‘Godfather of Folk’ Joe Wilson keeps traditions alive

A sunburned blonde woman leaned over the makeshift fence next to the Heritage Stage. People snaked past her and two toddlers as they trudged downriver or upstream to take in more music.

“Joe! Joe Wilson,” she hollered. “Come here and let me give you a hug.”

Wilson turned around Saturday afternoon to see who was talking to him. When his eyes met Sally Chadbourne’s, a sly grin spread across his face. The 65-year-old man shuffled over to plastic fencing, spread his arms wide and embraced the Castine resident in a bear hug.

Although he’s been called Mr. Folk Festival, the Godfather of Folk, and the man who has single-handedly kept traditional mountain music from dying, the executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts is just Joe to his thousands of friends around the world.

A few hundred of them showed up this weekend for the 66th National Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront.

Chadbourne and her husband, Del Davis, know him from their days as staffers on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, one of the groups that each year divvies up the federal pie and gives a tiny portion to the NCTA and other national arts organizations.

At times on Saturday, Wilson was so busy being glad-handed, lobbied, back-patted and revered that he barely had an opportunity to listen to the music that filled the air. When he did find a moment alone, he stood next to the stage, hands in his pockets, head bobbing up and down just enough to keep time to the music. In a way, he resembled a bobble doll on the dashboard of a Mercedes.

His solitude never lasted long. Wilson often cocked his head to put one ear closer to the mouth of someone who just had to tell him something. The other ear was heeding the music.

Wilson was raised on a farm in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee. Music was plentiful, but expectations were low.

“If I’d have been a truck driver, I’d have been considered a success,” he said Saturday.

His father played the harmonica and sang in a gospel group. His mother sang old English ballads. His aunt, who ran a boarding house, played a fretless banjo. Wilson tried playing the bass, but said he either didn’t have the talent or the patience to become proficient at it.

Today Wilson lives in two different worlds, the political realm of Washington, D.C., and the hills of east Tennessee, where his roots are still deeply buried.

Wilson shows no signs of retiring, but after a kidney transplant a few years ago, he has been forced to slow his pace a bit. He had his own golf cart and driver over the weekend to take him from one stage to another. Everywhere he went people threw their arms around him and bent his ear.

Only when he hosted a workshop Saturday afternoon on the tiny Two Rivers Stage under the Joshua L. Chamberlain Bridge did Wilson get a chance to hear uninterrupted the music he’s championed for decades. On stage, he displayed two of the many reasons he has built a reputation as an uncompromising force in folk arts: He traced the roots of the dobro and slide guitars back to ancient Egypt and brought together two award-winning artists for the first time.

Wilson introduced dobro master Jerry Douglas with Chuck Campbell, slide guitar player. The two, both winners of the 2004 National Heritage Fellowship, had heard of each other and listened to one another’s music but never played together. Where the Kenduskeag Stream meets the Penobscot River, the two musicians jammed without rehearsing under Wilson’s watchful eye.

“Joe’s been an inspiration to me, directly and indirectly,” Douglas said Saturday afternoon as he rode back to the hotel to change clothes between sets. “He’s been really good to me and turned me on to a lot of different music.

“He planned this,” he said of his pairing with Campbell. “He threw us together today because he knew we needed to meet.”

Douglas, who was in a band with Ricky Skaggs when he was a teenager, met Wilson in 1980. Although this was his first performance at the NFF, he has been on four world tours with Wilson sponsored by the U. S. Information Agency.

Douglas said that while other festivals feature a certain type of music, Wilson has kept the national festival focused on bringing together a diverse group of musicians that draw from traditions previously heard only in the most remote corners of the globe.

That, too, is a reflection of Wilson’s diverse background. Before taking on the job at NCTA in 1976, which included a substantial pay cut, he was a country record producer, a door-to-door salesman, a civil rights reporter, a publicist and a marketing consultant. As executive director of the NCTA over the years, he has put to use all those skills.

Wilson continues to produce recordings, but on CD instead of vinyl. He’s cobbled together nearly 20 collections of music ranging from Appalachian to Cajun, Irish to Mexican, rockabilly to New Orleans jazz and gospel to Piedmont blues. As the marketing consultant, he has an exclusive distribution deal with the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain, which has 487 locations nationwide in 41 states.

He still metaphorically goes door-to-door throughout the U.S. and around the world seeking out music he hasn’t heard, crossing cultural and racial lines. As a marketing consultant, his name has become synonymous with the NFF. He still attends the festivals that have grown from it.

Wilson said Saturday that he hopes to be back on the shores of the Penobscot River next year for the American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront. Bangor officials Saturday night gave him the key to the city just to make certain.

As he rode back to the festival Saturday afternoon along a dusty path that runs parallel to the railroad tracks, Wilson said that what he would miss most about Bangor is the people. He said that everyone has been wonderful to work with.

If the weekend is any indication, however, those people will find Wilson. He may follow the music, but the people will follow Joe – bending his ear, throwing their arms around him, seeking advice – while he keeps one ear always turned, always tuned to the music.