Ray Noonan’s First Report from the
Philadelphia Folk Festival

The Philadelphia Folk Festival has been a big part of my life for many years. It’s been my end-of-summer ritual since 1972 when I lived in Philadelphia and was attending Temple University. The Festival began about ten years previously, driven by the sixties’ folk music revival and later fueled by the emerging youth culture and trend toward large outdoor concerts. Today, the love for the music has persisted. But this annual event, sponsored by the Philadelphia Folksong Society and held on the Old Pool Farm in Schwenksville, PA, not far from Philadelphia, has become for many of us long-time supporters something that has as much to do with the people as with the music.

I don’t think I’m alone in the following scenario: In 1972, I was still a working undergraduate student who didn’t have a lot of money. Because a number of my friends were volunteers on the festival Security Committee, I volunteered to work the required hours over the weekend, which allowed me to have fun and get to see the concerts for free. Today, I could actually afford to be a “paying customer,” yet the comaraderie that has developed over the years with the people I’ve met and known for these many years has kept me coming back as a volunteer. It’s become a reunion of sorts, seeing people and friends I went to school with, catching up with their lives, watching them, their children, and now even their grandchildren in the process of growing up. At the same time, I get to enjoy the fresh air under a hot, late-August sun, campfires and music under the stars, and maybe a thunderstorm, as occurred in 1996 on Friday night around midnight as the last act on stage was winding down. And with the new millennium came new opportunities to improve these reports, as I joined the festival Press/Promotions Committee (the results of which are gradually making it into these pages).

In that respect, it isn’t even so important who the performers are, although a wide variety of both greater- and lesser-known folk performers are always present representing an almost endless variety of musical styles. So in the spirit of one of the longest-running folk festivals in the country, I invite you to browse and share some of the random sights of the Philadelphia Folk Festival over the past decade or so.

Although the reports from the 1997 and 1998 Festivals were delayed because I was primarily focused on completing (and beginning to recover from) my doctoral dissertation at NYU, I expected subsequent Festival reports to be available soon after each Festival. That didn’t quite work out, as teaching and departmental responsibilities and various crises took precedence, and then the terrorist attack in New York disrupted life for many of us. By 2003, I was completing my latest book, the award-winning Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (CCIES), which, along with new crises, consumed me through 2007 as we put the book on the website of the Kinsey Institute. I invite you to stop back again soon as I begin to catch up on these reports. This site was once the best and most complete of its kind—and it will be so again.

On a technical note: The photographs in the 1996-1998 articles were somewhat of an experiment; they were taken with the Casio QV-10 LCD Digital Camera with color display—a pocket-sized, fixed-focus, 96-shot-capacity, available-light, simple camera. I was testing out the feasibility and quality of this relatively inexpensive way to take photographs in the field and download them to the Web with the least possible delay. Although I’m not used to not being able to focus on my subjects, the quality of these photographs speak for themselves, and are clearly acceptable within the limits of the Web and the quality required for this particular experiment and are tolerable for use in such non-critical applications. Nevertheless, the reader will certainly be able to see the difference between those photos that were taken with the Casio QV-10 as compared to those taken with a standard 35mm SLR camera that have yet to be developed, printed, and scanned. The 1999 photographs, in contrast, were taken with an Olympus D340R Digital Camera. This camera had the advantage of having a built-in flash, allowing better night photos. In addition, it had much higher quality images, the minimum size being 640 x 480 pixels, which I had to reduce by 50% to maintain consistency with the earlier photos. Most required some color correction, as the older ones did as well. In addition, this camera had better image-format options, which facilitated Web use without further conversions.

The 2001-2009 photographs were by far the easiest to deal with, as well as to shoot. I used the digital still capabilities of a Sony DCR-TRV330 Digital-8 video camcorder. In addition to the high-capacity memory stick that hold hundreds of photos, it features auto- and manual focus and zoom, in addition to auto- and manual aperture control. It produces 640 x 480 resolution images, which were resized (with gamma correction) to the standard format of these pages. The night shots were taken with the built-in infrared Sony NightShot system. All in all, I believe the Sony has produced the best images of this series. The main problem is selecting the best of the 9000-plus images taken! The 2000 images, on the other hand, were the most tedious. These images were extracted from 8mm videotape using a Snappy video capture device, or, later, using the analog-to-digital conversion and capture capability of the Sony camcorder.