The Trees Community
August 1974
Fox Hollow Festival
Beers Estate
Petersburgh, NY

ANA(x) [on-stage mics? sbd matrix?] > TC-WR950 > FLAC 24/48

1. The Parable of the Mustard Seed
2. Jesus He Knows
3. Psalm 45

In mid-2020 I acquired a box of tapes from an eBay auction that only said they were recordings of a folk festival and had been obtained at a recent estate sale. Nobody else bothered to bid and about a week later they were in my possession. The labels revealed they were recordings of the Fox Hollow folk festival with a few tangental recordings at at the Eighth Step Coffee House and Café Lena but otherwise revealed virtually nothing about their contents, not even which year they might be from.

Unfortunately, my research notes taken while looking into these tapes back then appear to have gone missing and many of the websites I used as sources are gone, including a great blog post from a member of the community about their experience traveling to and performing at this festival. Thankfully, this article here seems to describe the exact same collection (except complete and from the original reels, not cassette dubs) and provides most of the context I'd lost:
https://library.albany.edu/news/summer-2021-folk-festival-archives

More than likely these cassettes were made by Don Person during the creation of the Fox Hollow festival LPs to audition potential tracklist candidates. Sadly, this makes sharing these recordings on Dime practically impossible without comparing every single track on the tapes to the LPs to see what was officially released and what wasn't. I've identified a few tracks as appearing on the LPs, but most remain completely unidentified in a similar situation to the archivist above. There's very, very little concrete information about the Fox Hollow festival online despite being incredibly well taped. Several archives have large collections of digitized Fox Hollow recordings available to stream online but nothing in the way of event programs nor posters listing who played which day.

Thankfully, this one immediately stood out and such was easy to identify. As far as I can tell, this recording has never circulated, has never been officially released, and in my opinion is the crown jewel of the Fox Hollow cassettes. I've checked all the archives that have their contents online and none seem to hold a copy of this set and I imagine if it was known to exist it would've been used for the extensive Trees Community box set release. No idea how or why this slipped through the cracks, perhaps the master is sitting in the University at Albany archives yet to be identified itself.

A quick Google search will tell you more about The Trees Community than I could here but Psalm 45 is worth the download alone. It's a truly haunting, droning, psychedelic masterpiece and while the other tracks are a bit more off the wall and theatrical, the whole set is this fantastic wind-down when taken as a whole. Despite being a generation or two deep on some pretty cheap tape stock it's still a fine, clear, stereo(!) recording that I can't place the methods of. Can't imagine it's a pure soundboard because no folk festival in 1974 is miking up every instrument on stage but the stereo separation and vocal clarity is incredible even for on-stage mics. Regardless of what the source might be it's an incredible capture and I'm glad to have stumbled into it.