Days 18 through 24: Saturday, August 23nd - Friday, August 29th, 2025: TradMAD Camp (Plymouth, MA) featuring Martin and Eliza Carthy, Jeff Davis, Yann Falquet, the Vox Hunters, Julia Friend, many more
For this series of articles, our writer Ty Maxwell will be documenting his tour of the Northeast, spanning from August 6th to September 8th. Maxwell will be writing reflections and insights into the process of booking and executing a DIY tour as an independent artist, the relationships that enable the whole enterprise, and the general day-to-day experience: the minutiae, difficulties and triumphs involved in touring as a solo musician.
Camp creatures (the raccoons are named, respectively, Mischief and Mayhem).
When I initially began booking this tour back in April, I routed it strategically: rather than start at the beginning and approach it linearly, I began in the middle, booking Providence on the 22nd before anything else, knowing that the next day I’d drive to the Pinewoods Dance Camp in Plymouth. It’s a new personal tradition I’m building into my life, making it a recurring sojourn.
Pinewoods is a traditional dance and music camp – celebrating their centennial this year! – located in a beautiful 25-acre pine and beech forest in Plymouth. The grounds contain four large dance pavilions, cozy rustic cabins and group houses, two clear-water lakes for swimming and boating, an open-sided dining hall with beautiful views over the water, and the camp house, right by Long Pond, which hosts parties and workshops. Different week-long programs fill the summer schedule – Scottish Session I & II, American Dance & Music Week, Early Music Week, English Dance Week, many more; I come for a program called TradMAD, organized by the Folk Music Society of New York.
I attended this session for the first time two years ago; I was more or less completely unaware that camps like this existed. My dear friend Benedict Gagliardi, one of the best musicians and singers and songwriters I know (and an utterly wonderful person through and through) invited me to come in ‘23. I took his recommendation without a thought or doubt: I did no research, just made the necessary arrangements. (Ben and I met in college at a folk music club he started, and over the course of a few years he really taught me so much incredible music, for which I am indebted. He’s now an instructor at TradMAD.) That week ended up being a maniacally fun and magic-filled, with moonlit night-swimming, group-sings lasting until sunrise, and countless hours spent learning from and listening to master folk musicians and singers. I remember distinctly feeling like I’d been dropped into a parallel universe, a time warp totally distinct from my day-to-day life in Philadelphia. I mostly go to see contemporary music in Philly – indie rock and all its DIY offshoots, electronic and free jazz and experimental music – so it’s always incredibly refreshing to come to TradMAD and focus intently on folk music, stuff I often play privately, for pleasure, not socially or professionally.
This year, while a little less maniacal for me, was otherwise no different. I spent my days, alongside a hundred or so other campers and instructors, singing and playing music (and learning, and forgetting, so much at an unrelenting clip) – and making time to swim, take long walks, and eat delicious meals with people decades younger and older than me. The nights and late nights were devoted to parties, but again, it’s a particular kind of party atmosphere when everyone around you seemingly knows an infinite number of songs, with not an ounce of shyness among them, nothing to impede a new tune or song from emerging at a moment’s notice. One night in particular, affectionately dubbed "Pub Night," is devoted entirely to singing and drinking, with no instruments in sight, and it lasts until the last one drops. My camp friends and I made mezcal negronis and I stumbled back to my cabin good and drunk around 3 AM, the party still in full swing.
After more than two weeks of driving from town to town and performing my songs for strangers, I took advantage of the immense privilege of focusing not on “original” music but inherited, passed-down songs and tunes for a stretch. The two workshops I attended daily (I hopped around a bit when I could, being a bit of a dabbler) were Jeff Davis’ two- and three-finger banjo workshop and Yann Falquet’s DADGAD-tuned guitar workshop, conveniently back-to-back in the same outdoor pavilion next to the lake. Davis is a total legend, an absolutely killing banjo and fiddle player. I typically play in the popular clawhammer (or frailing) banjo style, but his lessons focused on what’s known as two-finger thumb lead, where you pick the main downbeat melody notes with your thumb, generally filling around upbeats on the first string with your index finger – and the style of the great, mysterious banjo player Dock Boggs, who added the middle finger and played in a deep, singular style. Davis’ demonstrations unlocked the approach for me in ways I couldn’t previously grasp on my own, and he did it all with great warmth and unwavering enthusiasm for the material and the songs. He also showed us some incredible instruments, including a banjo made for him by the late great banjo player Frank Profitt. Falquet, on the other hand, is an utterly masterful flatpicking guitarist and singer; he showed our group many of his tricks and techniques for playing instrumental reels (tunes in 4/4 time) and jigs (6/8) in the common-in-folk-music DADGAD tuning. I’d never heard Falquet’s music before and now I’m obsessed. One evening, he led all the willing campers in an hours-long session of French, French-Canadian and Quebecois tunes and songs that left me converted, not to mention dying to learn at least one song in French, if only to show off.
I can’t condense all the wonderful things that happened over the course of the week into one post, and I’ve got three hundred photos and videos on my phone to prove it. (I haven’t even touched on what an immense honor it was to get to sit with and listen to the great Martin Carthy, but I think words would completely fail me there.) All I can say is: whether you’re a devoted and dedicated musician, song collector, singer or dancer – or simply coming for a week of fun in the woods with a collective who don’t need an AUX cable to provide an endless playlist – you’re likely to have the time of your life at this place. Next year can’t come soon enough.
