After 12-hour days clearing brush, wrangling cattle and mending fences, cowboy poet D.W. Groethe says folk festivals are a pretty good gig.
"You get to play for people that never heard cowboy poetry and here's the best part, they don't work you to death so you can catch all these really great people performing," he said from his home in Bainville, Mont.
An award-winning poet, Groethe's been reading his poems, singing his songs and performing at cowboy poetry gatherings since 1993. Poetry's been with him much longer than that. After his parents passed away in the 1990s, he found copies of poems he'd written as a boy.
These days, the poems might come to him quickly. He's always working on one. He keeps a small notebook in his shirt's front pocket and fills the front with ideas for poems, the back with lists of chores he needs to work on. When the two parts meet, he'll start on a new book.
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Great Lakes Folk Festival
MSU Museum, East Lansing
Aug. 13-15 Free greatlakesfolkfest.net |
"Eventually, something will strike me and I'll hear a line," he said.
The festival will mark his first visit to Michigan. Promoters find him through cowboypoets.com and his previous appearances at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., and the Dakota Cowboy Gathering in Medora, N.D. He's also performed at the National Folk Festival.
"I am a ranch hand/cowboy for a living," he said. "I've never made a phone call for a gig yet. I'm one of those people that have been writing poetry since I was a little kid. I've never gone out and pursued it as a livelihood."
About 90,000 people are expected to the MSU Museum's Great Lakes Folk Festival during the three-day event.
"People come and stay and stay and stay for hours," said Lora Helou, MSU Musem communications director. "While they are there they discover all this other music that they hadn't heard before. It is fun to explore around and dip into some other cultures."
The festival includes performances by Alberta Adams, Chulrua, De Temps Antan, Klancnik & Friends Band, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, among others.
Each performer will be playing more than once so festival-goers won't miss a performance. Working within a network of venues from across the country, the festival line-up is planned by organizers who talk with others to learn about the best music out there.
"One of the misnomers about folk music is the idea of the singer-song writer strumming a guitar on stage," she said. "What people learn [at the folk festival] is folk music is such a broad term."
