Terry Ralston

Keri: All right, so just for the record, can you say and spell your name?

Terry: My name is Terry Ralston, T-E-R-R-Y-R-A-L-S-T-O-M.

Keri: What was your first year going to Winfield?

Terry: It was 1975.

Keri: Tell the story of why you are the Mayor and how that started.

Terry:  Oh, well, that started a little later. It was after our camp had kind of morphed enough to where we had two canopies up and everything. And I seemed to be the only one who kind of was in charge of it. I was the only one who was obsessive enough to want to make sure that there was enough room for everyone. I was buying the stakes to reserve spots and all this. So because of that, after a while, somehow the name mayor kind of came up. So they started referring to me as mayor. And I kind of took it as a little side joke. I mean, finally, it'd be like somebody would say, "Well, I want to join you. I want to join you guys in Winfield next year." They would say to the person, “Well, you better talk to the mayor first.” So it gave me a lot more power than I was really wanting.

Keri:  Then you've been going for a long time. It started in '72.

Terry:  Yeah, I went in '75, which was the fourth festival. And then I got married, that following winter, in January of '76. And so we didn't go then for a couple more years. And then a good friend of ours who also had some history down there - he wanted to go again. And once we went down there again, we were hooked. So my wife's been 44 times. I've been 45 times.

Keri:  And then what first drew you there?

Terry: Well, two things. It was the music, but it was also the stories. When I went there the very first time in '75. I was up in the stands and this was back in the stands. Well, when I went the first time, there was only one stage. It was just the grandstand – that was it. And camping was very haphazard and intense - a lot of open fires. And Stuart Mossman was kind of the . . . He was kind of the emcee. And we just went up in the stands and I was trying to kind of get my legs on who's playing and who they are and all this sort of stuff. And I ran into the guy that introduced me to the guitar. He lives in Excelsior Springs. I think he's still alive. I haven't talked to him in probably about 20 years. But his name is Bill McCullough and I saw Bill and he came over and he went, "Bullet, what are you doing here?"

And I said, "I'm down here for the music."

And he said, "Oh," he said, "This is great."

And that was when they were headlining - Doc Watson, Dan Crary, and Norman Blake. And so ,at one point when we were up in the stands, Stuart Mossman held up one of his guitars and he said, "Some people have asked whether or not they can take a tour of my factory. Anyone that would like to, at about 3:30, we're going to meet right over here and we'll do that.”

So I looked at Bill and he looked at me and we said, "Let's do it."

Well, it turns out there weren't that many people interested in it. So, there were only about eight of us that went over there for this full tour of Stuart Mossman's personal factory that he had carved out of nothing, basically. He had patterns on all sorts of ways to form guitar sides and build guitars and so on. He had a patented way of aging guitars that involved suspending a guitar inside of a box that was inside of another box that was insulated with sand. And then, every 24 hours, he would play another note on the chromatic scale. Also, after 12 days, that guitar would be aged because of all the vibrations. And so it was like a pre-played guitar which is - as anyone that knows anything about string instruments - the older they are, the better they sound. Anyhow, we got to see the whole thing and that just blew me away. Those things were the primary things that kind of drew me that first time.

Keri:  Stuart Mossman. Then is he a big deal still with Winfield?

Terry:  Stuart Mossman passed away about - I want to say - maybe about 12,15 years ago. You know what he died of? The fumes. The fumes from all the lacquer and the glues and everything.

Keri:  Wow.

Terry: From this guitar.

Keri:  A Mossman guitar is a big deal though, isn't it?

Terry: I've heard people talk about our price list. He sold the name and his company to a place in Dallas who started making it on a mass production basis. And they were okay, but they didn't match up to his hand-made guitars. And so, I don't know if you recall Martha Hale that was in our camp. She had a Mossman for a while. And she then sold it to Jamie Logan that was in our camp. And then he sold it. I wanted to buy it, but he sold it for more money than I could pay. So yeah, they're wonderful guitars.  I have a very good friend who has a Mossman that he, it's in his will that if he goes before I do, I get the Mossman.

Keri:  Wow. Well, that is a big tie-in to your history with Winfield – The Mossman is.

Terry:  Yeah. Another little story about Mossman, there's a song that Bill McCullough taught me called "Love Into The Game." And it's a very poignant song and just a terrific song. So I was playing it one late Saturday night, way before our camp had come to morph into a bunch of musicians. And I was the only one there. And so I was playing this song "Love Into The Game." And all of a sudden I heard another guitar. And I looked over and he was playing the same chords and everything that I was. And so we finished, and I said, “Wow, where'd you learn that?” He pointed at his chest and said, “It's in here. And do you know Vicki and Pat?” I said, “no.” He said, “Vicki Armstrong and Pat Garvey – I was with them in Colorado when they wrote that song."

Keri:  Oh, wow.

Terry:  And he said, “What's your name?” I said, “Trevor.” He said, “I'm Stuart. Stuart Mossman.”

Keri:  Oh my gosh.

Terry:  And then I had one other encounter with Stuart Mossman. And that was when he played a house concert here in Kansas City. And at that time he had developed a . . . What do you call those things where they're one man's shows, and they get up and they talk alone . . . ?

Keri:  A monologue?

Terry:  Yeah, monologue. Afterwards, at this house concert, we set together and he started telling me stories. I said, “Well, how'd you come to start the festival?” Mossman said that, in the late '60s, he and his partner were making these guitars, so they went to the Newport folk festival on the East Coast. And he said, “We set up our booth and we sold all of our stock out in three hours.”

So I asked, “What'd you do then?”

He said, “We got back in our trucks and we headed back to make more guitars. This time we were going to make a bunch of guitars so that we wouldn't run out of stock so quick.”

And they showed up at the Newport festival the next year and a hurricane had come through and it ruined the whole festival. He said the only highlight of that particular time was that he ended up spending a part of the time sitting on a hotel bed with Linda Ronstadt and other people singing songs and stuff. So that's the genesis of the festival.

Mossman said he knew we had to have a festival headliner if we were going to draw anybody. So, he took his best guitar and he went down to Doc Watson and he said, “We're going to have a festival up here and it's going to be a feature flat picking contest and the prize will be musical instruments – whether that be my guitar, or a Gibson, or Mandolins . . . whatever.”

Doc said, “Well, if I'm going to represent you, he said, I need to see your guitar.”

So Mossman hands him the guitar and Doc plays – you know he's blind. Doc Watson was blind from birth. He starts playing it and he hands it back. Then Doc says, “Well, if I were you, I'd do this and I'd do that to the guitar. Bring it back when you do that stuff and I’ll take a look at it.” So he did, and they modified the things and then took it back to Doc. He played it for a bit, then handed the guitar back to Mossman and said, “When do you want to have a festival?”

Keri:  Wow.

Terry:  And he said, “Well, who else do you think I could get? Doc says, “Well, if you want to, I can talk to Norman Blake and Dr. Dan Crary. And so those three were the headliners for the first six years of the festival. And that's how that all got started. So then the festival continued to grow and morph. And so I can go on and on.

Keri:  What were some of the early changes that happened in the 70s?

Terry:  At that point, you could divide the camp into two genres. There was what they call the Walnut Grove and the Pecan Grove. And the Walnut Grove was the one that had the hoity-toities. They had all the campers and most things were up on wheels. Then the Pecan Grove had very few campers in it. It was all tents. Primarily, the Pecan Grove was younger folks – a little more raucous. And that's how it started out. I'd say that now, it's kind of got maybe three different camps. One is for the people that want to come and go in order to take in all the main stage shows. Then there's the people that will do some of the main stage performing, but they'll also play in their own camps or go around and play in other small camps. And then there's people that only come to the festival to hang out on the campgrounds.

Keri:  So were you part of the Pecan Grove early on?

Terry:  Oh, yeah. Early on, the festival actually was only Thursday afternoon through Sunday. And we would go down Thursday morning and get a prime spot right in the middle of the Pecan Grove – plenty of shade trees and everything. Then it was getting a little more crowded so we started arriving at the camp on Wednesdays, and when we went on Wednesdays, the grounds was wide open. At that time, our camp was mostly comprised of my personal friends. A lot were members of our church and a few other just friends that I'd talked into coming. Looking back on it, I was not big on institutionalized, organized religion. I don’t like this business of being evangelistic.

But my wife, Kathy, said to me one time, “You're an evangelist for Winfield:  You always talk about Winfield. As soon as someone mentions Winfield, you just light up.” I guess that really is right. One year we showed up on Wednesday and someone had already set up their tents on our space. I said, ‘Oh, curses!’ So we had to move up to higher ground and we continued to be forced up more and more until we were about to fall off into the big gully.

And that last year we were right on the verge of going down to this big culvert. We ran into another buddy of ours that we had come to know through the years. We said to him, “You need to join us over here in the flat.” He said, “That sounds great.” So the next year we did that. And we went down on the Thursday before the festival started. Finally, we got to know Camp Brigadoon:  They were about three camps over from us in that same general area. We grew to become friends with them and eventually started looking for the same sort of common spot for camping. By this time, there were a lot of the Brigadoon folks and some of the Waukiwi Inn folks who had campers that needed electricity and water. We also started having other folks come that were just musicians and were parts of local jams here in town.

People finally went to the festival after I'd been hammering on them for a long time and then they'd sit up by the main stages and come back from one of the performances and they'd go, "I know you were telling me about this, but I just really had no idea." They were just mesmerized. One fella, he was a associate pastor at our church – his name was Joe, and he came back and said, "These people make you happy."

Keri:  Yeah.

Terry:  Anyhow, we had all sorts of great moments and times like that. We did have some storms – some hard times. The only time that I left the festival early was when we had the second flood. I said, "I'm done." But the first flood that we had, we all went up to the Winfield Lake and set up our tents. The next morning, here came trucks carrying porta pottys and trucks came with big augurs, dropping power poles into the ground. The city just bent over backwards to recreate the camping scene up there around the lake.

Keri:  Very cool. Then the city appreciates you.

Terry:  Yeah. The festival does bring a lot of business. And there's anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 people every year. So...That's a lot. That's a whole lot.

Keri:  You kind of described the campsite in the early years. What made you choose to do the Pecan Grove instead of the Walnut Grove?

Terry:  They were the more sophisticated campers. They were the ones that wanted electrical power and all that stuff. And we didn't want to be that organized. We wanted it to be just community. I know there was one of the guys used to come like every three or four years. And each time he came to the festival, he would say, "Oh my gosh! I forgot how spiritual it is down here!"

Keri:  Oh really?

Terry:  Yeah. But the Pecan Grove was a different. It had a different texture and culture to it than we did.

Keri:  Could you describe kind of what the culture was?

Terry:  Ours was more a sense of community. We wanted to do more music together. We came to make music and to go to campgrounds to play music with other people we didn’t even know. That was what most of us wanted in the Pecan Grove.

And then the other thing was the Carp Camp and Stage Six in the west. They were a destination. Oh, boy. Carp Camp is a story in itself. They sit in sections. They have a huge parachute canopy. And they sit in sections around with their fiddles and their guitars and their mandolins and their didgeridoos. All year long before Winfield, they issued music for people to work on. And so it's always been wonderful to visit Carp Camp. You go over and the maestro sits in the middle of the whole thing. It's a show in itself. It's just a symphony in itself.

Keri:  You've talked about the Carp Camp and that stuff and then Land Rush and all those traditions.

Terry:  Of course they didn't work there in the very beginning. Land Rush, what happened was it eventually started  being too crowded. People were getting in and they were taking up too much space. They were claiming too much area and moved the fights and dust ups and started taking place. So the leaders - the administrators of the festival - said, “We got to get this more organized or it's going to be a mess, and we don't want that. What we need to do is have a deal where it'll be just like the Land Rush and people can go but they are held back until everyone goes at the same time. They tried that for a couple of years and so that's how Land Rush became a tradition.

By the time that us and some of the folks from Brigadoon decided to really run with the big dogs we came down for Land Rush. At that time, Land Rush was like the middle of August. And we'd come down and leave a tent or a vehicle or something to mark our spot. And there were some folks that would say, “I got just as much right to be here for this power pole as you do.”

I've had that happen a couple times with our outfit. But, for the most part, it works out just fine. And so what we try to do is we try to get enough of our major tents set up in the first few hours of Land Rush so that we can define our perimeter.

Keri:  So all of that's leading to another thing I wanted to talk about was home, a sense of home. I think I read that people view the festival as a coming home.

Terry:  Yeah. Coming home.

Keri:  In the early years of Winfield, what would you say made it feel like home?

Terry:  The people, the folks. We made fast friends with all sorts of people down here by that time. We made lifelong friends. So now I know that I can walk around the campground and about every third campground, I know these people. So it's like our own village. It took a while to do that. When we first started going down and I was such an evangelist for it. The only people that really came would be people that wanted to go up to the main stages. And I'd say, “I want to get my guitar and my mandolin. And I want to go around and sit in with other groups. I'm here for the music. I'm here to play music.”

Keri:  Early on was it explicitly said that jamming was a big part of the experience?

Terry:  It was at camps that had musicians – and it still is. Early on I used to take my gig bag and I would walk around till I found someone that was kind of doing some stuff that I thought I could sit in with. And then I'd take down my guitar and I'd watch and listen to see if they said I could join in. And if they didn't then there was sort of this etiquette where you left him alone.

Early on, at a lot of the camps, the musicians all were bands that played. Away from the festival, they played in bars and they made records. So there were a lot of professionals that were there. That's why, early on, some of the levels of musical sophistication were way past anything I could do. I was just a street musician just banging around on a flat top. But jamming is one of the greatest laboratories for music development that you can find because you can learn licks from each other. You can learn all sorts of chord structure from each other.

Keri:  So you said that there were a lot more almost professional early on. What was it like when you'd kind of come around and formally ask to jam with them?

Terry:  Well, some of them there said, "Sure, come on in," and I would. Or sometimes I'd stumble around and I'd just set my guitar down and just graciously listen.

Keri:  People talk about how there's a Winfield family.

Terry:  My early Winfield family really was what some of the folks down there refer to as my church buddies. Yeah, we're all family. We all check in with each other.

Keri:  I was going to ask this, but you kind of touched on it a little bit:  What are some of stories from the early years that you like to recall? You already talked about Stuart Mossman and that stuff. Is there anything else unique that you remember?

Terry:  There are so many stories. One of the musicians, John McCutcheon – he has done one song a lot, for a long time. There is a song called ‘Great Storm’ and it quickly became one of our tradition, signature songs. Let me give you a little taste of it. [playing guitar – sings]

The thunder and lightning gave voice to the night.

The little horse child cried loud in fright.

The function of baby, the story I was telling,

Of a love that has vanished

The powers of hell.

The great storm is over.

Lift up your wings as wide . . .

The first time I sang that folk song away from Winfield was when I lost a granddaughter and I did it at her funeral. Then I have done it at so many of my loved ones’ funerals. And, like McCutcheon, I always have expected people to join in on the chorus.

Anyway, McCutcheon is a folk singer and so he always was excited to come to the chorus of any song. When he would get close to the chorus of that song ‘Great Storm,’ he would say, "Folks, folks. This is a folk festival. You're supposed to sing, too.” One year at Walnut Valley, McCutcheon got on the main stage and went through the first verse. When it came time for the chorus, 4,000 voices joined him and he was completely enraptured. Another man on stage – one in McCutcheon’s band – started crying. McCutcheon came to him, gave him a hug and said, "It’s alright, it's alright." The crowd was silent. Tradition was for them to sing only the chorus. But, during this performance, when it was time for the second verse, everybody joined in and sang along – all together. That's what the festival is about.

Keri: That is wonderful. Wow.

Terry:  And there were a lot of other stories too, but that's one that stands out for me. McCutcheon wrote another pretty famous song that he really capitalized on. It's called “Christmas in the Trenches.” It's about World War I and how this informal truce came about.

Keri:  And who wrote that song?

Terry:  John McCutcheon, and he performed it at Winfield every year. He actually introduced it at Winfield.

Keri:  This leads into this other question. Early on, at the festival, was there a socially conscious element to it?

Terry:  Oh, definitely. Most of the musicians that we followed tended to have liberal leanings. But as far as it turning into some sort of a culture that this is a hotbed for liberals - that never really happened. Now, Woody Guthrie – a lot of his stuff was influential for musicians here. Guthrie was very prevalent when people weren’t writing their own stuff.

Keri:  You talked about, of course, Land Rush and some of the other things that go on - traditions, I guess. What are some that you do personally? Even if they're informal traditions, just things that you find that you've done the same way since early on.

Terry:  Well, Land Rush, of course, has been one of them that's kind of developed into that. Once we get a canopy, that stepped up the whole deal. We had a 10-by-20 canopy. For several years, we just had a single canopy, but when Russell started coming to our camp, that's when things really started changing. Because, you think I'm an evangelist? Russell would go around and visit camps and say, “You need to be in our camp.” So he's an evangelist for Winfield also. And for our camp.

Keri:  I was going to ask a couple more things. One is:  Describe how you feel when you reflect on the traditions and stuff. What does that do for you?

Terry:  It gets me excited. I just, I get excited . . . Thinking about past festivals gets me excited about them. And, each year, when we finish up with Winfield, and we come home and we unload everything, I'm already thinking about the next year. I'm already thinking about what things can we improve on. What things could we do a little differently to just make it be a little more fun, a little easier?

Keri:  But is there anything else you want to add? How it inspires you, anything like that?

Terry:  The concept of story comes from my orientation to Winfield. McCutcheon actually has an album. It's called ‘Story and Song,’ where he'll tell the story and then he'll do a song that reinforces it.

One of his more famous performances was when he was playing at a concert and this person came up to him and was actually talking to him. And then she left and he went back to his place. And his computer was gone, his phone was gone, a bunch of his music and stuff was gone. No words from this were taken, but he was enraged. And so he called his dad who was a Kremlin salesman and he started wailing on and his dad said, "John, John, it's just stuff." And so he couldn't quite let it go. And so he kept calling his cell phone from the phone that was in the room and finally someone picks it up and answers it. And he goes, "Who is this?" and he says, "This is Officer so-and-so. Who is this?" He said, "You got my phone." He said, "Well, who is it?" And he said, "This is John McCutchen." And he got my phone. He said, "Well, calm down." And he said, "Not only do we have your phone and your computer, we also have the person apprehended who took it." And it was the same gal that talked to him. So he kind of finished up with that story and John is so good at telling stories. And so then he wrote this song called "Forgiveness." So that's how his stories and songs go.

Keri:  Man, that is amazing. That's wonderful.

Terry:  I feel like we all are kind of in our home spot once we're all together at Winfield. When you walk in you feel like, “Okay, I've got my whole family here.”