WHITE SPRINGS – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Park Service will host the 59th Annual Florida Folk Festival on May 27 through 29, at Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park. The mesmerizing Sam Pacetti will perform on Friday evening, May 27.

 

Sam Pacetti is one who brings it all together, a fingerstyle guitar wizard, a deft songwriter, capable of haunting depth and wry humor in the space of one song and an impassioned and ecstatic vocalist, as well as a mesmerizing live performer, seamlessly melding head-spinning guitar pyrotechnics and raw emotion into one breathtaking package. Pacetti represents a culmination of the best of the American and British traditions.

 

Sam Pacetti grew up in North Florida, hardly known as a hotbed of either the folk tradition or musical innovation. At age 13, he found the music of both Chet Atkins and Merle Travis, profound influences on his early musical development. Then fate intervened shortly afterward in the person of Gamble Rogers, the legendary picker and raconteur from St. Augustine who took the young Pacetti under his wing. It was a time of astonishing musical and emotional growth. Pacetti and Rogers met and played weekly for a year, until tragically Rogers died while trying to save a drowning tourist caught in an undertow at Flagler Beach Florida. Though brief in their time together, Rogers instilled in Pacetti the importance of the folk process, the passing of music and oral tradition from teacher to student. Pacetti still counts Rogers as his most influential mentor.

 

Tradition and innovation neatly balance in Sam Pacetti’s music, the whole infused by relentless intelligence intent on musical and philosophical synthesis. Martin Simpson, Richard Thompson, Joni Mitchell and Merle Travis are touchstones to Pacetti, and while there are strong elements of the American primitive school of guitar wizardry throughout his work, there is a powerful raw emotionality evident as well, an earthy sensuality more reminiscent of Greg Brown or a red-dirt blues master than of a musical academia.

 

Advance tickets for the Florida Folk Festival are available through May 20, 2011 and are $20 per day or $40 for the weekend for adults.  At the gate, tickets are $25 per day or $50 for the weekend. Children under six years of age are admitted free of charge. Ticket prices for children between the ages of six and 16 for the entire weekend are $4 in advance or $5 at the gate. Credit card purchases can be made by calling 1-877-635-3655, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. To order by mail, send a check or money order to: Florida Folk Festival, Post Office Drawer G, White Springs, Florida   32096. Checks should be made payable to “Florida Folk Festival.”

 

For more information, visit www.floridastateparks.org/stephenfoster or www.FloridaFolkFestival.com.

 

The Festival will take place:

 

May 27–29, 2011

Gates open daily at 8:00 a.m.

Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park

White Springs, Florida