Folk Music

Florida Frontiers is the name of this column. It’s also the name of a public radio program, podcast, and public television series produced by the Florida Historical Society. In all its forms, Florida Frontiers celebrates the diverse history and culture of our state.

The second annual Florida Frontiers Festival will be held Saturday, October 21, from 11am to 5pm on the grounds of the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Ave., in Cocoa.

The event will feature a day of Florida music, demonstrations including Highwayman artist R.L. Lewis, vendors, food, a beer garden, and a children’s area with a “bouncy house” and games. Admission includes entrance to the museum, featuring permanent exhibits from the Ice Age to the Space Age, and the touring exhibition “Florida Before Statehood.”

Advance tickets available at FloridaFrontiersFestival.com are $15 for adults. Children 12 and under are free with a paid adult. VIP packages are $75, with amenities including complimentary food, beer, and wine in an air conditioned setting, and reserved seating in front of the stage.

The Willie Green Blues Band is headlining this year’s Florida Frontiers Festival. Green earned the 2017 Florida Heritage Award, and he has performed with blues legends including B.B. King, Eric Clapton, and Robert Cray.

Green started out playing clubs in south Florida in the mid-twentieth century. Since the 1980s, he has been performing regularly at The Yearling Restaurant in Cross Creek, named after the beloved book by Florida writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

“I play other people’s stuff, but I make it my own,” says Green. “I’m just an old time blues musician and I’m not going to change. The blues is me. I hope they like it when I play it.”

Also headlining the second annual Florida Frontiers Festival is Florida folk legend Frank Thomas, who writes and performs songs about the history, people, and places of Florida. Songs such as “Old Cracker Cowman,” “The Flatwoods of Home,” and “Spanish Gold” have earned him a loyal following. In 2013, Thomas was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.

Thomas’s Florida roots run deep.

“The Thomas side of the family came into Florida in 1820,” says Thomas. “He married a girl who was born in St. Augustine in 18 and 5, and her parents was well established there, they’d been there about 20 years, so I’m thinking it had to be late 1780s or early 1790s.”

Members of the Thomas family experienced a lot of Florida history.

“Longevity seems to run in my family,” says Thomas. “My daddy was born in 18 and 82. Now he grew up in a whole different era. Now think about that. I was born in (19)43. He was 61 when I was born. His daddy died at a fairly early age. A one-eyed mule kicked him in the head. That’s what killed him. My great-granddaddy, who I sing about in the song ‘The Flatwoods of Home,’ fought in the Great War of Northern Aggression and fought in the Seminole Indian Wars.”

Thomas grew up in Middleburg, Florida, in a musical family who played gospel music. His first performing experiences were in church. His early musical influences also included performers on radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry, including Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and Webb Pierce.

After serving seven years in the Army in the 1960s, Thomas began touring with nationally known gospel, country, and bluegrass bands as a guitarist and singer. He played with groups including the Taylor Brothers, the Webb Family, and the Arkansas Travelers.

“I made my way back to Florida in the late (19)70s, and I met Will McLean,” says Thomas. “Will was a big inspiration for me. He encouraged me to write songs about Florida. He said ‘You know, you write all these love songs and cheatin’ songs, you don’t do much of that. Write about what you know.’ He used to tell me that it would take all of us doing all we can to tell Florida’s story. There’s so much history in the state of Florida.”

Also performing at the second annual Florida Frontiers Festival are the Native Rhythms Festival Ensemble, heritage musician Bob Lusk, acoustic rock musician Mike Garcia, and singer-songwriter Chris Kahl.

The Florida Historical Society will host the first annual Florida Frontiers Festival on Saturday, November 12, at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa, from 9am to 5pm. Main Stage performers include Florida bluesman Ben Prestage, the Bethune-Cookman University Gospel Choir, Mariachi Nuevo Guadalajara, folk musician Bob Lusk, and singer-songwriter Chris Kahl.

There will be selected vendors and demonstrators including Highwayman artist R.L. Lewis and folk artist Ernest Lee, food trucks, and a Children's Corridor. The Heritage Tent will feature storytellers and theatrical presentations including J.D. Sutton as naturalist William Bartram and the Brevard Theatrical Ensemble leading a Florida Folksong Sing-Along.

Inside the museum, will be the opening of the new exhibit "Stetson Kennedy's Multicultural Florida," celebrating what would have been the folklorist and author's 100th birthday. Kennedy is best known for his classic 1942 book “Palmetto Country,” which documents the diverse cultural heritage of our state from Cracker Cowmen, to Seminole Indians, to Greek sponge divers in Tarpon Springs, to Latin cigar rollers in Ybor City, to African American turpentine industry workers, and beyond.

Festival headliner Ben Prestage is a native Floridian, born and raised in a rural area on the edge of the Everglades.

“It’s western Martin County, in between Okeechobee and Indiantown,” says Prestage. “It’s a fourteen mile long dirt road, seven miles east of asphalt and seven miles west of asphalt, all cattle ranches and orange groves. The biggest ranch out there is Allapattah Ranch, which I believe in the Seminole Miccosukee language means alligator.”

Primarily a blues musician, Prestage was influenced by that music at an early age.

“My dad was from Mississippi, and he listened to a lot of blues, so I was really into rural blues and slide guitar growing up,” says Prestage. “I heard Roy Bookbinder one time, he’s a Florida guy, and I heard him doing finger style at a concert when I was about 15 or 16. I went there by myself. None of my friends wanted to go to a blues concert. I heard him doing finger style and I really loved that, finger picking, stuff like that.”

Around the same time, Prestage was helping a neighbor build a chicken coup, and noticed that the man had a banjo. During lunch breaks, the man showed Prestage how to play bluegrass music.

“That got me into some old style banjo stuff, too,” says Prestage. “I always liked the old music better than any of the new stuff.”

Prestage is best known for performing as a one-man band. If you weren’t watching him play, you would think that you were hearing a group of musicians. By himself, Prestage provides a bass line, percussion, guitar, and vocals. He credits Memphis cigar box guitar maker John Lowe with helping him to create his signature sound.

“There’s a bunch of guys doing cigar box guitars now, but the way he made his was with one bass guitar string and three guitar strings, and it was all fretless,” says Prestage. “There’s two outputs, so the bass string goes to a bass guitar amp, and the guitar strings go to a guitar amp, so it’s in stereo when you play it.”

Prestage developed a way of playing drums and cymbals with his feet while playing his unique guitar, filling out the sound of a band.

“When I started it was really rough sounding, but over time I’m starting to get it together, starting to figure it out,” Prestage says with a laugh.

The Florida Frontiers Festival is an extension of this newspaper column, the radio program Florida Frontiers which airs on public radio stations throughout the state, and the public television series Florida Frontiers which is broadcast from Key West to the Panhandle. Like the other Florida Frontiers projects, the goal of the Florida Frontiers Festival is to educate the public about our state’s rich history and diverse cultural heritage in an entertaining and accessible format.

“There is a lot of Southern culture here, food and music that’s unique to this part of the country, as well as all the other cultures in Florida,” says Prestage.

Information about tickets, VIP packages, and event sponsorship opportunities can be found at www.FloridaFrontiersFestival.com and 321-690-1971 ext. 205.
 

Frank Thomas writes and performs songs about the history, people, and places of Florida. Songs such as “Old Cracker Cowman,” “The Flatwoods of Home,” and “Spanish Gold” have earned him a loyal following. In 2013, Thomas was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.

Thomas’s Florida roots run deep.

“The Thomas side of the family came into Florida in 1820,” says Thomas. “He married a girl who was born in St. Augustine in 18 and 5, and her parents was well established there, they’d been there about 20 years, so I’m thinking it had to be late 1780s or early 1790s.”

Members of the Thomas family experienced a lot of Florida history.

“Longevity seems to run in my family,” says Thomas. “My daddy was born in 18 and 82. Now he grew up in a whole different era. Now think about that. I was born in (19)43. He was 61 when I was born. His daddy died at a fairly early age. A one-eyed mule kicked him in the head. That’s what killed him. My great-granddaddy, who I sing about in the song ‘The Flatwoods of Home,’ fought in the Great War of Northern Aggression and fought in the Seminole Indian Wars.”

Thomas grew up in Middleburg, Florida, in a musical family who played gospel music. His first performing experiences were in church. His early musical influences also included performers on radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry, including Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and Webb Pierce.

“Some of the old time country stuff really fascinated me,” says Thomas. “We didn’t have electricity (until the 1950s) but we had a battery operated radio. My momma would listen to these old soap operas in the daytime. My daddy made her save that battery for Saturday nights so we could listen to the Grand Ole Opry, and that’s where I first started getting influenced.”

After serving seven years in the Army in the 1960s, Thomas began touring with nationally known gospel, country, and bluegrass bands as a guitarist and singer. He played with groups including the Taylor Brothers, the Webb Family, and the Arkansas Travelers.

“I made my way back to Florida in the late (19)70s, and I met Will McLean,” says Thomas. “Will was a big inspiration for me. He encouraged me to write songs about Florida. He said ‘You know, you write all these love songs and cheatin’ songs, you don’t do much of that. Write about what you know.’ He used to tell me that it would take all of us doing all we can to tell Florida’s story. There’s so much history in the state of Florida.”

Thomas joined other folk musicians such as Gamble Rogers, Paul Champion, and Bobby Drawdy in their efforts to preserve Florida stories in song.

“A song seems to stay with people,” says Thomas. “It focuses on their mind and they don’t forget it. I think that’s why, with the kids in schools, they need to be teaching more Florida history through music.”

Thomas has gained a reputation for strongly encouraging other performers to write songs about Florida history and culture.

“Sometimes I will give assignments to somebody, ‘go write a song about this or about that’ and the main reason for that was ‘Cousin’ Thelma Boltin,” says Thomas.

Boltin was director of the Florida Folk Festival at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center in White Springs from 1954 to 1965, and continued performing as a storyteller at the annual event until 1986.

“She hemmed me up one time backstage, got to putting her finger in my face,” says Thomas. “She was an old school teacher, retired. She scared me good.”

Boltin told Thomas about the FBI attempt to capture the infamous Barker gang at their Florida hideout in Ocklawaha. The resulting shootout resulted in the deaths of family matriarch Ma Barker and her son Fred.

“She said, ‘now you go write a song about that and you have it for me the next time I see you,’” says Thomas. “She did that to a lot of people. I try to carry that tradition on.”

Thomas performs regularly at the Florida Folk Festival each Memorial Day weekend, and at venues throughout the state.