By Sophia Lucente, A&E Editor

Published in print Apr. 22, 2015

It’s 3:30 p.m. on Saturday at Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance. I’m stationed, mud-splattered, on a layered plywood floor beneath the sloping blue and yellow tent ceiling of the Dance Tent when Big Mean Sound Machine finishes sound check and their unfathomably eager crowd clambers to their feet.

The biannual festival, held each spring and autumn, has become ingrained within the hearts and cultural experiences of many North Carolinians. Its schedule pamphlet advertises “bluegrass, Latin, African, folk, country, rock, zydeco and roots,” spread across four stages over four long days. Like Sound Machine’s audience, its populous is diverse, from brazen and sweaty adolescents finding solace in freedom, to the mellow comfort-seekers nodding in time in sagging camp chairs, to surprised infant dancers with paint on their faces.

If you’ve been to one Shakori, you’ve been to many. This year, to gauge how such a sense of community and timelessness might affect one from a performer’s standpoint, I spoke with a couple of members from longtime Shakori frequenters Holy Ghost Tent Revival. Their thoughts on community, hard work and local love were well evident; the rest can be explored below.

[Sophia Lucente] Of what importance is strong musicianship for your group?

[Ross Montsinger; Drums] Half of HGTR majored in music and so it would be a disservice to our professors and our education to do anything that might be considered less than musical.

[Hank Widmer; Trombone, Clarinet, Vocals] It’s not just the strength in musicianship that we value as a group. Eight years of creating and performing music together has shown us that our personalities— our individual, unique style of musicianship— is what drives and tickles our fancies.

[SL] HGTR was formed in Greensboro, not too far from where many of our readers live and attend shows on a regular basis. What about the Greensboro community helped foster the success of HGTR?

[HW] Our friends and [Greensboro College] professors and classmates were so delightfully encouraging in our infancy whilst we recorded our earliest demos. At that point, it was difficult to determine how genuine their clearly enthusiastic response to the music was exactly. Once we took to the stage it was apparent to us that our dear acquaintances weren’t lying to us; they really liked it.

[SL] What are your favorite things about performing at Shakori Hills?

[RM] Gotta be the companionship. Everyone is so happy to be there. We get to mingle with friends before and after the sets, and perform with tummies full of delicious food, beer and coffee.

[HW] The people. They’re so excited to be in the woods for a weekend of music and community. Especially the organizers and workers and volunteers; they create a setting for taking a deep breath, slowing your pace and enjoying everything and everyone around.

Widmer performing at the spring festival of 2011.

[SL] Having seen such huge success with your Kickstarter campaign and subsequent album release? What advice do you have for budding North Carolinian musicians? And what were your biggest challenges in making a name for yourself?

[RM] We hold our friends, family and fans dearly— that’s our support network. Our product (the music) is not something that any random person would buy out of convenience like a smartphone or food, so making fans requires creating genuine connections with people.

[HW] Their support was not just an investment in that project but in us as a lasting entity and here we are. Thank you! Our biggest challenge in making a name for ourselves has been our evolving sound. Our folk/ragtime-driven energy that conceived this band has grown into a bigger, smarter sounding rock and roll energy that has made us hungrier than ever for progress in song-writing and performing. Change sometimes confuses people. Hell, it confused us for a while, but that’s what growth is— unknowing and then understanding and then a cyclical repetition of that process. Advice: don’t stop.

[SL] Tell me about your experimentation as a band across different genres. How has being based in North Carolina helped you (as a group or individually) develop a musical identity?

[RM] I think many people would agree that we live in a time where genres are less important. No one is very good at describing the sound of a band anymore, and in North Carolina especially, people are responsive to the sound of musicians just being their true selves. North Carolina a collaborative place and we’re a collaborative band. We all have different backgrounds here, it’s okay to put them together as best we can without over-thinking how we will be marketed.

[SL] Explain to me the sensation of being on stage, riling the Saturday-night Shakori Hills crowd.

[RM] Performing at Shakori is like having a very good dream or riding a wave…it is very hard to process what I’m experiencing until I’ve gone back to— for lack of a better term— the real world.

[HW] It’s a high that culminates, stews and splashes out in vibrant colors of individual energy. Now take a big step back, to where you can’t differentiate individuals, and suddenly before you is an organism exploding with all varieties of emotion. That Dance Tent becomes one big breathing, pulsing life form; we become one for a few hours. Thrilling indeed.