Yellow Pine Harmonica Festival and Competition--Woodstock for the harmonica

I'm heading home and sitting at the Salt Lake Airport for a lengthy layover recounting my experience at the Yellow Pine Harmonica Festival and Competition this past weekend.  Thanks to my friend (and fine harmonica player) George Miklas, I had the opportunity to participate in this unique and awesome event.

Yellow Pine ID is about a 4 hour drive from Boise, and has a population of 35.  It is all dirt roads, has a general store, cafe, tavern, lodge, bar, community hall, and the Alpine Village cabins.  There is a fire department and post office.  For one weekend every year since the Idaho centennial, Yellow Pine has played host to well over 1500 harmonica players, fans, and music lovers who come in campers, trailers, vans, or tents.  People from all over come to this festival.  I spoke with people from Washington State, Utah, Arizona, California, Oregon, Kansas.  And we came from Pennsylvania.

A stage is set up on Yellowpine Ave (aka Main Street) and it features open mics and crowd pleaser performances. The music goes from 9am to just around midnight.  There are vendors that sell cowboy hats, t-shirts, western decor, bbq ribs, old mining town antiques.  This is truly a festival...a music festival...and at the center is the harmonica.  There was even a wedding that George and I had to play...officiated by "Sarge" in his boots, cutoff shorts, cowboy hat, and hip flask.

My role, along with George, was to judge the competition.  The competitors could play any music they wanted.  Blues harp, country, irish celtic (yep! 10 year old Mickey Howard played celtic tunes...on a diatonic harmonica!!), chromatic, groups.  We listened, wrote notes, and came up with the winners.  If you're wondering, Mickey won the youth category as well as a crowd pleaser.

We also had to perform two 2 hour concerts.  That's alot of music!  But, we did it with a mix of Harmonicats tunes, a jazz set, some country tunes, polkas...and we featured George's 12 year old daughter Janalyn on a number of tunes.  Again, all at the center was the harmonica.

The atmosphere was a celebration of music...harmonica music.  Cell phones don't work in Yellow Pine.  The only connection to the madness of life is the wifi connection at the general store. 

Remember, this is normally a town with 35 residents in cabins and homes sprinkled around the area called Yellow Pine.  As with any event, someone has to make it all work.  Lynne Imel, retired school teacher, picked us up in Boise, drove us to perform at the VA, drove us the 4 plus hours to Yellow Pine...the last 26 miles on a dirt road.  All at night!  Lynne was the behind the scenes force to this enormous event.  We stayed at the Alpine Village, and were fed, hosted, treated like family by Keith and Delta Halloway and their family. 
The results of the competition are given out Sunday morning and by Sunday afternoon, the campers, vans, trailers and tents were all gone.  The vendors had packed up.  And Yellow Pine could go back to it's daily routine.

It's the Woodstock of harmonica.  It's a celebration of Idaho, mining towns, and music.  It's the old west at the end of a dirt road.  It's something one never forgets.

Thanks Yellow Pine!



Yellow Pine in the morning.  At night, this street is filled with harmonica lovers!