'Hill people' celebrate at Bean Blossom

Come on hill people, get on your feets. It's Saturday night in the hills, and we're coming to getcha'" proclaimed Gene Deer of the Gene Deer Band just before lighting off with some down-home fire-breathing Chicago Blues at the second annual Bean Blossom Blues Festival last weekend. \nAnd he was right about an audience who came for a weekend of camping, barbecue and good music in the park. Laid-back in lawn chairs on the gentle tree-dotted slope of the Bill Monroe Music Park in Bean Blossom, Ind., was your typical Southern Indiana crowd of 200 you'd find in the woods for a party on an early autumn night -- old hippies, craggy-faced long hairs fresh off their bikes and the 50-year-old late bloomers dressed in black leather and jeans from head to toe and dragging their wives along perched on the backseats of their $25,000 Harleys. Or, as Gene Deer put it, "The hill people and the down-trodden." But since it was a blues festival, the crowd was sprinkled with a few yuppies and their kids.\nOld hippies seem to soak up any chance to see proficient people play actual instruments, and the folks at Bean Blossom did not let them down. From the crowd-pleasing Kelly Richey's Stevie Ray Vaughn-esque guitar solos played behind her head to the legendary Snooky Pryor taking everybody back down to Mississippi on his harp (that's a harmonica for those in the know), the hills vibrated with the electrified sounds of the blues. \nBut conspicuous in their absence were young college-age people (aside from one or two enlightened couples and neo-hippies) and, other than the old bluesmen fronting a few of the bands, black people, the originators of the music.\nThe small number of IU students was of particular consternation to the blues festival's organizer, promoter, founder and emcee, John Hall. "How do I get the fraternities out here?" he asked. "I want this to become a Woodstock-type thing where people listen to good music and then go back to their campfires and jam." \nSince this was the first concert this reviewer has ever attended that let people bring in their own coolers full of beer and food, I had no good answer for him other than the fact that the only way to get sorority girls to go out in the woods and hear the blues would be to have their boyfriends kidnap them. \nAs for the lack of black people in the bands and in the audience, Blind Mississippi Morris explained it in his own way after his set, "Black kids see the blues as a shameful time, an oppressed state of mind from the slave ship to the cotton field."\nDeere put it another way, "Most young black people don't want to associate with the blues, because they fall in with the stereotypical old man strumming on his guitar."\nBut all the artists were quick to admit that the blues is bigger than ever and that they play to bigger crowds every year. And it's crowds like the hill people at Bean Blossom who keep it going. After all, nothing is wrong with sneaking in one more good weekend of camping, all the while drinking your own beer and listening to good music.