Road trip to White Springs for old Florida and the Florida Folk Festival

What if there were an event you could attend this Memorial Day weekend that would be safe, and fun and refreshing to the weary spirit, without having to book a flight or take out a home loan to pay for the trip? The answer is an old-fashioned road trip to the annual Florida Folk Festival, May 27-29, at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs, Florida.

More: Artist, advocate Mel Meo was a Pine Island treasure

White Springs is 60 miles north of Gainesville, making it a 4 1/2 hour or so drive from Fort Myers. It’s an “old Florida” town of mossy oaks and antique shops on the bank of the Suwannee River, populated by maybe, at a stretch, a thousand people.

If you have never visited White Springs or the Stephen Foster State Park, or the Florida Folk Festival, “one of the oldest and most revered state folk festivals in America,” and “Florida’s Best Cultural Event, ” “…recognized by the Southeast Tourism Society as a ‘Top 20 Event’ in the southeast United States,” there is no better time than now to do so.

This three-day festival is your chance to discover the “music, dance, stories, crafts and food that make Florida unique.” And you will need all three days to experience and truly enjoy the whole of it, so book rooms NOW, anywhere as close as you can get to White Springs.

A Smorgasbord Feast for the Senses

The following is a mere overview of this phenomenal event that, best of all, takes place outdoors in the free, fresh, healthy air of north Florida country, where you can lean against a pine tree to sample some hand-cranked ice cream, and dance yourself sleepy under a star-bright sky each night. The festival is a feast for the senses—all five of them:

• Your first sense will be excited by the unusual, colorful, and fascinating sights you will encounter at every turn. In the Florida Remembered area, for example, you’ll see frontier trapper traders, and farmers in a cracker camp threshing barley and grinding corn. In the Seminole family camp area, you’ll find Seminole women at whirring sewing machines making traditional patchwork clothing. And in the crafts section, your eyes will widen in astonishment at the artistry of some 25 craftsmen and women selling everything from handcrafted acoustic guitars to gourd banjoes, from handwoven apparel to Hungarian embroidery, from Florida nature-inspired stained glass to handcrafted, primitive-Florida-style home furnishings. Here you can watch a blacksmith forge everything from barbeque tools to children’s toys, a spinner making rag rugs on a ridge heddle loom, and a woodcarver turning Florida bamboo into flutes, whistles, and bird calls.

More: Where have all the flowers gone (gladiolas, to be precise)?

• Your sense of hearing will be fully awakened by the sound of music—the music reflecting the wonderful diversity of cultures that have flavored the history of Florida, from Florida fiddling to Dôdô Awoko from the republic of Côte d’Ivoire of Africa; from old-time banjo (predating bluegrass!) to Spanish Flamenco performed by Master Artists of the dance. You can revel in Caribbean-style music, like reggae, as well as Haitian-style dance music performed by the Karibbean Groove, who are, incidentally, a band of Haitians who met in a church in Immokalee where their families were farmworkers.

Among these traditional artists (sponsored in part by the Florida Department of State Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts), you will enjoy the early 20th-century style of Cuban music performed by Grammy-nominated José Elias. Puerto Rico is represented by Plena Es, a band playing a combination of bomba, “the 17th-century music created by West African slaves on Puerto Rico’s sugar plantations,” and plena, “ mixed bomba with indigenous Taíno Indian music, jibaro music of the island’s mountain farmers, chamber music of the Spanish colonizers and the rhyming verse of urban satirists.” “The essence of the instruments…” says the band’s founder, “…creates such a powerful force that it doesn’t matter where you are from. I bet you will move.”

And, as if the international music of these traditional artists were not enough, music lovers can satiate their appetites at the amphitheater performances, over the three nights of the festival, of special-guest musicians who are international recording stars, inductees in every music hall of fame in existence, and winners of every known music award in genres as diverse as rock and roll and sacred steel (a type of music described as “an inspired, unique form of gospel music with a hard-driving, blues-based beat”), of Americana, or “harmony-based folk-rock,” and psychedelic bluegrass by the Firewater Tent Revival, of Florida folk music and tropical rock. Songwriters/singers and Grammy winners like Jim Stafford, Billy Dean, Bertie Higgins, and Del Suggs are just a few of the featured artists performing under the stars each night of the festival. Not to mention John McEwen (co-founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt band, and producer of the platinum, Grammy Hall of Fame album “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” named by the 2004 ZAGAT survey, “the most important record in country music.”)

• Your senses of smell and taste will draw you irresistibly to the food that is as diverse and delicious as part of the entertainment as the crafts, history, and music of this folk festival phenomenon. Come hungry for breakfast and stay all day, because no invitation to sample the cultural diversity of Florida is as compelling as the aromas of fried chicken, cornbread, and collards, of smoked mullet, and hoppin’ John, Mexican empanadas and Greek gyros, fried okra, catfish, corndogs, and roasted turkey legs. In this multi-cultural extravaganza of food choices, you’ll find everything in beverages from chai tea and latte to fresh-squeezed lemonade and pineapple smoothies. And for dessert, how about homemade ice cream and fruit cobbler, fried snickers or sweet tater pie, a root beer float, or just for the fun of it, a cloud of spun-sugar, pink cotton candy?

• Your fifth sense, of touch, will find satisfaction in workshops where you can test your dexterity at weaving with saw palmetto and cabbage palms, or try your hand at drawing music from Florida pioneer-era instruments, like the dobro, the dulcimer, and the banjo. Matter of fact, you really ought not to leave the Florida Folk Festival in Stephen Foster’s memorial park without at least running your fingers over the strings of a banjo. It is inconceivable that anyone ever wrote more songs for and about banjos than Stephen Collins Foster.

Foster was not, as one might imagine, a native Floridian, or even Southern-born. The man who wrote “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” and the Suwannee River song was born, educated and lived all his life in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York.

PostScript

In the preceding description of the amazing Florida Folk Festival, I have not scratched the surface of its entertainment. I didn’t mention, for instance, that festival organizers provided for the gratification of your sixth (paranormal) sense, as well as your five (physical) senses. Modeled upon the spiritualist activities at the famous Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp in Volusia County, Florida, psychic readings are given throughout the festival.

Nor did I ask if you’d like to dance. If you love dancing, you may take contra dance, or 19th-century folk dance lessons, learn the swing or the Haitian voodoo pop dance. Or just get up on the Heritage and Dance stage under the stars on Saturday night and do your own thing.

But here’s what I’m thinking; the dreamiest way to end your long weekend at the Florida Folk Festival is to slow dance with someone you love, singing softly,

"Way down upon the Suwanee River,

Far, far away,

That's where my heart is yearning ever,

Home where the old folks stay."

For more festival information, please visit floridastateparks.org/FloridaFolkFestival.

Cynthia A. Williams (cwilliams1020@gmail.com)

If you go

What: Florida Folk Festival

When: May 27-29

Where: Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs

Information: floridastateparks.org/FloridaFolkFestival

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Road trip to White Springs for old Florida and the Florida Folk Festival