Summer is upon us and so it is festival season again. Music festivals are a bit of an acquired taste. It can be the opportunity to see some wonderful musicians but often in less than ideal circumstances. The Main Stage at many festivals are platforms that have been erected at the bottom of a hillside so the festival goers can fan out up along the hill and all have a reasonable chance of seeing the stage. So it’s an opportunity to to sit out in a field in the burning sun, sweating and swatting bugs or huddling under a tarp in the pouring rain with mud creeping up around you. All this while trying to listen to music that often you can’t really hear unless you’re lucky enough to sit in the right spot in relation to the speakers so you can spend a lot of time with music that is too loud or unintelligible or difficult to hear. Meanwhile, people around you are eating and drinking and talking and laughing and often watching videos or chatting with friends on their phones.

So why do we do it? For those moments of magic. Sometimes it is an unexpected performer, one that is new to us. I was at a festival where the winner of a songwriting workshop was given the opportunity to open the main stage that evening. I missed the songwriting workshop but was in the audience for the main stage performance. Bob Martin walked out sat down and performed four or five songs from his then new album “The River Turns the Wheel.” I was amazed, mesmerized and couldn’t believe I had never heard of someone with such talent.

Other times it’s the unexpected appearance of someone you know as when Bill Morrissey showed up uninvited at a festival and was allowed to perform a few tunes. Bill was thinner and seemed more fragile than when I had seen him in the past, but the music was as wonderful as ever. A memorable moment in part because it was the last time I saw him before he committed suicide.

Sometimes it is something so familiar yet so unexpected that it catches you off-guard, as when Les Sampou worked her blues magic with a slowed down mournful take on “You Are My Sunshine” giving the song a completely new meaning for me.

Other times the magic occurs with the connection of performers that are randomly put together on a workshop stage. On one such occasion, four or five performers only had three or four minutes left in their set and we’re trying to decide something that they could do all to together. While they were chatting back and forth one of the performers, and I do not remember which one, started filling the moment with some licks on the guitar. Suddenly Anne Hills was singing one of the most moving versions of “Georgia on My Mind” that I’ve ever heard with wonderful harmonies from the other performers.

There are also moments of pure serendipity, as when I walked up Johnny Cake Hill to the Seamen’s Bethel in New Bedford for a meet the performer gathering to find James Keelaghan looking at the pictures of the New Bedford sailors lost at sea over the last two centuries. We chatted about the hazards of the sea and how such tragedies often made good songs. Once others arrived he kicked off the gathering by singing his song “Captain Torres”.

So we ignore the weather, the people not being respectful of the performers, the vagaries of the sound and wait for the magic to happen.

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Ron Cooke is the author of a book of short stories and poems entitled Obituaries and Other Lies (available at Amazon); writes a well-received blog (ASSV4U.com/blog); and hosts a weekly radio show called Music They Don’t Want You to Hear on KTAL-LP in Las Cruces, NM.  He is also a founding director of A Still Small Voice 4U, a not for profit supporting arts, culture and community that presents folk concerts, sponsors artists, festivals and community groups. Ron is an avid cyclist, racer, blogger, sculptor and ne’er-do-well.