“Can you believe we’ve been doing this — creating our own tradition — for 24 years?”
Katy Mitchell introduces one of the first performers, Jacob Johnson, on the opening day of the Ocrafolk Music and Storytelling Festival held June 7-9. Katy is Gary and Kitty Mitchell’s daughter so for her, the near-quarter-of-a-century of music-making has been woven into the better part of her life.
The festival founded in 2000 by Gary Mitchell and “Fiddler Dave” Tweedie along with their host band Molasses Creek has forged a niche for itself not unlike the distinctive charm of the place it’s held, on the barrier island no one gets to by accident: Ocracoke.
But getting there is part of the adventure. Coming from Greenville, a two-and-a-half hour ferry ride from Swan Quarter becomes a pleasure cruise when spotting performers in a vehicle less than an arm’s length away.
Seasoned attendees joke that the lineup includes some of the best musicians you’ve never heard of —but should have. And that makes the festival experience rather like discovering unbroken sand dollars or Scotch Bonnets in the surf: musical treasure hunting moments of giddy delight. Songs about sketchy motels, alligator underpants and dandelion breezes chase away cares of everyday life.
Guitar virtuoso and singer Jacob Johnson from Greenville, S.C., introduces an original song about a motel in Fayetteville and North Carolinians can’t help but laugh.
“You know you’re in trouble in these places when they give you an actual metal key,” he confides to the audience. “The roaches are smaller than the key, but it’s close. There’s no mice because the feral cats keep them away. But there’s free HBO.”
The song lyrics include a description of the lady at the front desk who “kind of looks like Steven Tyler, especially when she says ‘Walk this way.’” and “police tape around the ice machine.”
Johnson sports a Sammy Davis, Jr. t-shirt, jeans with cuffs turned up at the ankles, and white tennis shoes.
He is full of surprises, from playing all up the neck of his guitar (with his right hand) to singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee” in tribute to composer Richard Sherman who passed at age 95 just days before the festival.
“The key to originality,” he says, “is stealing from people who do something different than you do. I love stealing from piano players.”
At that, Johnson breaks out into “Georgia on my mind,” followed by Roger Miller’s “England Swings.”
But Greenville, N.C., also is represented, by Lipbone Redding, who brings his bubble maker on stage with him, reminding the audience of his slogan, “More bubbles, less troubles.”
When Katy Mitchell introduces him she says, “The first time I heard Lipbone — I think it was at Gaffer’s — my soul left my body.”
He holds up a set list scrawled on a brown paper grocery bag and says, “Apparently this set is brought to you by Food Lion.”
Like scouring the unspoiled surf at dawn with not another soul on the horizon, audience members can’t help but be dazzled by the diverse array of performers on The Golden and Berkley stages, the Barn, or the intimate Workshop Stage.
At least four groups include siblings, with two sets of twins. The Clements Brothers smooth away all the rough edges with their upright bass/guitar duo and mellow vocal harmonies. From the workshop stage they share details of their upbringing, including having parents who were folk musicians that sang them to sleep, to having two older brothers, including one who played trombone, joking,“which we all know is the best instrument for a career.”
When asked whether his upright bass had a story, Charles (who is 9 minutes older than George) explains it was sold to him as a “German church bass” from the 1800s. It has extensions that look like a series of small capos allowing the bass to go down to a low C. The brothers share a song they wrote for their dad who passed in 2019, “Never Alone.”
The Fontanelles from Wilmington include twin brothers, and Ocrafolk alumnus Tiff Jewell jokes that she has coached them to behave themselves and to edit a few words in certain songs to make them appropriate for the family audience.
Sisters Cassie and Maggie MacDonald hail from Nova Scotia, performing interchangeably in Gaelic and English with an occasional display of traditional footwork.
The Biscuit Eaters, a family band from Surry County, includes their pastor dad, homeschooling mother, and five children, with the youngest fiddle player at just age 6 (and just so — her birthday took place during the festival).
The age range of performers is just as wide as the musical styles, including storyteller Rodney Kemp, who has been present for all the Ocrafolk festivals since the beginning, reciting, “The Touch of the Master’s Hand.” Norfolk Virginia folk musician, Bob Zentz, who suggested the festival name of “Ocrafolk,” is celebrating his 80th birthday.
When Saltare Sounds, a group of multinational classical instrumentalists, accompanied by dancers and actors take to the barn stage, barefoot, one of them explains that for the group performing together has been something of a “research project,” trying to understand a sliver of what it’s like to communicate with each other’s medium.
But they add with a simplicity that speaks to the performer-attendee reciprocity of the unique festival (and it’s just as true as when hunting elusive seashells): “You don’t have to find the narrative — you can find your own narrative.”
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