Happy End with snow

Besides poetry the festival is a lot about music, Western music of different styles, having nothing to do with the soft-washed, hyped-up country music we mostly hear. On our last day, we started off with the fantastic "3hattrio" from Utah - boy, these guys were fantastic again! Besides "old-timer" Hal Cannon (banjo, guitar, vocals), this young violinist, 20 year-old Eli Wrankle (pic below), and good-looking Rastafarian Greg Istock, who plays acoustic bass and foot percussion and has a Caribbean music background (and reminded us of Hans Söllner), were really top-notch!









We had more music (and poetry) in the evening, in the last show in the auditorium with David Stamey, Waddie Mitchell, Rod Nelson (who's tie is on the picture) and Gary McMahan:


We guess all shows were sold out, not only in the smaller venue in the Folklife Center downtown, but also in the large auditorium with 900+ seats. The last two nights different ticketed evening shows, 2-3 in the auditorium, one after the other, and 1 or 2 in the G3 Bar Theater took place. We chose one each evening. All day, again, there were panels offerred with different artists at the same time. Visitation had grown on the weekend and lines sometimes were long to get into presentations or concerts.

For one of the youngest artists at the NCPG - Brigit Reedy (18) from Montana - it was her 16th NCPG! She was performing at age 2, yodelling in the bar. We knew Amy Hale Auker and Gail Steiger (pic below) from the ranch tour, the couple from Prescott/Arizona was performing together in one show, she telling stories, he playing the guitar:

Our last presentation this day was an interesting lecture about the cowboy artist C.M. Russell from Montana, held by Randy Rieman:

Well, the festival is over now. We enjoyed our last evening show and, as if the weather would be sad, too, it started to rain hard in the evening, turning into snow. It’s been a fantastic event and we are already thinking about returning next year.