.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

18 May 2007

2007 Florida Folk Festival canceled

We received word today from White Springs that sadly, the 2007 Florida Folk Festival, scheduled for Memorial Day weekend, has been canceled due to the wild fires in North Florida and South Georgia. As it stands now, there are no plans to reschedule the event and the next Florida Folk Festival will be in May of 2008.

13 May 2007

TLH017 Smoky Festival

It's dry in North Florida and very smoky. There's a huge swamp fire burning on the Florida/Georgia border. There has been a haze in the air the last few days, but today it's so smoky that my eyes burn when I walk outside. Right now, both I-10 and I-have sections closed because of the smoke.

This link should take you to the FHP site for road closure information.



On today's TallyCast, we travel down to Pinellas County, over to White Springs for the Florida Folk Festival and down to Gainesville.


The podcast opens with a tune by Mary Smith McClain,
better known as Diamond Teeth Mary, a great blues performer and an amazing person. Check out this story about Mary that was written after her death in 2000. I re-tell a story about Diamond Teeth Mary and her diamond teeth.

I first heard Mary sing and play the piano at the Florida Folk Festival in White Springs about 10 or 15 years ago. If you have some time over the Memorial Day Weekend and are anywhere near the intersection of I-10 and I-75, you should stop in and enjoy a bit of the festival. It's held at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park, a Florida State Park. Hopefully, but Memorial Day, the fires will be out, the rain will have come and everybody will be ready to sing and dance.

The podcast ends with a tune by the late Don Grooms; a Cherokee, a professor of journalism at the University of Florida and an amazing singer-songwriter. The tune is called "I believe".

Both tunes and the photographs here come to us from the official Archives of the State of Florida. You can access some of their collection by going the Florida Memory Project on the Internet.

I'm looking for stories of Gaines Street. If you have a story about Gaines street, please get in touch with me. The email is tallycast at gmail (that period looking thing) com or you can call my new talkback line at (850) 391-4955.

Be well, protect your lungs and pray for rain.

Dave


Labels: , , , , , , , ,


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Travel blogs