Now in its seventh year, the Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival is a celebration of the spirit of the late Sonoma County singer-songwriter

By Chris Samson, Argus-Courier Staff

With her pure soprano voice and honest, timeless lyrics, Kate Wolf embodied Sonoma County's burgeoning folk music scene of the late 1970s and early '80s.

When she died of leukemia in 1986 at the age of 44, Wolf's musical career was just hitting its peak. But she left a lasting legacy of 12 albums and more than 125 songs - and many musical friends.

In June of 1996, about a dozen of those friends gathered at an outdoor concert in Sebastopol to perform a tribute to the late singer-songwriter. That retrospective concert, held at Caswell Vineyards and attended by several hundred people, grew to become a two-day memorial concert the next year. By 2000, it expanded to three days with an expanding lineup of national and international musicians. Last year, the concert moved up to the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville, Mendocino County, where the seventh annual event will be held again this weekend.

The 2002 lineup includes Bruce Cockburn, Greg Brown, Nanci Griffith, Karla Bonoff, Kathy Mattea and many others, including festival regulars and veteran folkies Utah Phillips and Rosalie Sorrels.

Festival promoter Cloud Moss says the sense of camaraderie is what makes the festival special. "It's a warm family gathering," he said. "It's very relaxed, very mellow, and everybody seems to want to be there and experience what's going on. The musicians notice how attentive the crowd is. They're really there for the purpose of listening. That's what gives this festival a different feel. There is a sense of friendship and of people coming just to listen to the music and hear these artists."

This year's festival will be the most well attended yet, but Moss promises the event will not get too big. Last year, the festival drew about 1,700 a day on Saturday and Sunday. This year, indications are there will be 500 to 1,000 more than that per day. "We're drawing a lot more people from all over the place," Moss said. "But we'll cut it off at 3,000 people a day."

The move to the Black Oak Ranch last year added overnight camping to the experience, something that wasn't offered when the festival was in Sebastopol. "Now we're attracting a lot of people who go to the Strawberry and Live Oak festivals, veteran festival-goers who want to be there for the music," said Moss.

The camping element brings another ingredient to the festival - freewheeling campsite jam sessions that often go late into the night after the scheduled concerts are over. Many of the festival-goers are accomplished musicians in their own right, and bring their guitars, banjos, fiddles or mandolins for spontaneous music-making of folk and bluegrass songs.

Moss said he started putting together the lineup for this year's festival shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "I wanted a lot of heart to come out of it. Not patriotic songs per se, but heartfelt performers."

Although the festival is now in its seventh year, the original intent was not to make it an annual event or to get bigger every year.

"The retrospective concert in 1996 was designed as a one-time deal," said Moss. "There was not a master plan to make this an annual three-day festival. We've just been going with the flow. It hasn't lost the sense of intimacy or sharing or comfort that the original one had. We have no desire to make this get really big."

The move from Sebastopol to Laytonville wasn't by design, either, Moss said. "The Caswells wanted to utilize some of their property [where the first five festivals were held] for vineyards to get more yield. We understood that, so we had to find another place. This is where we found it. And the site itself allowed us to get a little bigger and to have on-site camping."

Other features of the festival include an open mike, which kicks off the festival at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, and a live taping of the National Public Radio program "West Coast Live" with host Sedge Thompson (and guests Bruce Cockburn, Greg Brown and Utah Phillips) on the stage on Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon.

There will be workshops hosted by performers on everything from fingerpicking and storytelling to songwriting and singing harmony throughout the weekend. In fact, there may be some times when festival-goers will have trouble deciding whether to stay in the music meadow for the main concert or venture away to catch a workshop.

Many of the artists will perform a Kate Wolf song during their performance. Some, like Greg Brown, have written songs about Wolf ("Kate's Guitar").

And Nina Gerber, who played guitar in Wolf's band for many years, will accompany a number of the scheduled musicians throughout the weekend, as she has done during previous festivals.

"It's gratifying to find out that so many artists know her music," said Moss, "and that more are learning about her. Her legacy continues to grow."

Wolf's songs, including "Give Yourself to Love," "Here in California," "These Times We're Living in" and "Redtail Hawk" have reached a wider audience since her death. Her "Across the Great Divide" is the theme song of Robbie Osman's Sunday music program of the same name on KPFA radio.

"If Kate had never written a song in her life, she would have been worth knowing," said Utah Phillips, a friend of Wolf's who will share duties as a performer and emcee this weekend. "The music was a bonus."

Moss added, "The festival isn't so much about her, but defining who she was when she was around here. Kate was a real person, a very caring person. Her songs are a slice of life, and not a particular time period. They don't lose their value 15 years later. You could sing her songs years from now and they would still be pertinent."