The festival is held at Camp Washington-Carver, a New Deal-era complex in the village of Clifftop, in Fayette County, West Virginia, near the New River Gorge. The site itself has a story worth knowing: the complex was built between 1939 and 1942 as a 4-H camp for African American youth at a time when the rest of the state's 4-H camps were segregated. After integration, the West Virginia Division of Culture and History took it over and began using it for cultural programs. Today Camp Washington-Carver hosts the string band festival each summer, with state sponsorship. The wooden lodges and the open meadow that surrounds them anchor a week that draws musicians from across the country and from as far away as Ukraine and Japan.

The official festival starts on the Wednesday before the first full weekend in August, but the field begins filling up days earlier with painted vans, hand-built canopies, and family camps that have returned to the same patch of ground for thirty years. There are contests - traditional band, neo-traditional band, fiddle, old-time banjo, flatfoot dance. There are concerts, workshops, square dances, and even basket making and hymn singing. The neo-traditional band contest on Friday is one of Clifftop's signatures, judged not on faithfulness to the past but on how creatively a band extends old-time music into other voices, instrumentations, and styles. But ask any regular what the festival is really about, and they will point at the campsites. That is where the music actually lives.

Over the decades the festival has drawn a remarkable cross-section of the old-time world. Nashville musicians like John Hartford and Tim O'Brien have played here, alongside Leftover Salmon's Vince Hermann. Legendary West Virginia fiddlers like Melvin Wine and Lester McCumbers carried tunes from their own elders into Clifftop's late-night circles. Second-generation revival players - Mike Seeger, Bruce Molsky, Rafe Stefanini, Brad Leftwich, Ira Bernstein - have anchored sessions year after year. The youngest generation of players, like fiddler Jake Krack, learned a good portion of their repertoires in the same campgrounds. The result is something rare in American music: a tradition that is genuinely intergenerational, where a ninety-year-old fiddler from West Virginia can sit down with a twenty-year-old from Brooklyn and start a tune that both already know.

Old-time music is older than bluegrass and quieter than country. The banjos here are usually played in clawhammer style rather than the three-finger roll. The fiddle leads, often in cross-tunings that turn the instrument into a small drone orchestra. Songs come down from the Carter Family, from the great Round Peak players of North Carolina, from West Virginia fiddlers like Edden Hammons and Ed Haley. At Clifftop the music spreads beyond its origins - Cajun fiddlers, Celtic harpers, swing players, even occasional reggae - but always with the same straight-off-the-strings acoustic ethic. Late on the last night, when most of the tents have come down and the contests are over, the music in the campgrounds rises one last time, holds for a few hours, and then carries itself home in a thousand cars headed back across the country.