Willow Folk Festival 2006 - Stage Performances

I'm getting kind of hooked on this whole blogging thing over the last couple of days. This is something that I've wanted to post up here for a long time. The Willow Folk Festival is a down home cornfield music festival that takes place near Stockton, Illinois every August. I grew up in nearby Freeport and have been going every year since my senior year of high school. I hold this festival as a pretty special tradition as it is just a beautiful commencement of amazing people and amazing music. If it weren't for this festival I would never have met anyone affiliated with the Dekalb S&S crew. I saw Little Headhunter play there in '05 maybe, and I was pleasantly moved by the music. I introduced myself to Tom Cober later that night and we hit it off pretty well. He told me about shows at the attic and 7th Street Space and I decided to check it out a month or so later. The rest is history I guess. A lot of great friendships I've made with people (especially Scratch and Sniff folks) are ultimately rooted at Willow. In 2006, I started bringing my tape recorder everywhere I went at Willow due to my documentarian/preservationist leanings. I have countless tapes from the past 4 years (except from '08 when my tape recorder was rained on) that I've been slowly digitizing and planning to put out in some format to sort of showcase the array of talent and great music that happens there. Well, here's batch number one of numerous volumes to come. These recordings are solely from the "stage" performances (open to anyone that signs up) from Saturday and Sunday. This is in contrast to the campfire recordings of the evening jams that happen after the stage performances finish, soon to come. It is by no means ALL of the performers, but I feel that it's a pretty good cross section of the talent there. I don't know the names of all the performers and songs so everything is just listed as "various artists." - matt - Willow