12th Annual Rhythm & Roots Music and Dance Festival
Ninigret Park, Charlestown, RI
Labor Day Weekend, September 4-6, 2009
If you had a zydeeelicious bone in your body, and if you didn’t have an excuse, like, you were getting married or your house just burned down and your car with it, I know where you were last weekend. The 12th Annual Rhythm ‘n Roots Music and Dance Festival in Charlestown, RI.
Spectator umbrellas and tents at rear, seated audience in front of Main Stage (center), and 4000 sq.ft covered wood dance floor at top right
Thousands of music lovers thronged to sun splashed, sprawling, Ninigret Park to hear some of the best zydeco and Cajun bands in the land play their hearts out. Dance-aholics headed for the two huge, covered dance floor pavilions and sweaty-wet two stepped and waltzed all day long and well into the night.
There’s something about the Red Bull jolt of a zydeco band that cancels out muscle fatigue. You head for a seat to take a breath after a zippy two-step, an accordion starts up on the bandstand and you turn right around and scan the floor for a partner. Trust me, you don’t have to look far.
Variety abounds. It ain't nothing to see college aged girls dancing with silver haired gents or AARP women dancing with men young enough to be their grandsons. This is one of the only places in the dance world where age is just a number.
A few bluesy and country acts were booked, but for the most part you were listening to the crème de la crème of bands straight out of Louisiana. And to prove how sweetly insidious zydeco has become, a few homegrown bands from New York and Rhode Island/MA got thrown into the mix.
Listeners arrive early to stake out territory on the one-acre grass as close as possible to the outdoor Main Stage. And there are rules. Spelled right out in big print on the second page of the free program. As in “No standing in front of the Main Stage. Standing is permitted at the sides.” And “Sunshades, Umbrellas, etc. must be at the perimeter of the concert area. Please do not block the view of others.” It’s environmentally conscious, too. “Help us RECYCLE by disposing of trash and recyclables in designated containers.”
Louisiana musician Tab Benoit plays on the Main Stage
No rowdies, either, unless you count over-energetic people on the dance floor. For the record, I saw only one clearly intoxicated person from 1 P.M. till I left at 10 P.M. The festival is extraordinarily well thought out. Need first aid? To find the Lost Child Center? Lost and Found? 24 Hour Security? It’s all clearly marked. Staff members were visible all day long.
What kind of a festival would this be without merchandise to tempt you? African baskets, hand crafted jewelry, beads, fragrances, T-shirts, and my personal favorite, a “temporarily air brushed tattoo” parlor are lined up on one stretch.
Ethnic and regional foods along with all-American homemade ice cream are on another section. Pulled pork, seafood chowder, red beans and rice, blackened shrimp, Greek and Thai foods, and vegetarian stuff - they’re all here.
Another convenience, all food and beverages (including beer and wine) must be purchased with script (dollars called “bayou bucks”) sold at Food Ticket Booths. The music vibe is strong. People chat like NBFs in the occasionally long lines. One couple danced in the line waiting to dig in to regional food at Chili Brothers. The man would have been me.
Music pouring from the Main Stage is amped via seriously large speakers into one huge, 4000 square-foot, wood floored tent, Dancers occasionally step out to watch the band play. Another band plays directly to dancers on the floor of the Red Hook Ale Brewery and Newport Vineyards Dance Pavilion several hundred yards away.
I stumbled upon Cajun dancing in 2006.
“Do you dance?” Chris Ash, fiddle player for The Magnolia Cajun Band asked me after I’d interviewed her for a feature story for the The Dartmouth-Westport (MA) Chronicle.
Within a Lafayette minute, she had Dewey Balfa singing on a tape in her home office and I was learning the two-step. “I think you’ve got it,” she grinned, “We play next month in Seekonk, MA. Come on over and dance.”
Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole play at Red Hook Dance Ten
I did show up for that dance - got hooked then and there. Which is why it wasn’t a stretch to drive two hours each way to dance, eat, and dance some more for nine hours today. If you have that zydeelicious bone in your body, this kind of music and dancing is worth driving alot farther than that.
Rhythm ‘n Roots Music and Dance Festival Bands
Great Big Sea(Sun) • Hot Tuna(Sat) • Asleep at the Wheel(Sat)
Jerry Douglas Band(Sun) • Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole(F/S/S)
Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys(S/S) • Tab Benoit(Sat)
Lee Boys(Fri) • The Travelin’ McCourys(Fri) • The Duhks(F/S)
Mitch Woods & His Rocket 88s(Sun) • Eilen Jewell(Fri)
Keith Frank & the Soileau Zydeco Band(F/S/S) • Papa Mali(Sat)
Nouveaux Honkies(F/S) • Corey Ledet & HisZydeco Band(S/S)
Big Sandy & theFlyrite Boys(S/S) Preston Frank (F/S/S)
Ed Poullard(F/S/S) • Magnolia Cajun Band(S/S)
Occidental Gyspy Jazz Band(S/S) • Li’l Anne & Hot Cayenne(S/S)
Hot Tamale Brass Band(S/S) • Len Cabral(S/S) • Marc Levitt (S/S)
Want to listen to the concert music? Consider making a donation to mvyradio if you like what you hear.
Ninigret Park Festival Features
Main Stage with Huge Covered Dance Floor • Workshops • On-Site Camping • Dance Pavilion
Dance Lessons Daily • Fun Family Stage • Unique Vendors • Nightly Fais Do Do • Ethnic & Regional Foods
Bike Trails • Swimming Pond • State-of-the-Art Playground • 5th Annual Kids Cajun Academy (pre-register)
Easy access! Just off US 1. Ninigret Park Exit. Entrance half mile ahead.
Minutes from Ocean Beaches & Accommodations
Photos: Paul Tamburello
Life Friendly Gardens: Feed Them Love, Not Chemicals
Summer is still splashing around in Watertown. Several of the gardens listed in the Life Friendly Garden Tour last weekend happened to be within walking distance of my digs on Oliver Street. It's inspiring to see how many ways there are to create a garden, large or small, with familiar or unique plants, sculptures, outdoor furniture, or even objects cast away by others, that results in an aesthetically pleasing, even whimsical, space.
Don’t expect to see bags of Scott’s Turf Builder or spray bottles of Round Up on this tour. The Life Friendly Gardens Tour in Watertown today was a showcase of how to garden without using toxic chemicals (see sign at left surrounded by big red finger plants called Amaranthus).
The mini landscapes surrounding several of the 14 houses on the tour within walking distance of my house were impressive. I’m good at growing grass, a few hardy shrubs, and two beds of pachysandra, which, as you know, require the maintenance skills of a sodbuster.
Knowing and accepting my limitations around anything requiring green thumbery is an asset. No longer do I view creative landscaping and plants that appear to be ready for a photo shoot for HG TV with malaise and a sense of insufficient imagination, an utter lack of what George H.W. Bush labeled “the vision thing.”
A walk through these gardens has the same effect on me as it does on their creators. Sort of an earth bound “Tranquility Base.” One gardener calls her space an "urban patch of solace" after a long day’s work. Another calls hers a “healing garden, healing first of all for me, the gardener, who finds infinite renewal in its ever changing beauty through the seasons.”
Entrance to Sharon Bauer's "Healing Garden" at 62 Pearl Street, Watertown (click Life Friendly Gardens Tour above).
Gardeners, like artists of any stripe, enjoy showing their work to fellow gardeners or oooh and ahhhhh types like myself. Cutting in flowerbeds, adding rocks, stones, and outdoor sculpture, tiny hand constructed pools complete with goldfish, and finding the right plants that will flourish in your environment requires patience. Some of the gardens on the tour have been in process for years.
These folks share tips and information. There are no proprietary secrets in this group. They’re eager to give ideas to the neophytes and share cuttings or little starter pots with anyone who asks.
They’ve got Farmer’s Almanac mentalities and plant flowers that will bloom from spring to late fall. Never a dull month in their gardens.
One enthusiast on the tour lived in a large two family house that had been neatly divided into four compact condo units. Where you and I might use their shared, untended, shady back yard as an excuse to pave the whole thing and make a bigger driveway, this gardener saw as an opportunity. Armed with abundant enthusiasm and a vision of Versailles, she got the agreement of the other three owners to have at the bedraggled plot.
The result is a shade garden (left) chock full of several kinds of hosta and shade loving flowers plus funky, colorful little garden sculptures plonked around the shady stuff - “an urban perennial shade garden,” she says.
The son of one homeowner made a small rock lined pool and filled it with koi (goldfish) and comets and topped it with lilies that Monet would have loved.
The same gardener, Sharon Bauer, printed a pamphlet for visitors. “Wild flowers flourish around the edges, providing food for humans and animals. Milkweed attracts Monarch butterflies. Goldfinches flock to evening primrose seeds, mockingbirds to pokeweed berries. The pin cherry tree next to our driveway volunteered from a seed dropped by a bird, and now catbirds enjoy a feeding frenzy when the cherries are ripe. Bees love goldenrod. Plantain heals bee stings. Motherwort, yarrow, red clover, nettle, chickweed, lady’s thumb and many other 'weeds' provide good medicine.”
Henry David Thoreau, legendary naturalist who lived in nearby Concord, MA, would have been right at home in this intersection of random acts of nature and conscious acts of gardener. Maybe this is what he was thinking about when he said,"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
Homeowners like pt at large are shocked, perhaps enlightened, that many so-called 'weeds' can be part of a colorful little ecosystem in the same company with impatiens, nasturtiums, black-eyed susans and day lilies. All a true gardener needs is space.
Vines bearing Mucat grapes cover back porch
The Chemical Use Reduction and Education Task Force (CURE) that sponsored the tour is a project of the Watertown Citizens For Environmental Safety (WCES), which is committed to educating the public about the dangers and safe alternative solutions to chemical use in the house and garden.
Today was a tour de force that showed beauteous gardens can be created without the aid of pesticides. Imagination, patience, and a good work ethic will do it just fine.
Photos by Paul Tamburello
September 13, 2009 in Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (7)
Tags: Chemical Use Reduction Education Task Force, CURE, Life Friendly Tour, Watertown Citizens For Environmental Safety, WCES