Jun 6
Bean Blossom: A Summer Vacation
Ah, summer vacation approaches.
In a few short days my wife and I will leave our central Illinois abode and head to a little obscure village in the south central Indiana hills called Bean Blossom.
At least, it’s obscure if you’ve never heard of the town that’s populated by less than 100 Hoosiers. The sole thriving business is McDonald’s - not of the Big Mac variety, but instead, McDonald’s grocery store, operated by a friendly, older gent I know only as Mr. McDonald.
For me, this tiny town on the Bill Monroe Memorial Highway heading north from Nashville, Ind., is far from obscure. It’s a place of significance for a couple of reasons, the first of which is my own roots.
My Grandma Gant was born in the late 1800s just outside town. My dad was born in Paragon, a small Indiana village just one county removed from Bean Blossom and Brown County. Providing a hint here that my mom might have been a year or two removed from being a child bride, my dad, like my Grandma Gant, was also born in the late 1800s.
Unlike my Hoosier dad and grandma, I’m an Illinoisan, born in Bloomington but reared a little in the manner of a Hoosier hillbilly on a couple of central Illinois farmsteads.
When I was young, my family would cram into my Uncle Poddy’s car and head to Martinsville, Ind., where relatives lived. It was as close as I ever got to a vacation in my childhood. We’d spend a long weekend with the cousins, and Bean Blossom was often mentioned during the conversations. Little did I know back then that this mystical place was just down the road about 20 miles away.
On another front, Bean Blossom holds a great deal of significance to the world of bluegrass music. In fact, true-blue bluegrass fanatics consider a few wooded and hilly acres on the edge of town hallowed ground. Bill Monroe, the founder and Father of Bluegrass Music, bought that piece of land years ago, when the Brown County Jamboree was performed in an old barn on Saturday nights, offering music shows to the tourist crowd that came to soak in the area’s rustic charm.
Monroe eventually started a bluegrass festival, which was held on the grounds every year in June. In the 1970s, the hippies and yuppies discovered the place and embraced the earthiness the acoustic music and wooded hills offered. Some observers of that era said Bean Blossom almost took on a Woodstock-like aura.
Around that same time, I became acquainted with Rickey Lamb, who had come to Lincoln from his southern Indiana home to attend Lincoln Christian College. Rickey, a few years my junior, found a part-time job at the newspaper where I still work. Our friendship quickly blossomed. We both viewed our stations in life at the time as just common farm boys engulfed by the concrete and asphalt of Lincoln, the mighty city (of 15,000 people). We also found a common ground in our love for music.
Rickey knew all about Bean Blossom. Turns out that when he lived at home, he accompanied his dad routinely to deliver melons and other produce from the Lamb family farm to the Bean Blossom farmers market. Rickey encouraged me a time or two to go to Bill Monroe’s famous Bean Blossom bluegrass bash, but I always found too many excuses to head that way.
A few years ago, Bean Blossom resurfaced in my life when another friend encouraged my wife and I to go. It sounded enticing, especially with the entire Nitty Gritty Dirt Band reuniting to close out the festival on Saturday night. Our kids were grown and gone from home, and I couldn’t devise a good excuse to stay at home. So we went - and we’ve been returning every year.
It’s evolved into quite the event in our lives, to the point I call it our Christmas in June. One son comes from Orlando, another from Toledo and yet another son, with his wife and two young children, drive up for the week from their Nashville, Tenn., home. Ten years ago, none of us would have dreamed our family would be so scattered - or that we would reunite yearly in a place called Bean Blossom.
We have several friends from central Illinois who also camp in our little U-shaped loop in the Bean Blossom campground. One of those friends is my old co-worker from long ago, Rickey Lamb, who has since become very much a part of our family. And, we once again gather with friends from far away, the folks we see only once a year at the festival.
Daily, our family walks down a shady, downhill path from our campsite to the concert area, where shows crank up around 11 a.m. and run into the late-night hours. The downside is the uphill, midnight climb back to our campsites. Once there, we break out our own musical instruments and try to emulate the professionals we’ve seen on stage. At times, the owl’s hoots have been replaced by the rooster’s crows before we finally decide it’s time to put our fiddles, banjos, guitars - and ourselves - to bed.
With this routine continuing for eight days, it’s far from a relaxing vacation. At the end of the festival, we collect the bit of energy we have left to pack it in on a Sunday morning. It’s not an enjoyable chore, especially knowing it’ll be a full year before we’re together like this again.
We go about our packing chores with laughter, small talk and a valiant effort to keep that stubborn tear from spilling onto our cheek. We finally hug, kiss and depart in different directions - filled with tremendous feelings of love for our family, with a week’s worth of songs in our hearts and minds and the knowledge that this tiny place called Bean Blossom will beckon us back next year.
God bless bluegrass and Bill Monroe.
Dan Tackett is senior editor of BluegrassJournal.com. This column also appears in the Saturday, June 7, edition of The Courier, a GateHouse Media newspaper in Lincoln, Ill., where the author is managing editor.
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