Down in the Valley: Every September, the Kansas town of Winfield comes to life with the Walnut Valley Festival

This Saturday night I’m choosing the honky-tonk and fiddle tunes of the Wilders, who are playing their first grandstand show at Winfield. The whole dirt field between the stage and the grandstand is already packed when our group arrives. Most of the folks in front have been there all day. John McCutcheon, who’s been playing the festival for two decades, is leaving the stage after leading the audience in Pete Seeger’s “Well May The World Go”.

He tells the audience Winfield is a festival for performers who don’t mind interacting with festivalgoers, because “there’s no way to get from one stage to the other without going down the midway.” In the Seeger song, there’s a pact made between people singing with McCutcheon from the grandstand, “Well may the world go, the world go, the world go/Well may the world go when I’m far away.” They sing “sweet may the fiddle sound” but also “peace may the generals learn.”

Then the Wilders come onstage in their suits and cowboy hats. They lay into their first number: “Comb your hair and paint and powder/You act proud and I’ll act prouder/You sing loud and I’ll sing louder/Tonight we’re settin’ the woods on fire.” Hank Williams’ song is a good reminder that part of staying well is having a good time together, and the Wilders are famous for riling up a crowd. By the end of the show they’ve got some of us dancing and everyone yelling “Amen.”

When the main stages close, the show goes on in the campgrounds that surround the official festival grounds and line the Walnut River. Fourteenth Street divides the campgrounds according to bedtime and volume level, and maybe campsite cleanliness. North of the road, most of the festival’s 300-some RVs share the fields with orderly tent and trailer camps. South of the road is where it gets ugly when it rains (which it will, at least once). This is the Pecan Grove, a teeming web of Christmas lights, parachutes strung from trees, state flags and old school buses that barely made it to the festival. The West Campground operates somewhere between these two worlds.

People are just as serious about making camp as they are about making music. I’ve navigated the grounds by a two-story tall domino, walked through a miniature old west town, and had the opportunity to enter camp through an enormous pharaoh’s head. Campers put out picket fences, tropical flowers and hay bales, and some bring full kitchens with ovens, refrigerators and griddles.

These camps are the labor of more than one weekend. For the most serious Winfielders, the community begins forming at the Landrush, which starts at 7 a.m. one week before the first official day of the festival. Vehicles line up at the fairground gates and wait to claim a campsite. Some campers stake their usual spot and then commute to work and school until the main festival weekend; some take their annual two-week vacation.

Under a cloud of smoke from hundreds of campfires, the Pecan Grove never sleeps. This Saturday night, people from all over the fairgrounds have come to the Pecan Grove to join picking circles and check out the stages. The dirt roads through the grove are packed with strolling musicians and partygoers, and jam circles grow so big they block the whole road. I stop to hear a chorus of “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” played on guitars, washboards, a flute, a couple banjos, a drum, and some bones. Then it’s on to Stage 5.

Set in the Pecan Grove with at least three other unofficial stages, Stage 5 is a campground icon. Started by campers in 1987, the stage is the back of a 1954 Chevrolet flatbed grain truck with a frame built around it. Strung with flags, fabrics, and a system that makes it sound bigger, the stage reaches its peak at about 2 a.m. Around midnight, the Stage 5 crowd starts making enough noise to be heard across the fairgrounds. Both lesser-known and mainstage musicians perform. The Wilders got their start playing on the truck bed. “We were cheered on by the late-night fans at Stage 5. We’ve played the stage nearly every year since then,” says fiddler Betse Ellis.

Tonight, Jen and I are headed to the stage to catch the end of Split Lip Rayfield, the Wichita-based “heavy metal bluegrass” band famous for its ’65 Ford gas tank bass. This year the band has drawn a crowd so big that I have to stand back in someone’s campsite to listen. While I try to keep my foot up with the music, I notice my parents’ friend approaching. When I greet him, he replies, “That’s not music.” Jen and I try to convince him, and finally joke that he might want to leave the area before someone hears him and beats him up.

If there weren’t a different kind of music being played 20 feet from this show, there might be some brawls. But people have made Winfield work as a space for circulating music between generations, genres and cultural backgrounds.

I’m still waiting for someone out here in Pennsylvania to recognize my bright yellow WVF bumper sticker. Either way, I’ll be back next year for my fix.