 52). Because leisure activities generate strong feelings of community, promote both collective and personal identity, allow individuals to appropriate personal meanings to cultural phenomena, and also allow for the creation and recreation of cultural knowledge (p. 53), leisure settings provide groups with a social world in which individuals share and recall a situated past, one that offers an opportunity to assign meaning to their present circumstances as well as their culture. Gvion (2009) suggests that it is through nostalgia that individuals construct and interpret their own versions of the world (p. 63), where feelings of community belonging, collective identity, and personal identity are experienced and reified through the summoning of collective memory. Just as Turner (1969) reminds us, the emotionality of cultural performance is evoked through the synthesis of the past and the present, and Gvion (2009) provides a foundation in which to understand how, through nostalgia, the connection of the past and present can be used to construct and experience unique versions of the world.

Similar to Gvion‘s (2009) work that examines the formation of collective identity through organized leisure settings, in their ethnography of the National Women‘s Music Festival, Eder, Staggenborg, and Sudderth (1995) explore the possibility of creating a community founded on collective identity and shared values through the leisure setting of a women‘s festival. The aim of this particular festival is to create an ideal temporary community that is safe for lesbians who may not experience a shared definition of the situation in their everyday lives. The authors combine interviews with the analysis of programs from festivals past and find that for the majority of women who attend, the festival provides a release from everyday life, wherein their sexual orientations are still challenged and seen as controversial. The authors find that festival attendees also attempt to create a community that they would like to see exist within the larger society. The personal becomes political for attendees, wherein alienation and isolation within society at large can be temporarily suspended. Although the ideal is shared among attendees, the result, for some, is further alienation. The authors discuss the implicit efficacy of the festival and provide suggestions for ways to enhance its inclusivity for all women who attend.

Kotarba, Fackler, and Nowotny (2009) discuss various Latino music scenes and their relationship with the production, experience, and performance of Latino music within Houston, Texas. Their ethnographic study examines the emerging scenes of rock en Espanol, gay Latino dance music, and professional soccer supporters‘ music as a site for cultural production through Latino music scenes. They utilize the concepts of scene, idioculture, and place to describe the various ways in which members of these Latino music scenes make sense of themselves and their everyday experiences, finding that for participants, the music scene provides meaning through shared language and identity. Their findings indicate that music scenes result in the creation of idioculture, or the production of culture on a micro level, providing solidarity and a sense of rootedness against a backdrop of political change taking place within their communities. Similar to the above works, Latino music scenes provide participants with a perceived sense of authenticity and temporary sense of place.

Snell‘s (2005) examination of music festivals differs from the above works in that Snell explores the role that outdoor popular music festivals play in musical teaching and learning within the community. Snell (2005) concludes that the unique, informal, outdoor setting of music festivals provides an immersion for attendees through extended stay at the festival (a few days to a few weeks), camping, and the backdrop of a natural environment. Participants describe the festival as a unique, unstructured, and valuable personal and musical experience. In Snell‘s (2005) examination of the Other Minds music festival located in Ontario, participants are provided with an ideal location for learning music within a community context. In addition, Snell (2005) concludes that these outdoor festivals promote the works of local artists, performers, and musicians through exposure to a variety of different musical genres. While this work does not include a symbolic interactionist framework it can easily be applied to symbolic interaction where shared definitions of the situation create a learning environment for participants against a backdrop of unstructured musical experiences. Amateur musicians are provided a context in which they can affirm their identities. Similarly, the Walnut Valley Festival includes an informal teaching and learning environment where attendees take active interest in teaching new members of the festival how to play instruments. The learning of an instrument at the Walnut Valley Festival could be considered a rite of passage in which new members are initiated into the community. Moreover, the festival provides seasoned musicians with an opportunity to hone their skills with other talented musicians at the festival, something that may be in short supply in their real lives.

Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter (1992) depict the Festival of American Folklife as a means of modern cultural production, where cultural values and products are displayed to the general public. Unlike other folklorists who primarily focus on the larger political aspects of the festival, Bauman et al. (1992) narrow their attention to understanding and interpreting the perspectives of the festival participants themselves, finding that participants are consistently active in the festival culture. In other words, participants are constantly revising their performances, interpreting their participation within the festival frame, and adapting to definitions and demands associated with the festival that are inconsistent with their personal identity. Second, in taking their participation seriously, participants‘ egos and reputations are constantly at stake. Attendees consistently evaluate themselves based on comments from other participants, their own personal obligations, perceived goals and attitudes, and the reactions of the audience. This study provides evidence of the importance of a shared definition of the situation as well as the issues that arise as situated identities are created. It also serves as a reminder that cultural performances are dynamic; participants at this festival understand that their reputations are at stake based on their performance, and use role taking as a mechanism for determining appropriate lines of conduct.

my interests as well as to further my understanding of cultural creation and reception

within a unique and vibrant social world. In addition, I have attended numerous music

festivals and find that they contain many of the elements described in the discussion

presented in the previous chapters. In this way, ethnography highlights the importance of

starting where you are. According to Lofland et al. (2006), fieldwork builds upon

researchers‘ personal connections to the world(s) around them, seeing those connections

as avenues for potential research (p. 9). They add:

effort to better my understanding of these various interests in connection with the Walnut

Valley Festival. I am also reminded of a powerful quote from Harriet Martineau

concerning the importance of sympathy when conducting research. She writes, A

sociologist that lacks sympathy is like one who, without hearing the music, sees a

roomful of people begin to dance (quoted in Lengermann & Niebrugge 1998:34). My

hope has been to generate an understanding of the music people dance to in the cultural performance of festival.

Gaining entry into the research setting proved relatively simple. Like all participants at the festival, getting into the festival was as easy as buying a ticket and packing up the car. As a musician myself, developing an interest in the world of folk and bluegrass music was as simple as casually attending my first picking party where musicians gathered at a friend‘s home to play music and enjoy each other‘s company outside of the festival. After attending my first picking party, I was introduced to other musicians who regularly attend the festival.

Shortly after my introduction into picking parties, I was invited to attend the Walnut Valley Festival, which I did in September of 2009 as a wide-eyed virgin (a term used by campers to identify those who are first time attendees). I was invited to camp within the Comfortable Shoes Camp a ready-made community in which to set up my Winfield home. I began learning to play the guitar and developed a relationship with other members of Comfortable Shoes, and by the time the festival concluded, I was left with a sense of intentional community, as well as a fascination with the festival, and how it worked. When I returned in September of 2010, my virgin status had dissolved and I became a known observer to the camp enclaves.

I utilized a grounded theory approach to my data analysis of the Walnut Valley Festival. Although I had a great deal of theoretical backing to guide me in my ethnography of the festival, I employed initial and focused coding to allow the data to

breathe, so to speak. The importance of grounded theory lies in the ability to let the interviewees and observations retain fluid movement in spite of a theoretical framework. My aim was to allow the cultural world of the Walnut Valley Festival, along with its participants, to guide my understanding and writing of this research. I borrow from Charmaz (2006:23) to elaborate upon the utility of an emergent theoretical framework:

Festival develop a shared definition of the situation, as well as to investigate observable

cultural components created and made available to participants at the festival, a

qualitative project is the most appropriate methodology. This reasoning follows

Charmaz‘s (2006:15) assertion: let your research problem shape the methods you

choose…Choose methods that help you answer your questions with ingenuity and

incisiveness. In order to develop an understanding of the Walnut Valley Festival as a

cultural object in which participants create and share meaningful experience, I chose to

immerse myself in the social world of the Walnut Valley Festival. As Emerson, Fretz,

and Shaw (1995:2) argue, immersion gives the field worker access to the fluidity of

others‘ lives and enhances his [her] sensitivity to interaction and process.

observation, and transcribed fieldnotes of the festival. I used a purposive, criterion

sample (Babbie 2010; Patton 2002) to choose participants for this study. The sample was

purposive in that I intentionally selected participants based upon the number of festivals they had attended and the location of the attendee. The number of festivals attended by participants played a significant role in understanding the culture at the Walnut Valley Festival; attendees who were veterans, or attendees who had attended the festival more than once, had a certain embeddedness in the culture at the festival that provided important insight based on their extensive knowledge of the rituals, artifacts, festival language, etcetera, gained through the years they had attended. Attendees who were virgins, or new to the festival, and weekenders (those who had only attended during the official festival) also played an important role due to their limited knowledge of the festival, which provided fresh insight into the newly experienced world of the Walnut Valley Festival. Location within the festival (i.e. Pecan Grove or Walnut Grove) was also an important criteria for my sample, as there is a difference between how campers experience the festival based on which grove attendees chose to camp in.

I interviewed 19 participants that represented the criteria mentioned above. Most were veterans although I did interview two virgins and provided auto-ethnographic reflections (Ellis 2001) on my own virgin status. Most of my discussions with virgins at the festival took place as informal, casual conversations that were typically spontaneous and not recorded. I specifically focused more on veteran attendees due to their extensive knowledge and embeddedness within the festival culture. Also, due to the differences between the two larger camps, the Walnut Grove and Pecan Grove, I interviewed participants staying within both camps. Because there were so many camp enclaves within the two groves, I necessarily limited my interviews to a few camps. Ten of my interviews were conducted with members from Comfortable Shoes Camp, one

interview with multiple attendees camped in the Walnut Grove, and the rest of my interviewees were located in various camps throughout the Pecan Grove (KAAA Camp, Stage 5 Camp, and Chicken Train Camp). All of my interviewees were white, nine were female, 10 were male, and all of them were from the United States, with the exception of Paul, who lives in France. Finally, because the festival is composed of not only musicians but also audience members who are not musicians, 14 interviewees were musicians who played regularly in the campgrounds and five were with attendees who simply enjoy listening. In an effort to understand the Walnut Valley Festival as a cultural performance, the distinction between attendees who are musicians and attendees who are not musicians provided important insight into how the culture at the festival is understood as a cultural performance, one that is continuously created and received by attendees.

approximately an hour, although some lasted two to three hours (see Appendix B for open-ended interview guide). Again I borrow from Charmaz (2006) who provides an

understanding of the importance of a conversation style interview:

wherever the interviewee felt most comfortable engaging in open conversation with me.

Interviews were formulated to probe for insight into the creation of a shared definition of

the situation, as well as how members utilize, interpret, and contribute to the cultural

performance of festival.

ethnographic observations included the full festival grounds. Intense observation at the

festival played a critical role in identifying important rituals, rites of passage, artifacts,

and creative, hand crafted props developed by attendees. I employed the use of recorders

and video cameras to capture interviews, stories, songs, the environment of the festival,

and observable dialogue among attendees. The data generated through the aid of these

additional devices was not fully transcribed but rather, served to jog my memory while

writing fieldnotes. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and other conversations and

dialogue were captured and placed into fieldnote excerpts throughout my findings. For

supplementary data, I examined sources such as several Walnut Valley Festival

programs, the daily newspaper entitled the WVF Voice, the official Walnut Valley

Festival web-site, several websites dedicated to established camps such as Rat Camp and

Comfortable Shoes Camp, attendees‘ personal video footage from festivals past,

photographs taken by myself as well as other attendees, and internet videos of the festival

to further understand different components of the festival that render it a cultural

performance.

distraction! Many campers have remarked that they never or rarely attend the main

stages during the official festival, and most of the musicians I talk to say they prefer

playing in the campground with other campers who aren‘t distracted by cumbersome professional musicians on the main stages. This, too, speaks to the notion of the musicians‘ festival as opposed to the official three day Walnut Valley Festival. Jacob, a young musician who has attended WVF with his parents for years, wrote a song that is now a favorite among Shoes Campers. The lyrics include, I just play to play. That‘s why they call it play, referring to why he is a musician.

have trouble selecting a particular memory; many jokingly remark that it is an unfair

question. One veteran camper, Lonnie, who has always been a weekender, compares

the week before the festival to Marti Gras.

throughout the week, campers have endless opportunities to engage in creative, silly,

play in the form of rituals that take place year after year within the campgrounds: the Rat

Camp Band Scramble, the golf cart parade, the Beer Garden‘s dessert contest, Shoes

Camp‘s Comedy Jam, Oz Tin City Limit‘s Beatles‘ night, Carp Camp‘s Parade, KAAA‘s

Chick Pick, prom night, marshmallow golf tournaments, a ukulele parade, songs-you

can‘t-sing-for-your-mother contests, and more. I focus on two to illustrate how the ritual

of play is extended beyond music to adult creative fun: The Rat Camp Band Scramble

and the Carp Camp (Hat) Parade. Both rituals coincide with one another on the

Wednesday before the official festival begins.

On Wednesday morning, attendees who want to participate in the band scramble sign up and are placed into random bands, typically with people they don‘t know (hence the term scramble ). These bands then write songs according to the theme (this year it was Alice in Wonderland), and try to include the word rat wherever possible. The scrambled bands then perform in front of the judges (usually Rat Camp members who are jokingly bribed by contestants) and the audience, who then votes for the Peoples‘ Choice Award. Band Scramble winners are awarded a famous Rat Camp Band Scramble button, a spot on the notorious Stage 5, and winners also receive acknowledgement in the WVA Voice. The Band Scramble performances are punctuated by a variety of costume contests which are also related to the annual theme.

back together in ways that remind us constantly of the process of recombination

(Abrahams 1982:166). Events such as the Band Scramble and Carp Camp Parade

illustrate the creative agency of participants as they reinvent social roles through

performance, creating a heightened emotional atmosphere where the player, like his

costume, appears to be always on the verge of coming apart, going crazy, going wild

(Abrahams 1982:172). During play, self-made groups…celebrate their sense of coming

together just for the fun of it (p. 175). When explaining the draw of the festival, many

interviewees used the word fun to describe their experiences. Indeed, fun is in vast

supply at Winfield.

of play, whereas other important rituals, such as playing music together during jam

sessions and Stage Five, could be considered rituals of performance that don‘t necessarily

include play in the traditional sense.

the back of an old, green pickup truck. Upon following the main dirt road that winds

through the grove towards Main Street, and then taking a left next to Beer Garden

Camp, campers arrive at what is often called, The People‘s Stage. As I search for

Randy and Sharon, the creators and hosts of Stage Five, I find Randy sitting in his fenced

off campground directly behind the stage. Like Shoes Camp, it‘s an intricate and creative

initiation ritual for Shoes Camp, as well as the festival at large. This year, Mayor Dan

approaches me and asks if I want to do the camp census again, and then jokingly adds,

Because you loved it so much. I quickly respond that I am more than happy to pass

the torch to another unsuspecting virgin, and he gives me a big hug; I am family now.

are the daily meals that Shoes Camp shares together. As leader of the breakfast kitchen,

Mayor Dan provides the camp with a Thanksgiving Breakfast every morning that

usually includes a combination of bacon and sausage, eggs how you like em, biscuits

and gravy, hash browns, fresh cut veggies, and pancakes. When the bell rings, signaling

breakfast time (the only vestige of a time table in camp), campers stagger to the kitchen/mess tent, talking casually about the night before or the day ahead. We stand in line, buffet style, and shuffle along collecting our breakfast until we are met with Dan at the end of the line, sweating over a hot griddle and taking orders for eggs. After preparing plates and chit-chatting in the mess tent, we disperse throughout the camp in small clusters, enjoying the shade, the food, and the company.

When I ask Bob, veteran Shoes camper and talented musician, about the difference between other music festivals and Winfield, he responds by saying, this is a musician‘s festival. Music makes up the very heart and soul of Winfield. As Donna jokingly reminds me, people don‘t keep coming back because they hate music. As noted earlier, most attendees, when I ask why they come to Winfield, respond with either community or a deep, rich, insatiable, emotional, and passionate love for music. When I ask for clarification on what the music means, many individuals find it difficult to articulate. After a few moments of quiet contemplation, Bob says quietly, it‘s just part of my soul, and veteran Pecan Grover, Tom, suggests that music is powerful because you could literally feel music, but admits that it is difficult to put into words. In a similar vein, Mayor Dan suggests that music tingles that part of your brain that feels good. For some campers, like Paula, music serves as an alternative form of communication or expression, where feelings are more easily communicated through song. The most common response is that music is the one, true universal language, and because all cultures share music in some form, it provides the largest common denominator, or connective tissue, between cultures and individuals. In helping me try to describe this quality of music, Zac, an avid construction worker, suggests that Music is like the bonding agent.

According to Kotarba (2009), music can be thought of as playing an important role in the transformation of space to place. He quotes Cohen (1995) to suggest that individuals can use music as a cultural map of meaning (p. 313). In the context of Winfield, music carries immense meaning to participants, and not just those who play instruments. Symbolic interaction informs us that ritual is a vehicle through which meaning is created, reinforced, and exaggerated. Jam sessions, or what some refer to as picking circles, are but one illustration of how musical rituals, or rituals of performance, serve to create a meaningful sense of place for attendees.

Like most campers at the festival, Shoes members fill most of their time either playing music or listening to music. There is almost always a jam (a group of musicians playing together) going on somewhere in Shoes Camp. At nights, the jams held at Shoes camp under the parachute grow to massive proportions, sometimes attracting large groups of onlookers on their nightly walkabouts. Shoes Camp is also home to some very talented and well known musicians at the festival, and every once in a while, some professional musicians have been known to spend their evenings jamming beneath the chandelier of Christmas lights that serves as a beacon for Shoes Camp.

Consistent with other egalitarian qualities of the festival, picking circles and jams are structured in such a way as to provide every participant an opportunity to play a song. The musicians participating in the jam typically, but not always, sit in picking chairs (hard seated chairs with no arm rests) and form a circle, the size of which depends on the number of musicians involved (see Appendix E for an example of a small picking circle in Shoes Camp). Instruments that are typically present in the circle include guitars, banjos, mandolins, fiddles, basses, and the occasional washboard, but other instruments are typically welcome (Elvis plays trumpet, Paula plays clarinet, and Cello Bob clearly plays cello). I have been told, however, that no trap sets or electrified instruments are permitted in the circle (or at Winfield for that matter), and Sandy, a talented pianist, suggests that to really be a part of the group, You need to play a stringed instrument. In fact, every musician in camp plays a stringed instrument (Elvis also plays banjo, and Paula also plays guitar, mandolin, and bass).  The ritual of picking circles brings with it a host of shared understandings surrounding playing music together at the festival. One night, in the wee hours of the morning, Monty shares with me the Ten Jammandments, a playful (yet true) list of guidelines for appropriate jam conduct. As he reads them allowed, we have a hearty laugh and talk about how accurate they are despite their comic value, and he lets me borrow them so I can copy them into my fieldnotes. Later, I find myself reading them allowed to Shoes campers under the parachute in the middle of camp, and it is met with laughter, stories of jam busters, and talk of unspoken truths.

Jammandment represents an unspoken truth that has, at one time or another, been

breached by another participant in the circle. I am reminded of Adler‘s (1982) work

surrounding humor in bluegrass where, oftentimes, things are seen by all to be

humorous precisely because it is all so necessary and familiar (p. 24). Failure to comply with the Jammandments simply makes one undesirable to play with, and these individuals are thus awarded the title of jam buster, jam hog, circle jerk, or circle jack, among other creative nicknames for those who misinterpret the definition of the situation pertaining to picking circles. The Ten Jammandments illustrate a humorous and playful way of showcasing shared understandings, but other prevalent unspoken rules are often told through stories.

A relatively new ritual for Shoes Camp is story time with Jack. Almost every night after dinner, campers gather under the large parachute in the middle of camp, some sitting with children on blankets laid in the grass, others reclining in chairs sipping red wine, for Jack‘s famous story time. Jack, a mandolin player and short story writer, sits in a chair holding a few sheets of paper, and reads, in his deep animated voice, one of his colorful, comical Ozark tales. Everyone in camp loves story time, and we all sit together in the clearing as Jack reads aloud in his best hillbilly accent, pausing every so often for effect, but also to give us time to laugh. When he finishes, we all clap excitedly. Like the notion of a family reunion, story time at the festival has more than one meaning. To me, story time represents another one of Jack‘s wonderful stories, but it doesn‘t take me long to realize that the festival, in and of itself, is one, large story time. In my fieldnotes, I mention the word story thirty two times, mostly used in the context of So and so told me a story about… Stories are told about the time a camper was arrested at the festival for smoking pot, a camp named Glitter Gulch that made an entire city out of glitter and cardboard, and the flood year, or the year Winfield was held at the lake.

My first year, all the stories I heard seemed like inside jokes, something I couldn‘t relate to as an outsider. But now with my virgin year out of the way and as a member of Shoes Camp, I bring my own stories. When I hear stories retold, I understand what they mean, who they refer to, why they are funny or poignant. I have my own stories about the tornado that hit Winfield in 2010 near our camp, about the noisy, out of tune fiddle player, about the nutty, hippy fellow nobody really wanted in camp. I hear about the time that a tree limb fell on Jason‘s tent or the time a propane tank blew up in an attendee‘s camper down the road and I feel as if I had been there somehow. I know who Manny is, I know about the rotten banana Elvis put in Brandon‘s sock, I know that one has to pack for two seasons at the festival, I know of the Ten Jammandments, and I also know never curse the Kansas wind.

For a new comer, stories are an excellent resource for shared understandings that aren‘t necessarily discussed out right at the festival. For example, after all the stories that are told about drunk interlopers, I understand that it is okay to drink at the festival, but not okay to get belligerently drunk. All the stories that are told about the festival staff, the Winfield police, and a camper‘s arrest, teach me that marijuana is permitted at the festival as long as it remains out of sight. After hearing Mayor Dan‘s frustration with a camper who had agreed to cook breakfast and never showed up, I know that everyone is expected to help with camp duties, because it takes a village. I know now that banjo jokes are told throughout the festival to illustrate that, oftentimes, banjos are loud and out of tune. Stories that are told about jam busters and those who monopolize the circle are perfectly represented in the Jammandments, which renders them funnier to insiders. It is through these stories that I learn the do‘s and don‘ts of festival life; always connect a splitter when hooking up to water so other campers can hook up to water too; never camp in an established camp‘s traditional spot, don‘t ever rope or section off a camping spot, when the ice people yell ICE!!!, start running because they‘ll drive on by without stopping; Stage Five picks are reserved for those who play on Stage Five; the Pecan Grove is the hippies and granolas and the Walnut Grove is reserved for the conservatives and non-partiers.

As illustrated above, stories play an enormous role in the creation and maintenance of the definition of the situation as well as the creation and transmission of idioculture. Consistent with a symbolic interactionist approach to cultural creation, Fine (1979) suggests that because meaning arises through social interaction, cultural creation is inextricably tied to groups and group life. Through continued interaction, groups create idioculture, or shared meanings, that they can refer to and use in various other interactions. The applicability of Fine‘s (1979) filtering elements (e.g., that items must be known, usable, functional, appropriate, and triggered) needed for the creation of idioculture become extremely apparent at Winfield. It is evident that many cultural objects, shared understandings, and rituals at Winfield are vastly known by veteran campers ( Band Scramble ), usable in that they can be understood by others at the festival ( Virgins ), functional in that they are consistent with needs and goals of other members (even if just to provoke laughter or entertain), appropriate in that they are consistent with patterns of interaction (no drums or trap sets!), and triggered in that they elicit a response from other group members (Hey remember when…?). There seems to be little doubt that individuals within camp enclaves have indeed created idioculture at the festival, but what is interesting is the degree to which idioculture compliments the notion of a shared definition of the situation at the festival and how these shared understandings are created and received through nostalgic narratives.

The phrase, Remember when… seems to have an imp ortant meaning at the festival, and often elicits deep emotion through connecting the past with the present. This feeling of nostalgia provides a powerful foundation for community, as even I experience in my short two years at the festival. The collective memories of participants, the ability to say yes and provide another story when asked Remember when… , draws attendees together through past, shared experiences that serve to make the present all the more meaningful. Indeed, Gardner (2004) suggests that one reason place becomes so meaningful is that it has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke what is most precious (p. 51). He suggests that attachments to meaningful places can be attributed to the memories and narratives people have about those places. Also, Gvion (2009:58) informs us that narrative provides a sense that the past is not lost forever, and that through narrative, individuals are capable of assigning meaning to the past as well as the present, something Turner (1969) would consider an important aspect of cultural performance. For Gvion (2009), experiencing nostalgia and appropriating meaning go hand in hand, where a situated past becomes accessible and verbalized through narrative. Neither narrative nor nostalgia necessarily represent a reality, but rather, a filtered reality or what Barthel (1997) describes as a combination between fantasy and what actually took place.

experience something to feel nostalgic about it, and likewise, stories reflective of

nostalgia typically represent what Gardner (2004) calls convenient or glorified

versions of the past. Similarly, Gvion (2009) adds that nostalgia is but one way that

individuals create colorful versions of their own worlds. During a story about how

everyone met Manny, Sandy mentions feelings of nostalgia to describe why a core

group of friends moved to remote parts of the country;

borrows from Bellah et al (1985) in suggesting that real communities can be

thought of as communities of memory or communities of nostalgia which rely on

key elements of tradition, ritual, a strong sense of…identity or placeand a collective

memory of its residents‘ shared past (p. 61). Here, Gardner (2004) submits that festivals

are actually created as a result of the rapid decline of communities of memory. For

Griswold (1994:5), memory is explicitly tied into the definition of a cultural object,

which always elicits emotions and memories from the past.

performances are highly emotional precisely because they connect memories, or the past,

with the present. Likewise, Schudson (1989) suggests that the retrievability component

of cultural efficacy is directly tied to memory, or how cognitively retrievable the cultural

object is. Furthermore, Fine (1979) submits that cultural content is created through

remembrances or what he terms known culture, and the notion of an item as

triggered directly implies a memory of something that can be brought up again over time in effort to make sense out of the present. Combined, these works reveal that nostalgia, or what Abrahams (1982:174) terms a sentimental back look, plays a role in the formation of meaning, the creation and maintenance of idioculture, the strengthening of community, and to some extent, the degree to which Winfield, as a cultural object, works for participants.

Although stories are an important vehicle for the creation of nostalgia, music and song contribute to these deep, emotional sentiments as well. There are many songs that are sung at Winfield throughout the years that evoke memories or emotions from festivals past. For Paula, hearing Monty‘s Porta-Pottie Shuffle or Jason‘s I can‘t I‘m Going to Winfield makes her feel like she is at the festival, like she is finally home. For many campers, favorite memories include certain jams or songs that were played with specific people, or nights under the stars where the music was so beautiful it couldn‘t be put into words. Mayor Dan recalls lying in his RV listening to a group of musicians play Yesterday by the Beatles‘ where the music was indescribably beautiful, and Mama Cass recalls a memory of listening to Beppy Gambetta on the main stage, tears streaming down her face. Monty remembers a jam with Elvis‘s late wife Tammy, a beloved and dearly missed member of Shoe‘s camp, where they played Moon Dance under a full moon with a flute player, and the ritual of Chick Pick finds most women in tears after a young girl sings Somewhere over the Rainbow for her parents. These intense feelings of nostalgia are involved in the creation of the indescribable, yet deeply felt, emotionality of music or as I describe it, affective nostalgia; the deep emotional response elicited through linking the past and the present through musical ritual. When song and memory are reunited at the festival, the result often takes the form of a powerful experience where emotions from the past are rekindled, summoning affective nostalgia in the present. 

where linking the past and present in musical relation provides the very foundation for establishing and discovering meaning. Turner (1982) suggests that

Turner‘s moments of experience ) through musical ritual, where music and memory

work together in reconstructing the past and reflecting on the present. Many of Gardner‘s

interviewees, like many of mine, made reference to a spiritual vibe (p. 207), or

what Mayor Dan labels an aura. Interestingly, Schudson (1989) uses the word aura

when describing resonance or that indescribable quality within cultural objects that

makes them memorable or powerful. For attendees, music resonates, or creates a

spiritual aura, providing music with emotional, nostalgic properties. Gvion (2009:60)

suggests that, through song, individuals are able to remember times they haven‘t lived in,

where participants share a collective memory through music. Unique and re-created

versions of traditional songs allow for the linking of the past and present, where singing

allows for the reconstruction of selected pasts.

nostalgia. According to Turner (1982), spontaneous communitas represents

I suggest that it is the powerful emotion of affective nostalgia that provides music with what Schudson (1989) might term resonance or rhetorical force. I also submit that it is through experienced affective nostalgia at Winfield that attendees appropriate meaning to the festival, strengthen community ties, and experience a perceivably more authentic, emotional performance in a world where communities of memory may be seen as a mere vestige of the past. It is the affective nostalgia produced in the campground through participants‘ continued involvement that provides the musicians‘ festival with all of the emotion and meaning it enjoys. As mentioned previously, many campers find the musicians‘ festival, with all the music, ritual, and playfulness it provides, to be much more enticing than the performances on the main stages, which I suggest relates to the ability of music played within the campground to produce affective nostalgia. When I ask the question, Do you ever go to the main stages to watch the big names perform? almost every single one of my interviewees, as well those that I engage in casual conversation, admit that they never or rarely visit the main stages, and prefer to play or listen to music produced in the campgrounds. Many respond by saying, I used to go up there a lot more than I do now, suggesting that over the years, a lot of campers have shifted their attention to the musicians‘ festival as opposed to the official festival. Disappointedly, Mitch and Irene say that the music played on the main stages e isn‘t what it used to be, and in a similar vein, Bill, creator of Carp Camp, remarks that I rarely go to the stage shows because the musicians here [in camp] are better. The music, stories, friendship, and family in the campgrounds provide attendees with such intense feelings of community and nostalgia, that being the camp dog, as David remarks, may provide participants with an ability to stay true to the music and the community. Paula suggests that the people who put on the Walnut Valley Festival have no idea that attendees in the Pecan Grove come for the Pecan Grove and not the main stages. Some campers suggest that this may be but one difference between the two campgrounds.

From the moment I arrived at the festival my first year, it became relatively clear that there exists a playful, joking rivalry between the two campgrounds. In fact, there is actually a large geographic separation between groves, where the main, paved road that leads out of the fairgrounds and onto Main Street separates the two campgrounds completely. One veteran camper, Josh, jokes that you need a passport to go over there! But truly, venturing over to the Walnut Grove, what some have called the RV Jungle or Hollywood, is quite the trek, depending on where one is camped in the Pecan Grove. After walking to the main paved road, there is another little gravel path that goes over a enormous hill, which also contributes to the geographic separation, and upon coming down the hill on the Walnut Grove side, directly next to the main festival site, a whole sea of neatly arranged campers and RV‘s becomes visible. When I venture over to the Walnut Grove on one sunny day, the difference between groves is exactly how my interviewees and fellow campers describe.

There are a few jams taking place here and there, but certainly not like in the rowdy Pecan Grove. Also, there aren‘t near as many tents in the Walnut Grove; most campers are staying in large campers and RV‘s perfectly arranged in tidy rows, where little gravel and dirt paths lead to various different camps. Unlike the cram packed Pecan Grove (especially later in the week), there is plenty of room between camps, a perfect amount of open space for attendees to navigate the campgrounds easily. However, similar to camps in the Pecan Grove, campers position their RV‘s and campers in such a way as to create a little open common area for campers to gather and play music.

The creative camp construction is still present in the Walnut Grove; most camps have signs, props, and fun artifacts, and some are the most intricate camp sites I have seen at the festival. Earlier, I had heard that campers in the Walnut Grove typically won the Camp Decorating Contest, and now, as I wander through the camps, I understand why. For example, Crab Camp has constructed a wooden dock surrounded by blue water made out of Christmas lights. Although the scenery is noticeably different in the Pecan Grove, there are a couple of camps that look a little more like Pecan Grove camps. These camps stick out in the campground with their many tie-dyed tapestries, and a couple of camps I run across are mostly tents.

While walking around, I happen on a beautiful and complicated hammer dulcimer jam, and I am suddenly intrigued, because I haven‘t noticed any hammer dulcimers in the Pecan Grove. I notice that a man playing the piano (another instrument I haven‘t seen in the Pecan Grove) is actually playing with sheet music, while the women playing the hammer dulcimers play in perfect unison. It seems almost like a rehearsal of sorts.

Monty tells me that a lot of camps in the Walnut Grove actually have home work, or music sent out to camp members to learn before coming to the festival. Later, I find out that Carp Camp, a large camp in the Walnut Grove, will also provide campers with home work on occasion. I had also heard that oftentimes, jams or picking circles are scheduled in the Walnut Grove, where a piece of paper or dry erase board will list the time and place of the jam, with a list of songs that were going to be played. Unless it‘s a special jam like Beatles‘ Night, for example, Pecan Grovers don‘t really schedule jams or give home work ; picking circles remain a spontaneous occurrence. That‘s not to say that people don‘t work on songs or practice before the festival, they just don‘t typically assign music to be learned by the campers.

When I ask about the difference between groves, many interviewees suggest that the music was different or that the mind-set, or what Todd calls, The Tude, [attitude] is the prevailing difference between campgrounds. Paula suggests that the Pecan Grovers are the wild children and that there is a social difference between groves, where the Walnut Grove is compiled of folks who have money. Mitch jokingly remarks that the difference between groves is the same difference that exists between republicans and democrats, and Sandy suggests that marijuana is absolutely not tolerated in the Walnut Grove. Monty insists that the music is different and that you better have your chops if you want to play over there, meaning amateur musicians aren‘t quite as welcomed in the Walnut Grove as they are in the Pecan Grove. Similarly, Bob mentions that the music is more traditional and structured in the Walnut Grove, and Todd jokes about the time he and a friend played a Frank Zappa song that was met with obvious disapproval by surrounding Walnut Grovers.

Interestingly, when I ask Walnut Grovers the same questions, I receive many of the same responses. The music is more polished in the Walnut Grove, and the atmosphere is more family oriented. Campers in the Walnut Grove, although they also enjoy the traditions and rituals the musicians‘ festival has to offer, seem to place more emphasis on the official festival that showcases the big names in bluegrass among various other events and activities. Pecan Grovers, on the other hand, are a rowdy bunch, and place much more emphasis on partying than members of the Walnut Grove. I‘ve heard several stories about campers that ventured into the Walnut Grove after 10 o‘clock, and were met with total darkness and abrupt silence. While the Pecan Grove is absolutely notorious for staying up and jamming all night, the Walnut Grove is known to shut down much, much earlier. For Pecan Grovers, the night life and street jams in the campground make the Pecan Grove a favorite place for those who welcome musical variety, beginners and professionals, and possibly, a little partying and jamming into the wee hours of the morning (and sometimes, all night!)

When I ask Monty what one of his favorite Winfield rituals is, one of his responses is porta-pottie jams. Confused, I ask him what porta-pottie jams are; certainly people don‘t play music together in a porta-pottie, although Matilda tells me that fourteen teenagers had piled into a single porta-pottie one year. Monty tells me that porta-pottie jams are street jams that take place next to a porta- pottie at night, because porta-potties are always illuminated by large street lights and musicians can see each other and what they are doing. Also porta -pottie jams usually take place because one musician needs to go to the restroom, so his musician friend is left waiting outside the porta-pottie entrance, instrument in hand. After a while, another musician would wander up, which is the perfect makings for a jam. The person in the porta- pottie would then wander out of the stall to a full blown jam session right by the door.

The night life at the festival, especially closer to the end of the week, is especially active. As the evening progresses, the excitement begins to build in the Pecan Grove, as musicians and friends venture out into the streets to wander around the grove and participate in street jams, beckoning other musicians to join. Sometimes, street jams will become so large that the group of jammers, onlookers, and dancers literally block off the street, making it impossible for others to pass through. Many campers have glow sticks and light up jewelry, Christmas lights, flash lights, and all sorts of creative and bright lighting displays so that, at night, the Pecan Grove begins to light up with brilliant, twisted colors that flash and stream through the darkness. Music can be heard absolutely everywhere, at times clashing with jams taking place only a short distance away. Camps have fires roaring, people are laughing and shouting delightedly, and occasionally, one may witness the intoxicated camper who falls asleep standing up (a story Mayor Dan, Jason, and Cello Bob tell me).

The stages in the Pecan Grove really pick up at night as well; the audience attending Stage Five is so large that walking across the area in front of the stage becomes impossible. Fine Time‘s Stage and Stage Seven are also usually hopping, drawing large groups of campers that dance around in front of the performers. Golf carts covered in Christmas lights drive in masses down the dirt roads of the Pecan Grove creating a colorful, moving, mini light show. Campers are milling about everywhere, playing music, singing, telling stories, and laughing wildly. Many campers suggest that the night life in the Pecan Grove is one of their favorite aspects of the festival, one that is almost entirely absent in the Walnut Grove. Like Paula said, campers in the Pecan Grove come for the Pecan Grove, because, after all, what happens in the grove stays in the grove!

The official Walnut Valley Festival begins on Thursday, September 15^th and includes performances by professional bluegrass or folk musicians on one of three main stages, musical workshops, a craft fair, music contests, multiple food vendors, and a store in which to purchase Winfield memorabilia. In 2010, the Walnut Valley Festival program includes thirty-one professional bluegrass and folk musicians that play at various times between Thursday and Sunday (the schedule is provided in the festival booklet), on one of the three main stages in the fairgrounds. Stage One is considered the most prestigious stage, followed by Stage Two and then Stage Three. Professional musicians are scheduled to play at various times on two or more of the stages. Some campers are provided the opportunity to play on one of the main stages, like when Mama Cass won the songwriting contest, and had the honor of playing with Monty, David, Paul and Peter on Stage Two (one of David‘s favorite Winfield memories).

The festival is also home to several different hands-on, musical workshops taught by well-known musicians in the bluegrass and folk world. These include workshops surrounding ukuleles, finger style guitars, new songs, fiddles, songwriters, hammer dulcimers, and autoharps. Also, the Walnut Valley Festival holds what is boasted as one of the best craft fairs in the country. The festival booklet suggests that individuals from twenty states come together to provide more than 100 displays of paintings, jewelry, wood items, glass, metalwork, baskets, pottery, weaving &spinning, leather, herbals &soaps, children‘s items, and food related items (2010 WVF booklet). Many campers in Shoes camp, such as Patti, Mama Cass, Monty, and Elvis collect Winfield mugs provided each year by the potter at the craft fair. Many other campers browse the crafts, picking up home-made reminders of their time at Winfield. Several people that I‘ve talked to, such as Mitch and Karla, have successfully sold their crafts in the craft fair, although Mitch admits that, after a while, it started to feel like work.

Out of all the interesting activities that take place in the main festival site, contests seem to have captured the most attention, possibly because Shoes camp is home to several talented contestants. In 2010, Matilda places third in the autoharp contest, which is met by much congratulations and excitement from fellow campers, who are always ready with support and encouragement. The Walnut Valley Festival is home to the autoharp contest, the mountain dulcimer contest, the mandolin contest, the old time fiddle contest, the flat pick guitar contest, the hammer dulcimer contest, and the bluegrass banjo contest. Paul, a superb guitar player from France, and member of Shoes Camp, often enters the flat picking contest. One year, the camp members decorated a t-shirt for Paul, with all their names on it, stating he was their flat-picking champion! Mama Cass states that, for her, just attempting to play backup rhythm with Paul while he‘s practicing for the contest is a festival highlight. One of Bob‘s favorite Winfield traditions happens to be the contests, and watching all the very young, talented musicians that compete. He remarks excitedly, you can see incredible things in any of those competitions! Similarly, Bill, from Carp Camp, also admits that he favors the competitions and recalls that one night we had five or six national mandolin champs, and they were all under twenty! On a different note, Matilda enjoys competing in the contest, because it showcases her instrument. One sunny afternoon while relaxing in the shade, she tells me, I don‘t do the championships to win. I do it to uplift and bring forward the autoharp.

Like many festivals, the Walnut Valley Festival is also host to a great number of food vendors, from nachos to turkey legs, and all the festival memorabilia one could ask for. Like the contests, festival memorabilia is another aspect of the official festival that captures camper‘s interest. CD‘s, t-shirts, sweatshirts, picks, bumper stickers, jewelry and countless other items are sold in the main fairgrounds, and many campers have traditions that involve purchasing an item every year at Winfield. For example, Paula, Mitch, and Holly all purchase a Winfield t-shirt each year, and Holly admits to having more than she could wear every day at the festival, even when arriving for Line Rush.

Bumper stickers are also prevalent at the festival, and many guitar cases and vehicles are enveloped in what could only be described as Winfield bumper sticker wall paper. Like stories and music, memorabilia purchased at the festival plays a large role in connecting the past to the present, and maybe even more importantly, provides a clear symbol of a potent memory that individuals can take home to cherish until the next festival. I have two Walnut Valley Festival bumper stickers and one Girls Gone Winfield! bumper sticker (a souvenir of Chick Pick ) stuck onto the side of a large bookcase in my home and each time I walk by it, I smile, and think of my Winfield home.

The final Saturday night spent within the Pecan Grove is arguably the climax of the festival, as it is the night before many campers will make the trip back home. As a result, the Pecan Grove is up all night, vibrating with music, yells, and laughter. The next day, however, always begins in exhaustion, and the experience of leaving friends and family for another year is just plain sad. The camp wakes up slowly and people eventually begin shuffling around, tearing down their tents and packing up their belongings. Campers begin to leave one by one, and they make their rounds around camp, hugging necks and bidding their goodbyes. Jason and I talk shortly about how much homework we both have to do and Paula is extremely anxious to get back home and catch up on her work, too. The feeling of the real world or real life feels strangely personal to me now, as I abruptly feel overwhelmed with things I have to do when I get home. Elvis, Monty, Rachel, Brad, David, and several others (including myself and Zac) work on taking down the army tents, which is not an easy task, and disassembling the kitchen, the shower, and taking the parachute and chandelier from the tree tops. Eventually Shoes camp and the Pecan Grove begin to, once again, look like a large open field, void of the sights and sounds of community, family, and music. The excitement is gone, and what remains is a dark sense of reality; we have to get back to our responsibilities, and, frankly, nobody wants to. The same thing is happening in the various different camps in the Pecan Grove; campers are packing up their vehicles, tearing down tents, and embracing as they say their goodbyes. For the final time, the community comes together to take apart what they had worked so hard to put together, and once the camp is torn down, our home goes back to a being a park.

After Zac and I help tear down camp, we too, go around saying tearful goodbyes and thank everyone for another great experience before finally piling into the truck. While we are pulling out, I wave out the window to my festival family, yelling loudly, See you next year! As we drive down the dirt road, I eventually lose sight of what was Comfortable Shoes Camp, and I continue waving goodbye to other campers in the grove as they, too, are bidding us farewell.

When we get to the end of the main, paved road out of the campgrounds, a man in a yellow jacket hands us the 2010 Walnut Valley Festival bumper sticker, and while smiling, says, We‘ll see you next year! As Zac pulls out of the campgrounds and onto Main Street, I begin to think of all my new friends and experiences at the festival. Zac and I immediately begin telling each other stories, all of which we had already heard or told each other, and we laugh as we begin our pilgrimage back to reality. I think about the music we had played together, the deep sense of community, the support and encouragement I received there, and the friendships that I will always cherish. I begin to sense the gravity of a family reunion as I think about the joy the next festival would bring, and how incredible it will be to see these people again, build our village, play music, and catch up under the our favorite shade tree about the years events. Now a member of Shoes camp, and a veteran attendee, I arrange all my new guitar picks in a special drawer when I return home, post my 2010 bumper stickers underneath my 2009 bumper sticker, and prop up my Comfortable Shoes Camp button and Chick Pick button against a row of books, so that I can both remember and anticipate the excitement of next year.

Drawing from observations, interviews, and personal experience, I have described the components and activities of the festival that render it a cultural performance (e.g., heightened emotional moments elicited through the linking of the past and present). I have also described prominent rituals (e.g., Stage Five, Rat Camp Band Scramble, Carp Camp Parade, and Jams, ) as well as props (e.g., cultural objects appropriated during creative camp construction), traditions (e.g., sharing meals together, virgin duties, and porta- pottie jams ), and festival language ( Stupidville, walkabouts, and jam busters ). Through the above ethnographic tale, I have attempted to identify those aspects of the Winfield experience that encompass Griswold‘s (2004) cultural diamond metaphor; social world (leisure,) creators (campers), cultural object (festival,) and receivers (campers). I have also identified Fine‘s (1979) components of idioculture as well as their applicability, and have attempted to illustrate various dimensions of cultural efficacy (Schudson 1989) as they apply to the festival as a cultural performance (retrievability, resonance, rhetorical force, institutional retention and resolution).

Similar to Fine‘s (1979) filtering elements necessary for the creation and maintenance of idioculture, Schudson‘s (1989) dimensions of cultural efficacy have a broad range of applicability at the festival; the cultural object is evidently retrievable (both cognitively through remembrances as well as geographically and economically) for those that come every year, as they have clearly retrieved it, some for decades. For many long time veterans of the festival, monetary and geographic retrievability is merely an obstacle worthy of overcoming. For example, Paul travels from France every other year, and others have borrowed money or gone into to debt to attend the festival. Winfield must carry rhetorical force and resonance for participants as many veteran attendees continue to return throughout their lifetime. It makes sense that attendees continue to participate in and respond to things they perceive to be meaningful, powerful, and alluring. Both rhetorical force and resonance are interrelated with Turner‘s (1969) notion of cultural performance as highly emotional and reflective, which pays tribute to the importance of the affective dimension of the festival as an effective cultural performance. Institutional retention is less applicable but some aspects are prevalent at the festival. For example, Paula fears that if she was not able to attend the festival, she would let other attendees down, and as a result, she would feel enormously guilty. Gardner (2004) also mentions the prevalence of guilt felt by veteran attendees who were unable to attend their traditional festival. Finally, Winfield also carries resolution in that people continue to come back, purchase memorabilia, learn new songs, or in other words, the festival encourages further action from participants.

Embedded within the overarching context of leisure, play, and perceived authenticity, there is also a prominent emphasis on creativity, camaraderie, and of course, a deeply felt sense of community. The apparent reduced role constraint and increased self-expression characteristic of leisure settings allows attendees to construct places to play, reminding us that ritual can be both earnest and playful (Turner 1982:35).

Moreover, through ritual, situated identities become meaningful to attendees. Hewitt (1989:156) suggests that in order to develop an understanding of situated identity, one must view the situation (or in this case, the festival) as a set of linked perspectives that provide participants a common ground through shared definitions of the situation. He elaborates by saying, The situated experience of personal continuity is essentially equivalent to a sense of emerging and ongoing meaning provided by orderly and expected events in which the person has a hand (p. 156). In this way, the creation and maintenance of the definition of the situation at the festival plays a role in not only the abundance of meaning produced and received there, but also in how individuals develop and experience a sense of identity that is situated in the context of Winfield.

remind us that shared understandings are always shifting and evolving as participants evaluate their performances as well as the performances of others.

Consistent with the fluid movement of the facets within Griswold‘s (2004) diamond, shared understandings are shaped through social interaction and are thus always subject to reinvention. I have suggested that these shared understandings surrounding the context of the festival as well as the insider knowledge (i.e. idioculture) produced through festival experiences are passed down to virgins and new comers through nostalgic narratives and musical rituals. But insider knowledge by itself is not enough to render Winfield a meaningful cultural performance. Thus, Fine‘s (1979) notion of idioculture falls short of capturing the meaningful components of small group life. In the absence of affective nostalgia, idioculture, as a concept, is lacking. Sociologists who study groups miss the mark if they do not take into account the affective ties inherent in group life, for this is the glue that binds.

With little exception (Gardner 2004; Gvion 2009; Turner 1969, 1982), most studies focus upon the cognitive aspects of festival that render it meaningful. But as I have shown, intense feelings are produced during performances that involve the ritualized playing of music, where attendees experience an atmosphere of heightened emotionality or moments of experience (Turner 1969). I have suggested that it is affective nostalgia that connects the past and present and provides music with its deeply felt emotional properties that are oftentimes so difficult to articulate. What Gardner (2004) might describe as the spiritual property of festivals, what Turner (1982) might describe as a form of communitas, and what Durkheim (1912) might describe as collective effervescence, I have termed affective nostalgia, an emotional by-product of

synthesizing the past and present through narrative and the performance of music. In an earlier work, Turner (1969) points to music specifically, stating

an enormous amount of time and energy creating and recreating the festival each year.

While my overall focus has been on the cultural object and its reception, it is worth

returning to the social context in which it takes place. If the real world represents work

and responsibility, the festival, situated in a leisure context, allows individuals to relax,

play, and freely express themselves through festival, music, and ritual. The rootedness

Solli (2006) refers to is achievable at Winfield and as Gardner (2004) suggests, festivals

do allow participants to perform their real‘ selves through perceivably more authentic

performances of identity and symbolic breaks from real life (p. 12). And as Gvion

(2009:53) posits, personal and collective identities are connected through leisure, where

personal meanings become instilled in cultural practices.

festivals to enact their longings for place, community, and authentic personal identity

(p. 7). Indeed, Winfield looks and feels like the reverse of contemporary society in some

ways. For example, there is absolutely no sense of time. The only exceptions to this are

when one wants to see a performance on a stage, watch a competition, take place in a

work shop (all of which have scheduled times), or when campers eat loosely scheduled

meals, like in Shoes Camp. The only other way to tell time at the festival (unless one has

retained their time piece; however, most attendees don‘t have one) is by a drastic change

in temperature signaling night fall, or when one suddenly realizes its dark outside.

Otherwise, the joke is that we are all on Winfield time. Also, other than shared

understandings that represent mostly humorous aspects of approved festival behavior

(e.g., the Ten Jammandments or becoming wildly drunk) attendees are mostly free to

fill their time how they please. Winfield positively echoes with laughter and frivolity.

The atmosphere is care free, feelings many individuals, including myself, haven‘t felt

since the follies of childhood. Interestingly, Baudrillard (2004) suggests that

paradise because it is fun, and as a site for play, perhaps Winfield is reminiscent of

childhood. The Band Scramble is particularly illustrative of the tendency of playful

rituals to influence and mimic childish behaviors at the festival. Vocabularies participants employ highlight the youthful nature of many of the traditions and rituals that take place at Winfield. As Harriet Martineau explained, Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man‘s spirit. Not only intellectual production, but peace of mind can‘t flourish without it (Quoted in Lengermann et al. 1998:39). Similarly, Mitchell (1988) suggests that Society without play grows stilted and stunted (p. 57). Following this desire for leisure, attendees create a place to enjoy their kind of music and briefly live the lifestyle associated with it with little concern for the expectations of

others (Bennett et al. 2004:9-10).

society, this study directs us to consider culture in general and the never ending search for

meaning and perceived authenticity, or what Turner (1969:15) describes as the perfect

expressive form [of]…experience. Festival becomes a site for such expression, resulting

in liminality and temporary anti-structure. Turner (1982) writes,

world and the festival world. What‘s important in terms of cultural studies, however, is

the cultural environment that limits creative expression, and as a result, inspires such

variation and experiment. Schudson (1989) reminds us that the power of a cultural

object is a property not only of the object‘s content or nature and the audience‘s interest

in it but of the position of the object in the cultural tradition of the society the audience is

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Cultural Performance – Turner

Cultural Efficacy – Schudson

For veterans that have been attending the festival for 20 consecutive years or more, it becomes quickly apparent that the festival is retrievable, and carries rhetorical force, resonance, and resolution – oftentimes, I applied all dimensions (with the exception of institutional retention) to veterans who have attended the festival for 20

years or more as a way to check and see if these dimensions were indeed prevalent throughout the interview, and they always were.

Idioculture – Fine

Many of Fine‘s dimensions speak for themselves; a cultural object must be,

Affective Nostalgia

This was coded through a combination of Turner‘s moments of experience (listed above), observed emotionality during musical ritual, difficulty describing the powerful properties of music, or verbally recalling a past emotional experience involving music (i.e., through nostalgic narratives).

Shared Understandings/Definition of the Situation

These were usually passed down through stories that I was told or that I overheard, or when I would specifically ask what are some shared understandings at the festival? or what are some unspoken rules? I recorded responses I heard regularly in my fieldnotes, keeping a list of the most popular, and if I heard the same thing from several different people, then I understood it to represent shared knowledge.

Play

This includes observed playfulness (like the band scramble) or the actual use of the word play, fun, or a comparison to something playful, like Mardi Gras for example.

Symbolic Break or Escape from Modernity – Gardner

Barb – Well, Dan does breakfast⁴ so…Well like today I finished my toenails⁵and I had planned on doing Mexican food tonight and for some reason I thought it was like noon and so I come over here and look at the clock and it‘s three o‘clock⁶. And I‘m going well I can‘t cook beans today!

MC – Winfield time.

Barb - So I‘m going okay what can I fix in a hurry here, you know, so I went to the store and got four arm roasts, because it was cheaper than buying stew meat, and cut all that up and they helped chop and then you just throw it all in the pot, you know, cook it.

MC – Not a rough night

Barb – Stew is an easy night, you know. It‘s not a big deal at all.

MC – Do you normally buy most of the food when you get here or do people donate?

Barb – We used to try to bring it with us but there is so much other stuff to carry. I bring all the basics⁷; I bring all the herbs and spices and usually olive oil and usually salad dressings. Things that I just don‘t feel like I can buy here easily, you know, things that would be…You know how expensive it is if you are buying a little bottle of oregan o or…but at home I order all that by the pound because I belong to an herb co -op so I try to bring all the spices and herbs that we are going to use with me so that we don‘t have that expense.

MC – Was it Dan and Lizzy who brought the mushrooms?

Barb – Dan and Lizzy brought the mushrooms, which was a lot. We are still trying to plan¹⁰meals around all those mushrooms.

and cups and bowls¹² but, you know, every year there are new people in camp¹³ so it‘s kind of a hard…it‘s a hard thing to…so we always have extra. We always keep extra.

MC – And then the camp kind of comes together for clean up?

Barb – The camp comes together for clean up, and most people are really responsible about helping and making sure that they donate money¹⁴, and once in a while… Do you remember last year when the rainbow guy came into camp¹⁵?

MC – Keep your pinto beans out of my soup!

Barb – Keep your pinto beans to yourself. And he was real taken aback by that I know. He was obviously not used to an organized kitchen.

MC – Well you definitely have a system going. I guess you have to keep so many people fed.

Barb – Well you do, you do, but it‘s always worked out, and yes there will always be years when some people don‘t pay or can‘t pay, but most of the time they come and tell you that and do extra kitchen duties and that‘s okay, you know, we always manage. It‘s not what a few people do, it‘s what everybody does, you know, that makes it work. If a few people can‘t contribute this year, they will next year, and we just move right along¹⁸.

Mc – Move on down the road.

Barb – Yeah… Communal living¹⁹is…it‘s really kind of a new thought for Garth and I because being children of the sixties, you know, it was the big thing²⁰and we were never into that, you know. I didn‘t want to share my space or my husband or any of those things that they were all sharing, but now as I get older, it‘s really nice to, especially in our community, to kind of live communally, because, you know, you only have to have one tractor, you only have to have one tiller, you need one person with a cow, somebody with chickens, and it just helps break up all the work, you know. It allows for everyone to be able to take a vacation and we‘re just fortunate that we have two kids that live around²¹ us so that we can all share the….it‘s….see I understand now why communal living is

such a luxury, it really helps.

MC – Yeah, and that‘s here and I think it‘s a really special experience, and I think that the kitchen is a really large part of this community; it brings everyone together

Barb – Well, it does… There‘s just something about eating together, and it‘s the saddest part of our society right now is that families don‘t eat together. And I don‘t know, hopefully some of the young people in this camp will take that home with them, and realize how important it was for everyone to eat together and share the day together²².

MC – My family always did.

Barb – We always did too²³.

Barb – It is. It‘s really a good place to sit around and catch up.

MC – Well, so you‘re not a musician.

Barb – I‘m not a musician²⁵.

MC – How did you escape that?