“For a While They Live a Few Feet Off the Ground”

Abstract

In this article, I use ethnographic data and twenty-five interviews collected over a period of four years at the Walnut Valley Festival, an annual folk musicians’ festival, to explore how attendees construct and maintain a meaningful sense of “place.” I argue that place is created through the repetition of traditional rituals that both physically and symbolically transform space into what participants call “home.” Of these, the most important are musical rituals in the form of “jams.” As a cultural performance, and through repeated participation over the years, musical ritual synthesizes the past and present, a merging that generates shared, heightened emotions among participants that leads to states of liminality and communitas. It is through attendees’ continued participation in musical, cultural performance, and the shared meaning, emotion, and memory that it provides that place is created and maintained at the festival.

Keywords

place cultural performance festival ritual music

Introduction

Scholars working within a wide variety of disciplines have become increasingly concerned with how “place,” or “space made culturally meaningful” (Shutika 2011, 10), represents “the one medium (along with historical time) through which social life happens” (Gieryn 2000, 467). As a result, literature emphasizing the importance of place has contributed much to our understanding of the social world(s) in which we live (Jackson 1994; Soja 1989; Sack 1997; Casey 2001; Leach 2005). Indeed, “all social phenomenon are emplaced” (Gieryn 2000, 467), or in other words, everything occurs somewhere. That somewhere, and the meanings that individuals create, shape, and attribute to it and within it, has become an important foundation for scholarly research on a plethora of topics, ranging from micro-level studies of self and identity (Prohansky, Fabian, and Kaminoff 1983; Milligan 1998) to macro-level studies of region and nation (Cuba and Hummon 1993; Duyvendak 2011).

Some particularly interesting and largely unexplored venues for the study of place are “musicians’ festivals,” or festivals where most of the music heard is collaboratively produced in the form of “jams,” “pickin’ circles,” and “song circles” by musician attendees who camp within the festival site for extended periods of time, some for nearly one month. With few exceptions (Gardner 2004a, 2004b; Scully 2005; Gruning 2006; Stimeling 2007; Cohen 2008; Barefield 2010), musicians’ festivals have been relatively ignored by scholars of all disciplines. Out of these, Gardner’s (2004a; 2004b) work represents the only study that explores issues of place at such festivals.

In this article, I use ethnographic data and twenty-five interviews collected over a period of four years at the Walnut Valley Festival, an annual folk musicians’ festival that takes place in Winfield, Kansas, to explore how attendees construct and maintain a meaningful sense of place at the festival. Now in its forty-fourth year, the Walnut Valley Festival (referred to as “Winfield” by participants) has provided what attendees call a “home” or “family reunion” to between thirteen and twenty thousand people who flock to the festival site each year. Over time, participants have created and maintained elaborate camps for multiple generations of biological and festival “family” within two large campgrounds at the festival. Throughout the years at Winfield, attendees have shared music, history, and memories; they have shared joys and sorrows, weddings and memorials; they have shared each other. Most importantly, every year (some for all forty-four) they come together to (re)create and share Winfield as a place to call “home.”

Place is physically and symbolically created and maintained at Winfield through ritual and cultural performance, specifically, the rituals of Land Rush, creative camp site construction, and the cultural performance of musical ritual. The rituals of Land Rush, where participants are allowed official entry into the campgrounds, and the ritual of creative camp site construction serve to physically transform empty space (i.e., a large field) into a meaningful place (i.e., “Winfield”). These camp enclaves, once created, play host to the highly ritualized, collaborative production of music in the form of “jams,” which symbolically transforms space into place through cultural performance, or the linking of the past and present through ritual (Turner 1969). Over time, by-products of cultural performance, specifically heightened emotion, liminality, and communitas, are attached to Winfield as a meaningful and distinctive place for participants. As a musicians’ festival, Winfield is purposefully created and recreated over the years by participants to serve as a place where they can repeatedly engage each other in musical communion at their leisure for extended periods of time. Through musical ritual as cultural performance, Winfield is endowed with the meaning, emotion, and shared memory characteristic of “places” (Tuan 1977; Hummon 1992; Milligan 1998; Gieryn 2000; Duyvendak 2011; Shutika 2011).

Literature Review

Musicians’ Festivals

While there has been much written on the history and revival of folk and bluegrass music (Artis 1975; Carney 1974; Adler 1982; Cantwell 1984; Smith 1984; Feintuch 1993; Nusbaum 1993; Rosenberg 1993; Scully 2005; Gruning 2006), there is a distinct lack of attention paid to festivals embedded within these musical traditions. With few exceptions (Gardner 2004a, 2004b; Scully 2005; Gruning 2006; Stimeling 2007; Barefield 2010), musicians’ festivals, as opposed to music festivals (festivals in which attendees play no role in producing the music or (re)creating and maintaining the festival), have been almost entirely overlooked by the scholarly community. Musicians’ festivals are unique venues for sociological investigations of place, because the place itself, as well as the music heard within, is actively produced by members, as opposed to festival organizers. Most scholars only briefly mention musicians’ festivals in relation to other topics, such as the music scene in Austin, Texas (Stimeling 2007), or the folk music revival in general (Scully 2005), which leaves Gardner (2004a, 2004b), Barefield (2010), and myself (Cobb 2011; Holyfield et al. 2013) alone in our focus on such festivals.

The most thorough exploration of musicians’ festivals, particularly as they relate to place, was conducted by Gardner (2004a, 2004b), who asserts that the newly revived interest in bluegrass music is associated with traditional American “roots” reminiscent of Old Appalachia. Through a focus on participants’ vocabulary of motives, Gardner (2004b, 156) explores how festival attendees perform a perceivably more authentic version of place, identity, and community than what they find within the “alienating and isolating conditions” of daily modern life. Attendees create festivals as “portable communities,” or “temporary forms of mobile gemeinschaft community,” where participation is “driven by a quest for intimate community, open and equal social relations, and simple living, elements [participants] found in short supply in their everyday lives” (Gardner 2004b, 155). Gardner (2004a, 2004b) concludes that festivals provide a retreat for those who need a break from the modern working world, while also providing participants with an inclusive, intimate, and simple form of community, or sense of “place,” that ties participants together, confirming identity, and providing a sense of nostalgia surrounding values lost in modernization.

Indeed, many of these themes are prevalent and remain important in both my past research (Cobb 2011; Holyfield et al. 2013) and the study at hand, as well as research surrounding the history and revival of folk and bluegrass music in general (Rosenberg 1993). Elsewhere, I have written with others on the importance of nostalgia and nostalgic narratives at Winfield (Holyfield et al. 2013); however, I do not conceptualize nostalgia at musicians’ festivals as a “retrospective” representation of an idealized past consumed by modernity. Instead, nostalgia can be understood as “prospective” (Boym 2001) in the sense that it is anticipated and generated through “emotionality, repeated performance, and ritual,” particularly those that involve “actively engaging the musical performance as creator or listener” (Holyfield et al. 2013, 459). In addition to conceptualizations of nostalgia, this research advances Gardner’s (2004a, 2004b) in two noteworthy ways, both of which are mostly related to a focus on different festivals from a different perspective.

First, while Gardner (2004a, 2004b) and I focus on different sites, scant research has succeeded in verifying the “decline of community” thesis, and as a result, it has received “increasing criticism for both theoretical and empirical reasons” (Hummon 1992, 257). Extensive contemporary research has shown that community should be understood in terms of processes, such as how individuals subjectively apprehend their environments, rather than generalized theoretical approaches that highlight the “broad ecological structuring” and consequences of modern life (Hummon 1992, 257). Nearly all of the attendees I spoke with at Winfield are involved in various musical communities outside of the festival. For example, many gather weekly or monthly to play music with other musicians in the form of “pickin’ parties” and “jams,” attend house concerts and local gigs, participate in other musicians’ festivals, and some even create their own little musicians’ festivals that involve a weekend of camping and jamming. Such frequent involvement outside of Winfield suggests that participants are not experiencing a lack or decline of community in their daily lives, a point I return to later in the discussion

Secondly, as I show in the analysis section, while attendees do look forward to a “symbolic break” (Gardner 2004a) from their jobs and responsibilities associated with daily life, what I refer to as “liminality” (Turner 1969), participants often go to great lengths and expense to reconstruct a version of the modern world at Winfield, bringing with them many of the luxuries it provides. In this way, Winfield looks and feels more like a creative reconstruction of a particular version of modernity, as opposed to an isolated haven in which to escape it.

In short, participants in this study were not drawn to the festival because they sought a form of escape from a society that was modernizing too rapidly, or because they found community in short supply in their daily life. Instead, what is of interest at Winfield is not what participants are running from, be it modernity or lost values, but instead what they are running towards (Holyfield et al. 2013), which, for all of my participants, is “music” and “family.” While participants do enjoy a leisurely break from the working world to “play,” what makes Winfield a distinctive “place” is the meaning, emotion, and memory that attendees attach to it, and this extends far beyond an adherence to values consumed by modernity. All groups that share experience over time will create and shape systems of shared meaning that tie them together in various communities, subcultures, and idiocultures (Fine 1979). As Turner (1969) suggests, the meaningful aspects of this process are connected to ritual and heightened emotional experience, or the “interpersonal glue” of group life (Barsade and Gibson 1998, 81).

Cultural Performance, Place, and Music

Whereas some have conceptualized festival as a cultural performance (Turner 1969, 1982; MacAloon 1984; Fass 2006; Shutika 2011), there is no work to date that explores the interrelationships among cultural performance, place, and musicians’ festivals. That cultural performance, music, and place, as they exist separately, are all characterized by their relationship to emotion, memory, meaning, and shared experience renders the neglected topic of how they work together worthy of sociological attention. Additionally, that both cultural performance and music, conceived of separately, share the ability to generate heightened emotion, liminality, and communitas makes these interrelationships all the more productive to explore.

Cultural performance can be conceptualized as an “attempt to manifest, in symbolic form, what [the community] conceives to be its essential life” (Turner 1982, 206). Turner (1969) argues that there are five “moments of experience” that set festival apart from “normal” life, all of which involve heightened emotional experience engendered through synthesizing the past and the present through ritual. For the purposes of this article, I conceptualize rituals as repetitive performances that “exemplify and reinforce the values and beliefs of the group that performs them,” thus providing a sense of continuity and community (Bial 2004, 87). Here ritual is a crucial component of cultural performance at festivals that offers “liminality,” described as a temporary break in the rules and structures of routine life (see also Fass 2006), or a moment both “in and out of time” (Turner 1969, 96). Liminality leads to a state of communitas, a “modality of social relationship” that represents “an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated . . . community or even communion of equal individuals” (Turner 1969, 96).

By-products of cultural performance, such as heightened emotion, liminality, and communitas, have a profound effect on the creation of, and attachment to, place. For example, in describing a Cinco de Mayo festival as a cultural performance, Shutika (2011, 230–31) draws on Turner (1982) to argue that “the development of shared experience and memory in place is significant. Festivals and other common experiences provide a break from day-to-day routines and enable participants to engage one another. Such experiences connect people to the place in significant ways.” Not only do these shared experiences connect people to the place, but they also connect the people to each other, confirming a sense of collective identity that renders places all the more meaningful to members.

Situating the “essential life” (Turner 1982) of Winfield (i.e., musical ritual) as a form of cultural performance highlights the importance of emotions and memory in terms of creating and maintaining a sense of place at the festival, as “place” is by definition inextricably related to emotion, shared meaning, and memory (Hummon 1992; Tuan 1977; Milligan 1998; Gieryn 2000; Duyvendak 2011; Shutika 2011). Space becomes place “as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan 1977, 6), as it is “interpreted, narrated, perceived, felt, understood, imagined” (Gieryn 2000, 465), “intimately experienced” (Duyvendak 2011, 106), and remembered. For Gardner (2004a, 52), place at festivals is “inextricably tied to individuals’ narratives and memories of that place,” and Milligan (1998, 2) uses the term “interactional past” to describe how “the more meaningful the interactions that occur [in a place] (or are otherwise perceived as linked to it), the greater the place attachment to that site.” Similarly, for Shutika (2011, 231), “memories are always rooted to particular places so that the places in return hold memories.” For participants at Winfield, memories are often associated with, and created through, the ritualistic and collaborative production of music in the form of jamming, where the past plays an important role in generating the emotion, liminality, and communitas that symbolically transforms Winfield into a meaningful place for attendees.

For participants, Winfield, as a musicians’ festival, is all about creating, listening, and sharing music together, giving music a “very particular and sensual role in the production of place” at the festival (Cohen 1995, 434). Many have explored music’s role in constructing “symbolic boundaries” (Roy and Dowd 2010) around types of people who enjoy certain types of music in certain types of places (see Bennett and Peterson 2004 for a collection of such work). Most germane to this research, however, is that place can be “‘produced’ (defined, represented, transformed) through musical practice” (Cohen 1995, 434; see also Duffy 2000). Kotarba, Fackler, and Nowotny (2009, 313), for example, argue that music plays an important role in the transformation of empty “space” to meaningful “place,” where music can be understood and employed “as a cultural map of meaning.” Furthermore, as a music “scene,” Winfield represents an “expressive” and “voluntary” forum where “the production and consumption of music…draw[s] people together and symbolize[s] their sense of collectivity and place” (Kotarba, Fackler, and Nowotny 2009, 313). Similarly, as a social process, “musicking” (Small 1998) draws people together, encourages interactions and relationships, symbolizes collectivity within a place, and thus invests “spaces” with the emotion, shared experience, and memory that render them “places” (Cohen 1995). In short, “music does not then simply provide a marker in a pre-structured social space, but the means by which this space can be transformed” (Stokes 1994, quoted in Cohen 1995, 438).

In addition to its capacity to transform space into place, music fosters both liminality and communitas. Remarkably close to Turner’s (1969) definition of liminality is Tuan’s (1977, 128–29) description of the relationship between space and music; “Music can negate a person’s awareness of directional time and space. . . . Music and dance free people from the demands of purposeful goal-directed life, allowing them to live briefly in what Erwin Strauss calls ‘presentic’ unoriented space.” Perhaps it is music’s role as the “language of emotions” (Cooke 1959; Farnsworth 1969; Juslin and Sloboda 2012) and its capacity to engender liminality, to “free people from goal-directed life,” that render it a productive foundation for communitas. In connecting music to cultural performance, Turner (1969, 165; see also Holyfield et al. 2013) suggests that stringed instruments, such as the acoustic instruments celebrated at Winfield, foster a sense of communitas: “It is even more fascinating to consider how often expressions of communitas are culturally linked with . . . stringed instruments. Perhaps in addition to their ready portability, it is their capacity to convey in music the quality of spontaneous human communitas that is responsible for this.”

In summary, while Gardner’s (2004a, 2004b) work represents many important parallels to my research, I understand place as created and maintained through continued and collaborative participation in traditional rituals over the years, particularly the cultural performance of musical ritual. Like cultural performance, which has been described as serving an important function in the creation of place (Shutika 2011), “place” itself is characterized by its relationship to both emotion and the past. Music’s relationship to emotion (Carless and Douglas 2009; Clarke, Dibben, and Pitts 2010; DeNora 2012; Juslin and Sloboda 2012), its capacity to create and transform place (Cohen 1995; Kotarba, Fackler, and Nowotny 2009), and its ability to foster liminality and communitas (Turner 1969) renders the cultural performance of musical ritual a primary vehicle through which Winfield is endowed with the characteristics definitive of “place.”

Methods

Setting

The Walnut Valley Festival is located about an hour from Wichita, in the small, rural town of Winfield, Kansas. In addition to the two campgrounds, the festival setting includes the Winfield Rodeo Grounds where attendees watch performances by popular bluegrass or folk musicians on one of three large stages. Many of those who attend the stage performances are “weekenders” who do not camp for extended periods of time in the campgrounds, but instead come and go at their leisure to enjoy the “official” festival that takes place from Thursday to Sunday each year. During this time, participants can peruse numerous booths with arts and crafts, music, clothing, instruments, memorabilia, or take part in a great variety of musical contests and workshops. The rodeo grounds, where the “official festival” takes place, is located between two large campgrounds known as the Walnut Grove and the Pecan Grove, which are geographically separated by the main, paved road that leads out of the fairgrounds and onto Main Street. Participants’ sense of place can be understood as complex and multifaceted, having much to do with their particular campground and the camp they call “home.”

The focus of this article is on the “musicians’ festival” that takes place within these large campgrounds, particularly the Pecan Grove, where members set up “home” for their stay at the festival. Within both campgrounds, participants establish unique and elaborate camps that are set up in the same geographic location from one year to the next as part of a festival tradition that hinges upon members’ early arrival for the ritual of “Land Rush.” During the festival, all day and night, thousands of musicians can be found wandering from camp to camp to participate in jams under large billowing parachutes hung from trees, or on makeshift porches and stages made from tarps, wood, and truck beds. Oftentimes musicians will start spontaneous jams in the middle of the dirt roads within the campgrounds, or march down the winding paths in groups playing music. Indeed, the term “musicians’ festival” refers not to the activities and performances during the “official festival” but rather the experience of playing music with others in the campgrounds, many of whom rarely attend performances on the main stages.

Gaining entry into the research setting proved relatively simple. Like all participants, getting into the festival was as easy as buying a ticket and packing up the car. As a musician myself, I developed an interest in the world of folk music after being invited to my first “pickin’ party” where musicians gather at a friend’s home to play music and enjoy each other’s company. Shortly after my introduction to pickin’ 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 “Comfortable Shoes Camp,” a ready-made community in which to set up my Winfield home.

Data Collection and Analysis

I utilized a grounded theory approach to data collection and analysis (Charmaz 2006), choosing to immerse myself in the social world of the Walnut Valley Festival for four years, approximately forty days at the festival in total. As Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (2011, 3) argue, “immersion gives the field worker access to the fluidity of others’ lives and enhances his [her] sensitivity to interaction and process.” Primary data for this research includes ninety pages of fieldnotes and twenty-five interviews with both veterans and virgins of the festival. Out of the twenty-five interviews, five included two participants at a time and one included three so that, in total, thirty-two attendees participated in this study. Because of their extensive knowledge and experience at the festival, the vast majority of interviews took place with “veterans,” although I did interview two virgins and provided autoethnographic accounts (Ellis 2004) on my own “virgin” status. I interviewed participants staying within both campgrounds, although the majority of interviews and observations took place in the Pecan Grove. Thirteen of my interviews were conducted with members from Comfortable Shoes Camp, one focus group–type 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, Our Grass Is Blue Camp, and Chicken Train Camp, to name a few).

All of my interviewees appear exclusively white, eleven are women, fourteen are men, and all of them are from the United States, with the exception of Paul, who lives in France. The age of participants ranged from early/mid-thirties to late sixties and early seventies, the majority falling somewhere around fifty. The demographic of my interviewees is somewhat consistent with the demographic at Winfield, where older white males tend to be overrepresented at the festival, and after four years of attendance, I can count the number of nonwhite participants I have seen on one hand. Finally, because the festival is composed of not only musicians but also nonmusicians who still participate in musical ritual (singing/harmonizing, dancing, clapping, requesting songs), twenty interviewees were musicians who played regularly in the campgrounds and five were attendees who simply enjoy listening. Interviews were open-ended, audio-taped, conversation style, and lasted approximately an hour, although some lasted two and three hours.

In addition to interviews, participant observation at the festival played a critical role in identifying important aspects of “place” at the festival, such as rituals, rites of passage, artifacts, and props developed and displayed by attendees. Also, by participating in jams throughout the years, I became highly aware of the deep emotional connections that are forged through music, and developed many lasting friendships and “family” simply by sharing music with others. Because I was just learning to play guitar my first year at the festival, it was not until my second year that I could participate in jams; thus, it was in my second year, and particularly in my third and fourth, that I finally became (and felt like) a card-carrying member of the community.

Additionally, I employed the use of recorders and video cameras to capture stories, songs, the atmosphere and environment of the festival, and observable dialogue among attendees. For supplementary data, I examined sources such as Walnut Valley Festival programs, the daily “newspaper” entitled the “WVF Voice,” the official Walnut Valley Festival website, 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 and other attendees, and Internet videos of the festival.

Following my grounded theory approach to data collection, I coded my interviews and fieldnotes according to grounded theory practice, which includes initial coding, open coding, and extensive memo writing (Charmaz 2006). As themes emerged, my coding process was guided by Turner’s (1969) definition of liminality, communitas, and cultural performance as ritual, for example, evidence of heightened emotionality, evocation of the past, revival of feelings associated with the past, and linking of the past and present. After my first two years at the festival, I reached a point of ethnographic saturation, which remained the case during my third and fourth year. In addition, I employed participant validation or “member checks” (Lincoln and Guba 1985), where many congratulated me on capturing the “feel” of the festival. Upon reading my work, many participants wrote confirmations in the sidelines such as, “You get it! . . . Emotion is what it is all about for us!” and “I’d say you ‘nailed it’—Good job!”

While this research focuses on community and “family,” it is important to note that Winfield caters to a certain “type” of person and is not exempt from various points of contention. For example, the festival appears to be a largely white place that includes only those who can afford, or otherwise acquire, tickets, camping fees, camping necessities, travel costs, and time away from work. Additionally, there are frequently squabbles over who gets to camp where when Land Rush arrives or frustration when other musicians do not share the same definition of “jamming,” for example. In short, even at Winfield, race, class, gender, and age rear their ugly heads in terms of “who” can attend, “who” cooks camp meals, or “who” does the dirty work of setting up enormous tents. People still feel angry, frustrated, hurt, and excluded at times. My intention in this article is not to ignore these issues, but instead to focus on others.

I now turn towards my analysis, which begins with a description of the physical transformation from space to place through the rituals of Land Rush and creative camp site construction. I then turn towards the largest portion of this analysis, the symbolic aspects of place creation through musical ritual as cultural performance. In this section, I first describe participants’ shared interest in creating and listening to music, which represents a primary draw of the festival. I then describe how this manifests itself in the highly ritualized and collaborative production of music in the form of “jamming.” Following this description of jamming as ritual, I outline the characteristics that render it a cultural performance, specifically the synthesis of the past and present, liminality, or what attendees refer to as “Winfield time,” and communitas, or what participants describe as a “family reunion,” another principal draw of the festival. Throughout, I connect these themes to the creation and maintenance of a meaningful sense of place for participants to call “home.”

The Ritualistic Transformation of Space to Place

The Physical Transformation of Space to Place

Land Rush

One of the first rituals to take place at the festival is “Land Rush,” which typically occurs ten days before the “official” festival begins. During Land Rush, hundreds of attendees who have arrived weeks in advance are finally allowed entry into the campgrounds. As attendees pass through the main gate one by one, they are provided with a number that corresponds to their place in line. The lower the number, the sooner the vehicle will be allowed to enter the campgrounds and secure a site in the Walnut Grove or the Pecan Grove. This is of the utmost importance to participants, especially for established camps who have camped in the same geographic location within the campground for many years. After receiving their number, attendees are directed to a large field near the rodeo grounds where they will camp together until the day of Land Rush. The much anticipated Land Rush starts at 7 am, and despite the enormous number of vehicles, the process itself is highly ritualized and brimming with excitement and energy. After my first experience with Land Rush, I was rather blown away by how efficiently hundreds of vehicles made their way into the campgrounds:

True to tradition, the ritual starts at approximately seven. They start moving the Walnut Grove first (something one veteran Pecan Grover thought was terribly “unfair”), and there is rumored to be around 500 vehicles moving into what some campers call “Hollywood” (i.e., the Walnut Grove). While I was expecting muddy chaos, Land Rush, as it turns out, is very systematic and efficient. The WVF staff knows exactly what they are doing and are surprisingly calm, cool, and collected. Attendees are up and ready to go at seven a.m., know what to do, where to go, when to go, and how to go about it. I watch as campers methodically drive out of their lines and onto the main road that leads into the campground, dismantling the “RV jungle” one vehicle at a time. After the Walnut Grove is moved out, they start moving the Pecan Grove in, and one by one many happy campers find their way home, honking and shouting all the way, which according to Mama Cass, is a Land Rush tradition. [Fieldnotes 2010, 16–17]

Experiencing Land Rush is like experiencing the systematic becoming of Winfield as a whole, but the festival itself is a place composed of many different smaller places. For example, Winfield is a place composed of two campgrounds, the Walnut Grove and Pecan Grove, which represent different places in their own right. Within these campgrounds are camp enclaves, smaller places where attendees set up “home” for their stay. The ritual of Land Rush marks the very beginnings of the transformation from “space” to “place” on all of these nested levels. Before Land Rush, the campgrounds are just another empty (and oftentimes muddy) space; there are no groves, no camps, no festival. However, as soon as Land Rush begins, as soon as the first vehicle crosses over the main road, the campgrounds are slowly filled with the people who make these spaces “places” and call them “home.” As the winding lines of noisy, overjoyed attendees make their way to their traditional grove and campsite, it begins to look, sound, and “feel” like Winfield. Immediately after campers enter the campgrounds via Land Rush, they begin constructing their camps, transforming those empty spaces into places as well.

Creative camp construction

Similar to the construction of most “homes” at Winfield, setting up a camp like Comfortable Shoes is no easy task; it takes a lot of work, and more importantly, a lot of working together. The entire perimeter of the camp, which encompasses approximately 250 feet, is sectioned off by campers, an enormous white RV (playfully named “Moby Dan” by Shoes campers), and gigantic army tents. These army tents are provided by long-time veteran Elvis, who also supplies the shower, the camp parachute, and every tool imaginable. Elvis’s army tents function as the kitchen (complete with refrigerators, enormous tables, a sink, and almost everything one might have in one’s kitchen at home), and the “mess tent” or “breakfast kitchen,” which houses another refrigerator, giant table-like cast iron skillets, and a cast iron smoker for making breakfast. The mess tent doubles as a storage facility, typically for instrument cases and chairs, and also serves as a place to jam in the event of renowned and unfortunate Kansas weather. Mayor Dan, along with camp volunteers, cooks what one camper calls a “Thanksgiving Breakfast” every morning for the entire camp, and brings all the equipment in the mess tent, like the large, antique griddles, which are vestiges of World War II. The other three army tents serve as a suite-sized room for Shoes campers, the “lodge” (another large, enclosed area where attendees can congregate), and the shower room (complete with a much appreciated, fully functioning, walk-in, fiberglass shower).

Barb and Rachel, coleaders of the kitchen, bring almost everything needed for cooking; utensils, pots and pans, herbs and spices, large bowls, homemade breads, and canned goods. Rachel and Barb do the bulk of the planning and cooking of evening meals, which feed the entire Shoes Camp family. Although there are certainly key players in terms of the actual construction of Shoes Camp (like Elvis, Mayor Dan, Barb, and Rachel, for example), everyone plays an important role as part of the Shoes family. Many campers bring fresh vegetables and fruits from their gardens, extra chairs, tables, silverware, plates, and lights. Volunteers get ice (which often involves chasing down the ice truck), run errands, pick up trash, help with tents, unload supplies, and take turns watching children. The entire camp comes together to unload trailers, assemble all the army tents, organize the kitchens, and hoist the giant parachute and “chandelier” that serves as a beacon for Shoes camp. In the case of setting up camp, it truly does “take a village.”

My first year attending the festival, I am stunned by the lengths some go to when creating their own, unique little villages. The tradition of the camp site decorating contest, which some camps take very seriously, pays homage to the importance that campers place on constructing a creative, personal, and oftentimes extravagant place to call home. The Pecan Grove is packed with bikes, scooters, golf carts, enormous tents (with multiple rooms and even closets), mind blowing campers and RVs, VW busses, parachutes, tie-dye tarps and tapestries, refrigerators, grills, ovens, fire pits, creative camp-name signs, lazy-boys and other types of furniture, lamps, fans, air conditioners, intricate flags, blow up yard ornaments (such as the large penguin at Penguin Camp), Christmas lights, little bridges connecting camps, tiki torches, carpets, televisions, improvised canopies, props (OZ Tin City Limits has the entire cast of the Wizard of Oz), and many vehicles are parked to where they showcase hilarious bumper stickers or are cluttered with bumper stickers from festivals past. One camp has an entire living room set up under a large canopy complete with a big screen TV and multiple couches for watching football games (something my friend Zac excitedly reports upon arrival). Daina from Chicken Train Camp tells me that on a number of occasions they tried to bring out live chickens, but the attempt always somehow ended in morbid failure. One camp showcases an enormous peace sign made out of Christmas lights that hangs over the camp like a beacon, and another has constructed an entire medieval village, complete with castle-like buildings and games. Yet another camp has hung a gigantic fork in a tree directly above a prominent “fork” in the main, dirt road.

Camp names also represent this type of playfulness and creativity, like “La La Land” and “Flaming Duck Fart,” for example. Although playful, many camp names reflect a shared identity, such as “Stillwater Camp” and “Comfortable Shoes” (what Elvis’s late wife and beloved Shoes member wanted to name her first album). Established camps become, over time, a marker for personal and collective identity, where individuals can “express their individuality and solidify their identity as being part of something unique” (Gardner 2004a, 53). In constructing their camps, participants appropriate their space and render it a place by providing “identity markers” (Hebdige 1979), such as large signs that display camp names, which creates an intricate, colorful, and elaborate “vernacular village” (Gardner 2004a, 10) that become “a significant draw to festival participants in their own right” (p. 41).

In addition to markers of personal and collective identity, camps also serve as landmarks that assist participants in orienting themselves within the campgrounds. Because they are constructed in the same geographic location from year to year and often involve the same artifacts (such as Shoes Camp’s chandelier beacon, for example), established camps provide a way of mapping out and navigating the campgrounds. For example, one might provide directions to another camper by saying something like, “take that left like you are going to Stage Five, and then when you get to the giant penguin hang a right.” In this way, camp construction is a crucial part of actually creating place, but once constructed, camps also play an important role in terms of navigating that place, of knowing where you are and where you are going.

The ritual of campsite construction is a tradition that represents the (re)creation of a “layered interactional network of sensations, feelings, and sentiments that unite experiences with the physical, sensual environment to create a meaningful sense of being or feeling ‘at home’” (Gardner 2004a, 49). Through creatively constructing campsites in the same geographic location with and for “festival family,” participants come together year after year to purposefully build and shape an unfailing sense of place in which they have an important role in maintaining. Through ritual, campsites become cultural “emblems” that “explode with meanings for they are invested with the accumulated energies and experiences of past practice” (Abrahams 1982, 161). Thus, camps, and by extension, the groves and Winfield as a whole, become meaningful places because attendees continue to actively participate in their physical creation and maintenance throughout the years, some for decades.

Once created, these festival “homes” play host to the heart of Winfield: Making music together. Land Rush and creative camp construction play important roles in the physical transformation from space to place at the festival, but it’s important to note that, because they serve as rituals that involve the (re)creation and attachment of meaning and emotion to place, they play an essential role in the symbolic transformation from space to place as well. The reverse is equally true; the collective production of music serves to physically demarcate place (e.g., “purist” bluegrass in the Walnut Grove versus more eclectic styles in the Pecan Grove).

Combined with the rituals of Land Rush and creative camp construction, the cultural performance of musical ritual generates the shared emotion, liminality, and communitas that renders Winfield an important and distinctive place to call “home” among participants. While Land Rush and camp construction do endow Winfield as a place with meaning and emotion through ritual, camps are purposefully built to house music and “family,” without which there would be no Winfield in the first place. I now turn to participants’ shared love of music and musical ritual, arguably the most important components of the symbolic creation of place.

The Symbolic Transformation of Space to Place

Music and musical ritual

Participants at Winfield unanimously agree that the primary draw of the festival is music and community, where a shared love of music is the foundation for community, something I return to later. This is not surprising as creating and listening to music with others is the very reason for the festival. As Donna jokingly reminds me, “people don’t keep coming back because they hate music.” The vast majority of attendees, when I ask why they come to Winfield, simply respond, “Well, I love the music,” “Of course the music,” “It’s the music, of course,” “It’s the jam sessions, for me,” and “I love music. That’s why I come, the experience of playing with others.” When I ask for clarification on what music means to them, most find it difficult to articulate. Many often rely on ready-made narratives, such as “music is the universal language,” by far the most common response, for assistance in describing the importance music has in their lives. After a few moments of quiet contemplation, Bob says quietly, “it’s just part of my soul,” and veteran Pecan Grover, Tally, suggests that music is powerful because you can literally “feel music,” but admits that it is difficult to put into words. Likewise, Jacob explains his love for music by saying, “I’ve had people come up . . . and go, ‘man, that harmonica just like touched me in my soul, like no really, it went right through me and I felt it. . . . That’s why I’m in music” (his emphasis). For Jimmy, music is essential because “we’re made of music.” For Mitch, “music transcends everything.”

In the context of Winfield, music carries immense meaning and emotion for participants, and not just those who play instruments. From a symbolic interactionist perspective, both music and ritual, as they exist separately, serve as vehicles through which to create, shape, share, and attach meaning to our social worlds; our identities, experiences, and communities. The most important and prevalent activity that takes place at Winfield combine both music and ritual in the form of “jams,” or “pickin’ circles,” which can easily be found anywhere throughout the festival, day and night. Although jamming is often spontaneous, innovative, and great fun, it is also highly ritualized and based on shared understandings about the “right” and “wrong” way to jam.

Consistent with other egalitarian qualities of the festival, pickin’ 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 sit or stand in a circle, the size of which depends on the number of musicians involved, and audience members usually form a circle around the musicians. Participants in the circle typically select songs to play in an orderly fashion (clockwise or counter clockwise), and the musician who initiates the song usually sings that song and is responsible for choosing “leads” or “solos” around the circle. 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). No trap sets (a set or collection of drums) or electrified instruments are permitted at Winfield, and Sandy, a talented pianist, says that to really be a part of the group, “you need to play a stringed instrument.” In fact, almost 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, Monty shares with me the “Ten Jammandments,” a playful (yet true) list of guidelines for appropriate jam conduct. As he reads them aloud, 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 in my fieldnotes:

THE TEN JAMMANDEMENTS BY CHARLIE HALL AND ROBERT ROSENBERG: FROM THE FOLKNIK JAN/FEB 2002

THOU SHALT TUNE THY INSTRUMENT—There are too many good cheap tuners around not to do this.

THOU SHALT LISTEN—If you can’t hear the lead instrument or vocalist, then consider yourself too loud.

THOUGH SHALT PASS—When handing off an instrumental solo, try to follow a pattern either clockwise or counterclockwise. If you want to skip the next solo or pass it on to the next picker, be sure that the next person is aware of the handoff. No one wants to start his or her solo in the middle of a song.

THOUGH SHALT WELCOME OTHERS—Open up the circle if others want to join. The jam can’t be too big if people are polite.

THOU SHALT SHARE IN THE SELECTION—Open up the choices of songs to the pickers around the circle. Don’t monopolize the jam.

THOU SHALT TRY NEW STUFF—Once in a while a participant may suggest original material or one that is out of character with the jam. This is A-OK (refer to Jammandments #2 and #4)

THOU SHALT LET OTHERS KNOW WHEN YOU ARE NOT JAMMING—Bands may sometimes be rehearsing and may need to exclude non-band members from jamming. If so, an explanation would be nice for the would-be jammers.

THOU SHALT NOT RAID—Don’t interrupt an active jam by calling musicians away to begin another jam. (Bob’s note: Also, don’t raid and take over a jam by having your full band suddenly decide to sit in on a jam and end up playing all your own songs.)

THOU SHALT KEEPTH THEY RHYTHM STEADYTH—Errors in rhythm are most difficult to overcome. Avoid adding or dropping beats. Play quietly if you can’t keep up and pay attention (refer to Jammandment #2.)

THOU SHALT NOT SPEED – Do not start a song too fast for the others to play. Once everyone has had a turn to lead, then one may announce that the tempo is about to increase.

What makes the “Ten Jammandments” so funny to participants is that every “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, 24) work surrounding humor in bluegrass, where oftentimes things are “seen by all to be humorous precisely because it is all so necessary and familiar.” 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 pickin’ circles.

It is not only the highly ritualized character of jams (the “essential life” of Winfield), music’s capacity to be “felt,” or participants’ shared love of music and musical communion that renders musical ritual a type of cultural performance. Although these aspects are all important, it is through repeated participation in musical ritual over the years that attendees are afforded an opportunity to synthesize the past and present and generate feelings of liminality and communitas, and it is in this way that musical ritual can be understood as a form of cultural performance. That music, liminality, and communitas define Winfield as a place for participants and represent the primary draw of the festival indicates that the role of cultural performance in the symbolic creation of place cannot be underestimated. It is to these characteristics and by-products of cultural performance that I now turn.

Synthesizing the past and present

After missing a year at Winfield in between my second and third year, I was struck by how moved I was when returning to the festival. After the first night of my third year, I record this flooding of memories in my fieldnotes:

So many different, yet subtle, things about Winfield embrace me and remind me that I have finally made it home: The distant sound of picking and the ringing sounds of laughter, the warmth of the day and the (somehow still surprising) cold of night, the winding river that flows strongly on the perimeter of the Pecan Grove, the big gravel hill that leads to the Walnut Grove, the reverberating sound of the ice man yelling “IIIIIIIIICE,” the lingering smell of dinner time followed soon after by the smoky smell of campfires, the familiar camp signs that mark the established camps that I have seen over the years, the sight of parachutes in trees and musicians underneath, and of course the familiar faces. . . . Faces I haven’t seen in two years. [Fieldnotes 2012, 1]

Milligan (1998) suggests that attachments to “place” can be attributed to memories people have about those places. 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, and the place, all the more meaningful. When these shared experiences and memories are connected to musical ritual, the result is all the more powerful. For Turner (1969), cultural performance is highly emotional precisely because it merges past and present experience, and for participants at Winfield, this is particularly true in relation to music.

There are many traditional songs that circulate throughout the campgrounds and within certain camps over the years that evoke powerful memories and emotions from past experiences and jams at the festival (Holyfield et al. 2013). For Paula, playing 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.” Mayor Dan recalls 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 Beppe Gambetta (a world-renowned acoustic guitarist), tears streaming down her face. Monty’s favorite Winfield memory revolves around a jam with Elvis’s late wife Tammy, where they played “Moon Dance” (a popular Van Morrison song) under a full moon with a flute player. Every time he plays “Moon Dance,” that precious moment is relived and the story is retold. I can no longer play Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son” without remembering a time when Cello Bob and I played it at the festival with the sun on our faces and the sound of the cello richly ringing through the camp. For me and my participants, reliving these experiences through song is a merging of the past and present in that it evokes the memories and emotions attached to the song in the very moment of its (re)creation.

These emotions and memories are not so much attached to the song itself, but instead they are attached to Winfield as a place and the people who sing them there. To illustrate, during my first night at the festival on my third year I was able to participate in a jam with my Winfield “family” for the first time in two years. The emotion of finally sharing music together at Winfield, music that I had not heard or played in years with “family” I had not seen in years, is simply overwhelming:

Sitting in the circle at Winfield for the first time brings inexplicable and visceral joy and comfort. At one moment I am so fulfilled that I feel myself begin to tear up, and I just close my eyes and hold my guitar close, my gratefulness overcoming me. Occasionally I look at Mama Cass, Monty, Mitchell, or Jake and we’ll exchange a smile, a wink, or a little nod of understanding. We play all our favorites—Mama Cass’s “Milk Cow Blues,” Carl’s “Sweet Carolina,” my “What’s Up” (Matilda’s favorite), Frank’s “If I Had a Boat,” Monty’s “My Conservative Girlfriend.” Later during the jam, Paula and Harper arrive and I run to Paula and hug her so hard I almost suffocate her. Paula pulls up a seat next to me and each time it comes around to one of us, we play one of our favorite songs to play together: “Why You Been Gone So Long” and “Boots,” songs I would never initiate without her at Winfield, much less play by myself at home. It absolutely fills my soul, and in this moment, I am truly, utterly happy. I’m finally home. [Fieldnotes 2012, 3–4]

Later that week, during a conversation about this experience with Paula and Jimmy, Paula remarks on music’s capacity to trigger memories that are relived in the present, adding layers of emotional significance to the songs and the people who play them at Winfield:

You have a connection and I think that’s big with a lot of people, you know, you have some sort of—like, “Turn Your Radio On” for example I have a huge connection to, and it’s all because of Monty, like I don’t know what it is about that song. . . . I’ll hear that song and I’ll just ball, you know. . . . Even thinking about it is kind of tearing me up just because you know it’s deep rooted, it’s deep inside and you can’t control it, and I think that’s where those relationships bond at a certain point in time and whatever song you’re hearing is that connection, you know. It’s deep. Music is so deep. [Interview, 2012]

In response, Jimmy is quiet for a moment before saying, “Monty will play some songs and man it’s just like that—I’m like right there in that moment.” For Turner (1982), cultural performance is the finale of an emotional experience, where linking the past and present in “musical relation” provides the very foundation for establishing meaning. Turner (1982, 18) suggests that “an experience is incomplete . . . unless one of its “moments” is “performance,” an act of creative retrospection in which “meaning” is ascribed to the events and parts of experience. . . . Experience is both living through and thinking back.” Through song, individuals are able to reexperience the past and share a collective memory through music (Gvion 2009, 60). For Paula, Jimmy, and many others, traditional songs played by “family” over the years carry emotion precisely because they link the past and present. The result of this linkage through cultural performance takes the form of heightened emotional experience, liminality, and communitas, which are attached to, and characterize, Winfield as a place.

Liminality and communitas

One important result of the merging of the past and present through ritual is liminality. Here the division between Winfield and the “real world” becomes a visible reality and where festival, or what Abrahams (1982, 163) calls a “fantasy world,” provides attendees with the opportunity to experience “times out of the ordinary.” It is during these extraordinary experiences that participants “escape the mundane pattern of everyday existence to find a more fundamental reality, a sense of meaning and belonging” (Barthel 1997, 12).

In a song about musicians’ festivals, Maxwell sings it best: “I’ve been to the festival with all of the people, they’re laughin,’ they’re singin’, they’re dancing around, with smiles on their faces, showing all of their graces, for a while they live a few feet off the ground.” Indeed, participants do seem to live a few feet off the ground while at the festival, particularly because Winfield looks and feels like the reverse of everyday life in so many ways. For example, there is absolutely no sense of time. The only exceptions to this are when one wants to see a performance on stage, watch a competition, take part in a workshop (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, an unusual occurrence) is by a drastic change in temperature signaling nightfall, or when one suddenly realizes it is dark outside. Otherwise, the joke is that we are all on “Winfield time.” In addition, attendees often put aside activities that are representative of “real life,” not the least of which is work. For example, Monty says that he refuses to even “pick up a newspaper” at the festival, and both he and Dylan agree that the festival is a time “to get away.” Elvis adds, “you so forget all the rest of your crap. You leave the rest of your life behind.”

Gardner (2004a) suggests that participants attend bluegrass festivals as a “symbolic break” from their daily lives, finding that many attendees felt the festival was an opportunity to flee the “real world” that is traditionally represented by an overload of work and responsibility. I understand this “symbolic break” to represent Turner (1969) and Fass’s (2006) notion of liminality, a by-product of cultural performance. Musical participation outside of festival life has the capacity to bring about liminality, of existing “betwixt and between.” For example, Nash (2012, 591) suggests that “participation in the barbershop hobby creates a space between contemporary society and actually being in that society. Through their music, barbershoppers distinguish between their interpretation of society and their membership in it.” Repeated participation in musical ritual as cultural performance renders Winfield a liminal place, a characteristic that is partly responsible for participants’ interpretations of Winfield and fellow attendees as symbolic and more authentic versions of “home” and “family.” Such sentiments reflect another important by-product of cultural performance: Communitas.

When asked about the draw of the festival, overwhelmingly the response is music, but also community. Many participants remark that the festival is like a family reunion every year, and liken the festival to “home.” For example, Jimmy responds by saying, “The music and my friends. It’s home.” Dylan answers, “I love the people here. You know . . . it’s like we have a family reunion every year.” Similarly, Matilda agrees that “it has to be the community, the fellowship; it has to be the fellowship. . . . We’ve come here so much it is like coming home.” After a moment, Dan says through a big smile, “Gosh, it’s the people. It’s the friends. There are people I see here, only here once a year, and it’s like you come here and it’s like you never left. It’s a feeling of home.” Daina echoes these responses by saying, “It’s like a reunion . . . a family reunion.” Similarly, Jacob adds, “It’s like a big ole family reunion kind of deal because you see so many faces you’ve seen since that early time.” Monty agrees with these sentiments (and also hints at liminality), saying, “It’s a family reunion. . . . It’s like check your beliefs, your politics, your religion at the door and accept this communal happening.” Many participants add that not only is Winfield like a family reunion, it’s with the “family that you get to choose,” which again pays homage to Gardner’s (2004a, 2004b) assertion that participants find festivals and their members to be more authentic versions of “home” and “family.”

That participants feel as if they are having a family reunion each year speaks to the deep sense of community felt at Winfield, what some call the “Winfield spirit” ( Holyfield et al. 2013). For example, during my experience in Shoes Camp, I often saw the whole camp come together to ensure that everyone had everything they could possibly need.

I’ve noticed several illustrations of not only sharing everything, but at times sheer sacrifice. Jackson stood by where we plugged in for electricity to ensure that it wasn’t unplugged, everyone here has helped to construct our massive camp, we let Florence borrow our extension cord, folks brought food from their gardens at home (Dan and his wife Lisa brought Shitake mushrooms that are now drying in the sun), Mama Cass helped Paula pay the customary food fee for the week, I let Jimmy borrow my capo, Verda borrowed electrical tape, Elvis lost something important and everybody around was looking for it, Mama Cass bought pizza for anyone in the near vicinity, Lacy took Paula to the store, children share toys, mothers help with babysitting, and we take turns helping wash dishes and preparing meals. This place is a total functioning community—these people have known each other for years. [Fieldnotes 2010, 21]

As the above excerpt illustrates, “Festivals continue to be, perhaps above all else, a technique of celebrating plenty by engaging in a spotlighted display and a sharing of goods and of energies with all of the community” (Abrahams 1982, 176). Participants at Winfield come from all walks of life; there are those who have to borrow gas money to get there and then sleep in their cars, and there are those that stay in RV’s that cost upwards of a million dollars. Despite these differences, however, Winfield represents a “communion of equal individuals,” or a celebration of an “essential and generic human bond” forged through a shared love of music and musical experience (Turner 1969, 96–97).

Matilda puts this best when she says, “My Winfield experience includes all the camaraderie and all the friendships and everything, but my autoharp experience is the musical experience that also would envelop those things, but also envelops all the music.” Nearly all the participants I spoke with understand music to be 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. Upon his first year at Winfield, Zac, a construction worker, suggests that “Music is like the bonding agent.” Harper says that music is responsible for “the soul family” at Winfield, and both Paula and Jimmy agree that music is a more authentic form of communication, allowing people to connect and “bond” with each other in more emotional, meaningful ways. It is in this way that the experience of communitas at the festival can be understood as a by-product of musical ritual as cultural performance. Feelings of an idealized version of “community,” “family,” and “home,” despite a plethora of social differences, arise from past and present experience with musical ritual throughout the years that connect people to each other (as “family”) and to Winfield as a place (as “home).

Discussion

While Gardner’s (2004a, 2004b) research offers profound contributions to this study, as well as the study of musicians’ festivals and place in general, participants at Winfield are not drawn to the festival as an escape from modernity (instead, they are more likely to pack modernity and bring it with them). However, this is not to say that participants at Winfield don’t need a break from the working world to “recharge their batteries,” as many campers put it. Elsewhere (Cobb 2011), I suggest that Winfield is affectionately called “band camp for grown-ups” because it provides opportunities for leisure, fun, and play. Mitchell (1988, 57) suggests that “society without play grows stilted and stunted;” thus, following a desire for leisure, attendees create festival as a “place” to “enjoy their kind of music and briefly live the lifestyle associated with it with little concern for the expectations of others” (Peterson and Bennett 2004, 10). Because it is, in important ways, a liminal and “symbolic break” from daily life, Winfield directs us to consider the never-ending search for meaning and perceived authenticity, or what Turner (1969, 15) describes as “the perfect expressive form [of] . . . experience.”

I also did not find that attendance was driven by a lack of community in participants’ daily lives. Instead, as previously mentioned, most participants take pieces of Winfield home with them, often gathering weekly or monthly with other attendees to jam. As Turner (1974, 56) notes, “communitas in ritual can only be evoked easily when there are many occasions outside the ritual on which communitas can be achieved…[I]f communitas can be developed within a ritual pattern it can be carried over into secular life.” Indeed, many keep musical ritual alive outside of the festival, and thus create various other “places” that extend beyond the campgrounds. While these places are fun, important, and keep the spirit alive, they are not Winfield for myriad reasons. Simply put, participants love Winfield because of the music and people there; the festival is a place that is purposefully (re)created year after year to engage both of those things for extended periods of time with thousands of other people.

I understand place creation at Winfield as a product of repeated social processes, interactions, and rituals that provide the shared emotion, meaning, and memory characteristic of, and attached to, “places.” Without these, the campgrounds are what they are the rest of the year; empty “space.” Winfield is characterized by musical ritual, liminality, and communitas, all of which represent primary draws of the festival that keep attendees returning year after year. “Place” at Winfield is constructed through the repetition of traditional rituals that both physically and symbolically transform space into what participants call “home.” Of these, the most important are musical rituals. Borrowing Turner’s (1969) definition of cultural performance, the creation and reception of music is unanimously considered to represent the “essential life” of the community, where it is ritualistically and collaboratively produced and reproduced in the form of jams. Through repeated participation over the years, musical ritual provides an opportunity to link the past (i.e., shared experience and memory of jams or songs) with the present (i.e., sharing experience recreating jams or songs in the unfolding moment). This merging of the past and present through musical ritual generates shared, heightened emotions among participants that lead to states of liminality and communitas that are then attached to Winfield as a place. It is through attendees continued participation in musical, cultural performance, and the shared meaning, emotion, and memory that it provides, that place is created and maintained at the festival.

Conclusion

The study of “place” has become an important topic of scholarly inquiry, but few address musicians’ festivals, only one has examined place at these festivals, and no research explores the interrelationships among musicians’ festivals, place, and cultural performance. In an effort to update and extend Gardner’s (2004a, 2004b) work on place and musicians’ festivals, I have argued that Winfield, as a place, is created and maintained through ritual, particularly musical ritual as cultural performance. Through a review of the literature, I have shown that both cultural performance and music share the ability to generate heightened emotion, liminality, communitas, and a sense of place (Turner 1969; Tuan 1977; Cohen 1995; Shutika 2011; Juslin and Sloboda 2012). I have also shown that place is defined by the meaning, emotion, and memories attached to those places (Milligan 1998; Gieryn 2000), where memories and the past play important roles during cultural performance and the creation and reception of music (Holyfield et al. 2013). When cultural performance and music are combined in the form of jamming at Winfield, musical ritual becomes a primary means for the generation and attachment of meaning, emotion, and memory to Winfield as a place.

Despite its contributions, this study is not without limitations. Half of my interviews were conducted with members of Comfortable Shoes Camp and may not align with the experiences of all attendees, although interviewees outside of Shoes Camp consistently shared similar feelings about the festival. On a similar note, two studies could be conducted on Winfield: One on the Pecan Grove and one on the Walnut Grove. There exists a joking rivalry between camps that deserves further exploration; for example, the difference between groves has been described as the difference between “democrats” and “republicans,” “partiers” and “squares,” and others describe the Walnut Grove as “Hollywood” because of the amount of RV camping, all of which speaks to many perceived differences between groves that could be explored. The vast majority of ethnographic data and interviews came from experiences and participants in the Pecan Grove; thus, this study does not examine “place” as it is created and experienced in the Walnut Grove. Also, consistent with Gardner’s (2004a) observations at musicians’ festivals, I observed that an overwhelming majority of participants are white and most musicians are white males, but I did not include an analysis of race, class, or gender in this study, all of which certainly impact how participants experience place and the festival. Additionally, despite the observation that a large majority of participants are over thirty, my interviewees are all aged thirty and above, leading to a neglect of younger generations who also attend the festival.

Future research could certainly fill these gaps. Also, it would be productive to examine how place at musicians’ festivals is experienced by “weekenders,” those who attend the festival for shorter periods of time, and those who opt to stay at hotels as opposed to the campgrounds. Furthermore, comparative research between musicians’ festivals, as well as other types of festivals, would only enhance our understanding of cultural performance and place as they relate to a variety of festival subcultures and settings.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

A great deal of thanks to Lori Holyfield, Margarethe Kusenbach, and the reviewers for their helpful guidance along the way.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Maggie C. Cobb is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include the sociology of culture, specifically the subfields of music and narrative identity, as well as social psychology, particularly the sociology of emotion.

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