By Ashley Ernst
In the early 1970s, Robert Force and Albert d’Ossché found themselves at the Sweet’s Mill folk music festival in the Sierra Nevada foothills just east of Fresno, California. They were struck by the fact that nobody paid to attend, there were no audiences, and no stages.
“There were just people who … parked their campers and wandered from campsite to campsite to play music,” Force said.
Force and d’Ossché had just published “In Search of the Wild Dulcimer” and were looking for other dulcimer players. Instead of going on the road to find dulcimer players, they decided to bring the dulcimer players to them.
“We dreamed up the idea of the Kindred Gathering,” he said.
50th Anniversary
Kindred Gathering 50 will take place Aug. 2 – 5 at Echoes of the Sea, Copalis Beach, Washington, 2 miles from the original location.
The entire motel, campgrounds, and RV spaces have been reserved, and there are many other options nearby in Ocean Shore, Washington.
For more information, find the Facebook group “KG Forever” at facebook.com/groups/kgxl2014/ or contact Robert Force at rolefo@gmail.com.
The original flyer invited people to “a Kindred Gathering, a meeting for friends of modes and dulcimerie.”
“Your instrument is your admission to a weekend of yourselves,” they wrote. The address? Alexander’s by the Sea – one mile north of Ocean City, Wash.
The notice was placed in the newly-founded Dulcimer Players News and another one in Mother Earth News.
Along with the flyer placed in DPN Vol. 1 No. 5 came Robert Force’s note More on the “Kindred Gathering”. Capturing the spirit of the era, it reads in part,
All across this country (as well as abroad) there are people who are saying “I can do that” and are building and playing dulcimers. Many of these people had no previous conception of how it should be done. Consequently we are witnessing the emergence of a new folk tradition – one built solely on the idea that if it has eight notes and some strings that drone, it’s a dulcimer. We don’t have to encourage or discourage that – it’s quite independent of any of our efforts. So to quote ‘In Search of’ .. “it all boils down to folk music, and never forget, no matter what anyone says, that folk music is what you do”.
And they waited.
By August 15, 1975, people from all over the country had arrived for the three day festival. Many became the musicians who went on to define the West Coast dulcimer scene: Bonnie Carol, Michael Rugg, Neal Hellman.
“I think what made it work is when you came to play there were no expectations,” Force said. “You gathered and played around a campfire on Friday night. On Saturday night there were mics on a stage and you got fifteen minutes. It didn’t matter if you had a few albums out … or if you were a struggling beginner. You got your fifteen minutes with a supportive peer group.”
“Everything was deliciously personal,” he said, “Everyone got to the point where they knew it was a safe place to be. There was never a cult of the personality.”
In the 50 years since its inception, Kindred Gathering has continued in fields, campgrounds, riverside and oceanside, rotating between California, Washington and Oregon.
Music is different, Force said, by the seashore, in the deep forest, or in the desert. “The music would reflect that environment we were in,” he said.
Lance Frodsham has attended the festival most years, even taking on hosting duties two years in a row.
“It’s just become a tradition,” he said of the festival.
“My oldest daughter, Emily, she grew up with the Kindred Gathering and she expects to go. We plan it way in advance. It’s gotten a little more posh over the years. In the old days, we were out in the middle of nowhere and people would dig a latrine and it was pretty wretched. Then we went to Port-a-Potties and now we have running water.”
Meals have become communal with people bringing food they share.
“That’s the flavor of our Kindred Gathering,” said Cathy Traut-Hessom, member of the dulcimer group The Chinchillas, and a four-time organizer of the Gathering.
She’s known many of the Gathering attendees since before her son, Sean, now 32, was born. One year when it looked like plans for the Gathering would fall through, Sean, then 10, announced on a conference call that they could not cancel the festival. The Forces had friends in Port Townsend, Washington, who had a couple of acres and a circus tent.
“We camped under the circus tent and just made do,” Traut-Hessmon said.
The Gathering, she said, is more than a festival. It’s a family reunion.
“That was a big event when” Sean “brought his future wife to meet this crazy band of misfits.”
Those misfits have sustained a festival gathering for 50 years, keeping time with a festival clock that anyone can move forward or backward. Workshop locations have names like “under the old oak,” “next to the barn;” workshops are titled “Fariña tunes,” and “Responsible Anarchy” (on a side note, no one attended the Responsible Anarchy workshop).
There is a craft table and room on stage for non-dulcimer playing folk who perform “unusual acts.”
“We were a core group of people who came to know each other, who came to welcome seeing each other once a year for three days and who shared the idea that everything was, in a sense, permissible. If you wanted to play jazz and bring your trombone … tell a story, recite a poem, sing a song, form a group or perform solo … it was always open.”
“Most salient is, we never changed it,” Force said. “It was never meant in any sense to be a commercial festival. It was not to make money. It was not to pay people to be there. It was because you enjoyed the music.”
Keep Reading
- “Profile: Kindred Gathering,” by Robert Force, Vol. 9 No. 1 (1983)
- “Robert Force, an interview by Madeline MacNeil,” Vol. 13 No. 3 (1987)
- “Al d’Ossché: In Search of the Wild Dulcimer Man,” by Susan Porter, Vol. 16 No. 4 (1990) (published shortly after d’Ossché’s death on Sept. 9, 1990)
- “Community,” by Robert Force, Vol. 33 No. 1 (2007)
Learn More
- Five West Coast dulcimer musicians who came together at the Kindred Gathering went on to record the “Pacific Rim Dulcimer Project.” Albert d’Ossché, Michael Rugg, Neal Hellman, Bonnie Carol and Robert Force were joined by Michael Hubert on the 1977 album.
- The 1970s West Coast dulcimer movement is documented by filmmakers Patricia Delich and Wayne Jiang in their 2013 documentary, “The Hearts of the Dulcimer.”
- Robert Force has made “In Search of the Wild Dulcimer” and other works available for free on his website robertforce.com. He is working on his autobiography, “American Minstrel,” which will be published online, but the release date has not been set.
- “English Village Carols for Mountain Dulcimer” by Lance Frodsham will be published by Mel Bay in 2024.
- Find autoharpist Evo Bluestein‘s book “Road to Sweet’s Mill,” which documents the West Coast folk music movement in the 1960s and 70s, in his online store at evobluestein.com.
Ernst plays both mountain and hammered dulcimer and was the editor and publisher of DPN from November 2018 to July 2023.
