BLUFF MOUNTAIN FESTIVAL
I have read announcements of the Bluff Mountain Festival for several years but never visited it. It is a festival in Hot Springs, about a half hour downstream from Marshall on the French Broad river. It takes place yearly on the grounds of the Hot Springs Resort and Spa where people have come through the 20th century to soak in the hot springs as cure for their ailments. The town of Hot Springs was flooded during the Helene flooding with the downtown stores and restaurants and the spa being badly damaged. They are slowly being rebuilt.
But the festival takes place on a wide field under shade trees which the flood didn’t damage. A number of tented booths were set up in a large square and off to the side there is a small bandstand where traditional music and dancing and ballad singing were the program for the day.
The first booth I encountered was a Million Memory Project, people who were collecting stories and photographs of Appalachia which will be put on line and into books. This is the kind of stories and photographic documentation my friend Rob Amberg has spent his life collecting and has included in a number of books of photographs including his latest published book, Little Worlds, a thousand of which newly published and waiting to be sold were washed away by Helene’s flood (Photos and stories at robamberg.com).
The second booth welcomed me to Marshall by registering me to vote. In Democratic Asheville my vote is going with the tide and has little value, but here in rural Republican Madison County maybe it will make a difference. The friendliness and eagerness with which I was registered to vote was heartwarming.
There were food booths and craft booths but the big attraction was the mountain music and clogging performed at a bandstand with a plywood clogging surface in front of it. It took a few photographs and spatial videos of the musicians and the dancers which included here.
CLOGGING
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0bcgHhYkd4oP9_myCVtwH-DHQ
WALTZ
https://share.icloud.com/photos/071X3k7FYLFnRci_VAzEAph9A
BAND
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0beHE29GPGwptLNv3GNAmt5Lg
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 