Festival’s flat pickers ‘can talk to the souls of people everywhere’

Beppe Gambetta was 17 and living in his native Italy when he fell in love.

In love with the American style of guitar flat picking, that is.

“Someone brought some Doc Watson (records) to my hometown,” he said. “It was exactly as when you see the woman of your life. You want to understand everything about her. You devote your art in that direction. This happened to me.”

It didn’t take the young Gambetta long to connect flat picking with one of its premier venues, the Walnut Valley Festival held in Winfield each year. Now recognized as one of the best flat pickers in the world, Gambetta will perform at the festival next week alongside three other masters of the genre: Dan Crary, Pat Flynn and Bryan Sutton.

“We’ve got four of the top flat pickers in the world that are going to be here on stage at the same time,” festival coordinator Rex Flottman said, referring to Saturday, Sept. 17’s last concert on the festival’s No. 1 stage at the grandstand. “I think it’s going to be pretty amazing for anybody interested in that style of guitar playing. I think they’re going to be blown away.”

Held Sept. 14-18, this year’s festival features shows by 35 performers or groups and 10 musical competitions – nine of them sanctioned as national or international contests – plus music workshops, a juried arts and crafts show and food vendors. That’s the “official” part of the festival.

The unofficial side has been in full swing since this morning, when campers were let in to the Cowley County Fairgrounds during the annual “land rush” for favored camping sites. As usual, they’ll be playing music around campfires and on unofficial stages, eating and drinking and occasionally sleeping. About 15,000 people typically attend the festival.

Flottman said the concert featuring the four flat pickers was arranged to celebrate the fact that the genre has been a key part of the festival since its official start in 1972. Indeed, according to the festival’s website, the Walnut Valley Association was formed that year “with its sole purpose to produce the Walnut Valley National Guitar Flat-Picking Championship Festival.” That year, early festival organizer Bob Redford put flat-picking pioneers Crary, Doc Watson and Norman Blake on stage together.

Flat picking is a style of guitar playing that evolved in bluegrass and other traditional music as the acoustic guitar moved from being strictly a back-up instrument providing rhythm to one playing the same types of solos as the banjo and fiddle.

Gambetta said it was 1967 when he first heard the Doc Watson music that changed his life.

“I was playing Led Zeppelin – you know, all the stuff a teenager plays.”

He transformed himself into a flat picker mostly by self-study and even applied for a spot in the festival’s national flat-picking championship contest, for which only 30 spots are made available each year.

In the mid-1980s, “I got a beautiful letter from Bob Redford encouraging me to participate. It’s fun, because I recently looked in my files and found this old letter,” he said. But Gambetta didn’t have enough money to travel to the United States until 1992, when he was invited to play at the festival as a performer. “It was one of the incredible emotions of my life.”

He has performed at 18 festivals since then.

“The beauty of Winfield happens not only on stage but in every campground where musicians meet and continue to play,” Gambetta said. “Even if I’m getting older and need to sleep, I really try to visit all of them.”

Gambetta and his wife, Federica, a classically trained guitarist, live part of the year in New Jersey so he can perform and teach in the United States. Just before the start of the Walnut Valley Festival, he wrapped up a series of shows and workshops in Alaska. In addition to traditional American music, he is known for playing a variety of other styles, from Celtic and Italian to the tunes of central Europe. Last month, he published “The Flatpicking Sourcebook,” which he says attempts to cover as much of the genre’s history and technique as possible.

“Actually, flat picking is a technique that is deep and strong and can talk to the souls of people everywhere. It happens with flamenco and other forms of music that are so beautiful,” he said.

Gambetta said he, Crary, Flynn and Sutton have been trading ideas via e-mail about what form their show will take and will have time for at least one practice. He’s played with all of them before and says each brings a distinctive style.

Crary is “this great master ... one of the fathers of flat picking.” Flynn is “the person who invented the ‘newgrass’ style. He was for many years the mind behind the band Newgrass Revival.” Sutton “represents the new generation that is coming. He is really the person that brings the flat picking at the high level.” As for himself, Gambetta says, he imparts “a little European vibe” to the ensemble.

In addition to their show together, all four flat pickers will perform solo or as part of other groups during the festival.

Other Walnut Valley Festival highlights, according to Flottman, include:

▪ Darin and Brooke Aldridge, a young couple who’ve played The Ryman auditorium in Nashville and who scored a hit on the bluegrass charts with their version of “Tennessee Flat Top Box.”

▪ Ray Cartwell and Tennessee Moon. Cartwell, a former member of the New Traditional gospel group, possesses “an amazing voice,” Flottman said. “This is one of the first places they’ll place outside of Nashville, so we’re excited to have the chance to preview them to everybody.”

▪ Juni Fisher, who’s won numerous awards from the Western Music Association.

Still, Flottman expects the flat pickers’ concert to be the most-talked-about event of the festival, much as its predecessor was nearly 45 years ago.

“We still have people 45 years after saying I would have killed to see that happen, and we have others who say I was there when it happened,” he said. “We know that many people couldn’t have been there, because there weren’t that many people at the festival. It’s one of those things that are kind of Walnut Valley lore.”

This story was originally published September 8, 2016 at 8:39 AM with the headline "Festival’s flat pickers ‘can talk to the souls of people everywhere’."