The Townie

Know the backroads. Use the front door.

The Town That Keeps Deciding to Exist

The Folk Festival opens tonight — the first one in many years without Mary Muse.

I should tell you up front that I am a terrible camper.

Years ago I pitched a tent at Quiet Valley Ranch for exactly one night, with a five-gallon bucket of cedar chips and more optimism than sense. At two in the morning a trumpet went off in the campsite next door, followed by the kind of joyful, unrepentant revelry that only happens when people have nowhere to be in the morning. I couldn’t even be mad — it was wonderful. It was also a million degrees, and by the next afternoon I’d packed up and surrendered, gratefully, to air conditioning. I’m a fair-weather camper; that part of Kerrville isn’t for me. But I’ve loved what they do out there for a long time, and I came by that love honestly.

When I was doing graduate work at Schreiner University — living in Kerrville, a good two decades older than most of my classmates — I talked my way into a songwriting class on campus. The professor who said yes was Bill Muse. Bill introduced me to his wife, Mary, the first person ever to serve as executive director of the Kerrville Folk Festival Foundation, a job she held for eight years, and to the low-ego people who make the whole thing run. They got me a scholarship to the songwriters’ camp. I have rarely felt so out of place and so completely at home at once.

You would have liked Mary. She listened as much with her heart as with her ears, held what everyone out there calls a “loving space,” and had a smile that reached all the way up into her eyes. She was also gloriously practical — the story they tell is that she once pulled a splinter out of Elton John’s hand backstage, minutes before he went on. Whatever it took to keep the show on the road.

Mary died in January, two weeks short of her sixty-eighth birthday, and this is the first Festival in many years to open without her. In April the people who loved her filled the ranch’s Threadgill Theater with stories and music — and the foundation announced something meant to outlast all of us: the Mary Muse Spirit of Kerrville award, given each year to whoever shows up hardworking and welcoming, a muse to the musicians and volunteers around them, giving without keeping score. The next person who does what Mary did.

That’s the thing about a festival that’s outlasted three recessions, two pandemics, and every algorithm since 1972: it keeps deciding to exist. The people Mary drew around her are the ones lighting the campfires tonight, tuning the guitars, welcoming the strangers. Keeping the thing she loved alive is how a community says a name out loud after someone’s gone.

So if you make it out to Quiet Valley Ranch this year — or if, like me, you just roll the windows down and sing something on the drive home — sing it a little louder than usual.

With love and a campfire jam stuck in my head,

The Two Insights Your Business Needs Right Now

1 · The Economics of Event Season

There's a particular arithmetic that runs through every Hill Country town between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and most operators learn it the hard way: festivals don't just bring revenue — they bring a whole different kind of customer, with a different timeline, a different tolerance, and a different reason for being in your zip code in the first place.

The Kerrville Folk Festival is a useful case study. It draws roughly 30,000 attendees across 18 days. Many camp at Quiet Valley Ranch, but many more drive in from Fredericksburg, Junction, Llano, San Antonio, and points farther for an evening show. Hotel rooms book months in advance for the first and last weekends. The customer who comes through your door on a festival weekend isn't the same one who'll be back in October — they're more forgiving, more curious, more willing to spend on something regional. But they're also choosing, in real time, between you and the place across the street.

For businesses far from the festival, the spillover is the real story. A wedding venue in Llano picks up bookings. A vineyard in Mason gets a Sunday crowd that came up for the show and made a day of it. A general store in Harper sells out of cold drinks. The mistake is treating festival traffic as a surge to survive. The opportunity is treating it as a free sample of a much larger customer base — the people who'd love what you do if they only knew about it. Every Hill Country weekend between now and Labor Day is a marketing budget you don't have to spend. The only question is whether you've staffed for it, stocked for it, and made it easy for someone to remember your name once the music stops.

2 · The Verdict of 370 Million Reviews

In February, Booking.com named Fredericksburg the #1 most welcoming city in the United States — and #5 in the world — in its 14th annual Traveller Review Awards, a ranking built from more than 370 million verified guest reviews. A designation like that isn't a billboard a chamber bought. It's the aggregate verdict of hundreds of thousands of people who actually stayed somewhere in the Hill Country, were treated well, and said so in writing.

Here's why that matters to a business three towns over. Rankings like this don't drive visitors to a single hotel — they drive them to a region. When that much search traffic points at Fredericksburg for Memorial Day or the Fourth, a meaningful slice of those travelers will wander: out to Mason for a winery, to Llano for a rodeo, to a roadside stand somewhere along the way. The visitors are a given. What they do once they've crossed your county line is not. The operators who win the summer won't be the ones with the biggest ad budget — they'll be the ones who are easy to find, genuinely welcoming, and memorable enough to earn the review that pulls in the next ten.

Source: Booking.com 14th annual Traveller Review Awards (announced Feb. 4, 2026).

What's Happening This Week & Beyond

Events, news, weather, ag, and the rest of what's moving across the Hill Country.

On the calendar

What's moving across the region

Community. Fredericksburg's girls basketball team came home as Class 4A Division II state runners-up; Becker Vineyards wrapped its 27th annual Lavender Festival in Stonewall; and Mason County 4-H heads to Roundup (validations Jun 16–17; Texas 4-H Roundup Jun 1–4 in College Station).

Schools & business. Fredericksburg's FHS INCubator Pitch Night awarded $20,000 to student entrepreneurs at Rockbox Theater; FISD named Dr. Calvin Bowers its lone superintendent finalist; and Magnolia Hospice of Brady cut its ribbon.

Recognition. Fredericksburg's VFW Post 7105 raised $83,109 at its 80th anniversary; Happy State Bank's John Wallace earned the National Outstanding Eagle Scout Award; and Llano seniors Konrad Zwicke and JD Friday made Class 3A All-State football.

Weather. Soggy and storm-charged through Memorial Day weekend — rounds of showers and thunderstorms, "heavy rain at times," highs in the mid-to-upper 80s. Severe storms likeliest north of the Carrizo Springs–Pleasanton–La Grange line (NWS EWX, May 18). Watch the radar before evening events; turn around, don't drown.

Policy & funding. TDA's TxCDBG block grants keep funding water, sewer, and street projects for towns under 50,000 (Mason, Menard, and Junction qualify). The new Texas Agricultural Grant Program (HB 43) is rolling out through the TDA-GO portal — get on the notification list.

Economy. Visit Fredericksburg reports $175M in 2024 visitor spending, ~1,200 jobs, and $17M in tax revenue (TravelStats) — dollars that ripple out to Mason, Llano, and Stonewall. Brady's 52nd World Championship BBQ Goat Cook-Off (Sept 4–5) still draws thousands.

Ag. The May 5 U.S. Drought Monitor put ~68% of Texas in drought, but April–May rains greened up Edwards Plateau pastures (Mason, Menard, Kimble improving). Edwards Aquifer levels remain below average since 2022. Cattle futures hit records — cash fat cattle at $255–$256/cwt.

Market. San Angelo Producers Livestock Auction (May 7): 509 head, calves and yearlings steady, cows and bulls $2 higher. May 12 sheep & goats ran heavy (7,500+) — lambs $5–$20 lower and kid goats off $30–$40, worth watching for Mason and Menard producers.

Grants. The Texas Rural Woman Grant (TWU Center for Women Entrepreneurs) is open through June 5 for rural, woman-owned businesses. TxCDBG and USDA Rural Development Community Facilities funding remain open year-round.

Tourism. Fredericksburg's 105-room Albert Hotel (open since Jan 2025) adds big-weekend capacity; expect spillover into Mason, Llano, and Junction around Memorial Day, the Stonewall Peach JAMboree (Jun 18–20), and the Fourth. Book B&Bs and ranch stays early.

All listings verified and current for the May 21, 2026 edition.

What the Folk Festival Means to the Hill Country

Fifty-four years on one ranch outside Kerrville — and what it tells us about this place.

There's a ranch about ten miles south of Kerrville where, beginning tonight, a small temporary city of songwriters will rise out of the cedar and live oak. Tents will go up in clusters along the dusty interior roads. A main stage will catch the late-afternoon light. By dark, somebody who flew in from Nashville will be sitting on a folding chair next to somebody who drove over from Brady, both with guitars in their laps and nowhere else they'd rather be. This will happen every night for eighteen straight days.

The Kerrville Folk Festival started in 1972. It was Rod Kennedy's idea — a three-day affair in the city's municipal auditorium, built on the radical premise that the songwriter mattered as much as the song. Five hundred and fifty-six people came that first weekend, paid five dollars apiece, and watched eight Texas songwriters take the stage one after another. Nobody knew yet that they were watching the beginning of something.

Fifty-four years later, the festival has outlasted three recessions, two pandemics, several ownership transitions, and every algorithm that's ever tried to tell us what we should listen to. It is the longest continuously running songwriting festival in North America. It draws roughly 30,000 people across its eighteen days. James McMurtry opens it tonight. Brandy Clark, S.G. Goodman, The Vandoliers, Lilly Hiatt, Jon Muq, The East Pointers, Lucy Wainwright Roche, Jason Ricci, and Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters are on the bill across the run. The New Folk Competition — which launched the careers of Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams, and dozens of others — hands out its 2026 hardware on Memorial Day weekend.

But to describe Kerrville in terms of its headliners is to miss what makes it Kerrville.

The festival's true heart isn't the main stage. It's the campground. A performer who's spent three decades coming back to Quiet Valley Ranch once said that "80% of Kerrville is what happens at the campfires." Around midnight, after the formal concerts wrap, the campground comes alive. Song circles form around fire rings. People who don't know each other take turns singing the songs they're working on. Someone hauls out a battered mandolin. Someone — usually but not always with a notebook — writes down a line they don't want to forget. By morning, those songs have been polished, abandoned, reshaped, or carried home to be recorded in a basement in Wisconsin or a barn in East Tennessee. The festival is, in this sense, a working session disguised as a vacation.

What Kerrville built — and what fifty-four years of nightly campfire circles have reinforced — is something most music festivals couldn't replicate if they tried. It's not a brand. It's a community. There are people who have camped at Quiet Valley Ranch every May since the Carter administration. They've watched their kids grow up there, learn their first chords there, fall in love there, and bring their own kids there. There's a thing they call "Kerrvert" — a portmanteau of Kerrville and convert, the people who came once and never stopped coming. The Ballad Tree sessions in the afternoons. The Songwriters School workshops. The thirty-year-old running joke about which campsite has the best coffee. These aren't marketing artifacts. They're rituals.

And rituals require a place.

That's the part that matters most for the Hill Country. The Folk Festival doesn't happen in Austin. It doesn't happen in Nashville. It happens on a ranch outside Kerrville because Rod Kennedy looked at the land and decided that what songwriters needed wasn't a club or a theater but a place to sleep under the stars between songs. Fifty-four years later, the ranch is part of the festival's identity in a way no urban venue could be. The cedar smoke. The whippoorwills at three a.m. The way a guitar sounds different outdoors, in the dry summer air, surrounded by cedar and sky.

The economics aren't small either — roughly 30,000 attendees, mostly camping on-site but also booking up Kerrville and the surrounding communities for the opening and closing weekends, with restaurants staffing up and gas stations on Highway 16 seeing steady out-of-state traffic. The festival is a meaningful piece of Kerr County's tourism economy. But identity, not income, is what Kerrville exports best.

The Folk Festival is proof that the Hill Country can make and sustain something durable — not a one-time spectacle, not a viral moment, but a fifty-four-year practice of sitting under a tree and listening to each other sing. That is, increasingly, a radical act in a culture organized around scroll speed and recommendation engines. The festival makes a case, every night for eighteen nights, that a song written for one person, played around one fire, in front of forty quiet listeners, is still worth more than the algorithm thinks it is.

If you've never been, this is the year to try. The first weekend (May 21–24) has James McMurtry and the opening-night energy. Weekend three (June 5–7) has the wind-down magic of people who've been at the ranch long enough to know each other's middle names. Family-friendly. Camping welcomed. Pack the rain gear this year — the skies look generous. Tickets at kerrvillefolkfestival.org.

And if you can't make it out to Quiet Valley Ranch, do this instead: roll the windows down on your next drive home, find a song you used to know all the words to, and sing it loud enough that the people at the next stoplight can hear you. That's the Kerrville spirit, made portable. The festival isn't selling music. It's reminding the rest of us that music is the kind of thing you make together, in the dark, with the people who happen to be there.

For fifty-four Mays in a row, the people who happened to be there have been us.

The Porch Supper Nobody Overthinks

A reader wants people on her porch — not a production. Hazel Mae and Fern agree.

Sugar, the thing keeping people off your porch isn't your porch. It's your standards — and I say that with love. Here's the gathering nobody admits they want: a folding table, a tub of ice with beer and sparkling water, one platter of something — brisket from down the road, a watermelon you cut in front of them — and chairs you already own. A speaker playing something nobody hates. That's the whole production.

Stop waiting for the right Saturday and pick this one. Send a group text: Porch. Friday. Six. Bring yourself, I've got it. If somebody asks what to bring, say ice and leave it. The reason folks remember a night isn't matching napkins — it's that you opened the door at five-fifty-five looking glad to see them. You're the gathering. Put it on the calendar. This Friday, not "soon."

There's something worth noticing in the word production. You used it like it was the enemy — and I think you're right. A garden teaches this one. The bouquet you remember isn't the florist's arrangement; it's the wildflowers a friend pulled from the roadside, still wet, set in a jelly jar on the railing. They say I thought of you louder than any composed thing could.

Hosting works the same way. The people coming aren't gathering evidence — they're coming because you'll be there, and want a few hours near each other in the long Hill Country light. The slower the evening goes, the more room there is for what matters: the talk that turns serious by the second drink and silly again by dark. The porch already knows how to be hospitable. Let it.

Got a question for Hazel Mae & Fern? Send it in. hey@thetownie.ai

You Wrote Back

Our Mother's Day edition — "The Women Who Hold It Together" — ran two weeks back. Then the replies started arriving, and they're the reason we do this.

Jeanie wrote in, and we've read her note more times than we'll admit:

Jeanie, you said it better than the article did. That grant — the Texas Rural Woman Grant, run through Texas Woman's University's Center for Women Entrepreneurs — is still open, with applications accepted through June 5. It exists for exactly the women Jeanie is describing: the ones quietly running something real out here. If that's you, or someone you know, consider this your reminder.

Geri kept it to two words: "Awesome edition!" Geri, that's the kind of note that gets a person through a Tuesday. Thank you.

And Mark wrote in to congratulate us on a recent feature about The Townie in Voyage Austin. That was kind — but here's the thing we keep coming back to. That edition was never about a byline, or a feature, or the person typing this. It was about the women in this community who carry so much and so rarely hear that anyone noticed. So thank you for the congratulations, Mark — and know that after reading your notes, all of them, we felt a little seen, too.

That's the whole job, really: you see us, we see you. Keep writing back. The porch is always open.

Every life has a soundtrack. Listen to yours.

Aries  Mar 21–Apr 19
The song stuck in your head is the one your body knew before your brain did — a beat you keep tapping on the steering wheel. Trust it. Aries doesn't deliberate; Aries dances. Move first. The lyric will come.

Taurus  Apr 20–May 20
Your song this week is slow and warm — the kind that stretches a Sunday afternoon into evening. Don't change the station. The loop in your head is asking you to slow down enough to hear the bridge. There's a line you've been missing.

Gemini  May 21–Jun 20
You've got three songs stuck in your head and you keep trying to braid them. Stop. Pick one. Sing it a whole afternoon before the next one comes in. Your gift is variety; your work this week is depth.

Cancer  Jun 21–Jul 22
The song that won't leave you alone is from a long time ago — kitchen radio, a particular summer, somebody no longer in your daily life. Let it play. It's a love letter from the version of you who first heard it.

Leo  Jul 23–Aug 22
Your song is the one you secretly want everyone in the car to sing along to. Roll the windows down. Leo wasn't built for headphones — Leo was built for the chorus. Pick the song that, sung loud, turns the car into a parade.

Virgo  Aug 23–Sep 22
The song in your head is annoying you because you can't remember the title, and Virgo can't stand an unresolved file. Stop searching. Hum it for somebody. Let them name it. Not every loose thread is yours to tie.

Libra  Sep 23–Oct 22
Your song this week is a duet — two voices, two perspectives, one melody that holds both. A conversation in your life has been waiting for its harmony part. Stop singing it alone. Balance is a sound, not a stance.

Scorpio  Oct 23–Nov 21
The song stuck in your head hurts a little, and you keep replaying it anyway. That's Scorpio. The lyric is doing quiet emotional surgery. Let it. By Sunday you'll either be free of the song or in love with it — both honest.

Sagittarius  Nov 22–Dec 21
Your song this week sounds like an open road. Highway 16 at dusk. Windows down, somebody else driving. Sag's restlessness has a soundtrack, and it's playing. Make a small plan. Go somewhere. The song wants company — and so do you.

Capricorn  Dec 22–Jan 19
The song in your head is one you used to play while building — a work song, a rhythm for repeating motions. It's back because you're starting something new. Trust the muscle memory. The song knows your hands before your hands know the task.

Aquarius  Jan 20–Feb 18
Your song this week is the weird one. The deep cut. The track somebody put on a mixtape that you never got over. Aquarius doesn't share its strangeness easily — but this week, somebody asks. Send them the song. Let your private playlist become a bridge.

Pisces  Feb 19–Mar 20
Your song this week is one you can almost hear underwater — distant, beautiful, slightly out of reach. Don't chase it. Float toward it. Pisces hears what the rest of us miss. By Sunday, you'll be the one humming it for somebody else who needed it.

Until next week — find your song, sing your part. Every porch in the Hill Country is a stage if you let it.

Still Here: Rhea

A young shepherd mix with amber eyes and one job: to be near you.

Some dogs make you earn their affection. Rhea is not one of those dogs. This sweet shepherd mix — just under a year old, all legs and ears and good intentions — has one primary objective in life, and it's to be as close to you as physically possible. Sit down near her and she'll roll right over, offer her belly to the heavens, and soak in every second of attention you'll give. The volunteers say she leans into a scratch like it's the best thing that's ever happened to her. Every single time.

She's young, so she's still figuring a few things out — basic obedience, leash manners, the etiquette of being a big dog in a people-sized world. But everyone who's worked with her says the same thing: she's a quick study. She's spayed, heartworm negative, and fully vaccinated — ready to go the day the right person shows up. And that person is someone who wants a shadow: a human to follow room to room, ride shotgun on the errands, and sprawl across the foot of the bed.

If you've got room for an affectionate big girl who'll love you with her whole body and ask for nothing but your company, call Second Chance at 325-347-6929 or email adoptions@secondchancemason.com. Rhea's ready when you are.

Beautiful photography by Suzanne DeMaree

"Okay, full disclosure: I'm a hugger. I'm working on reading the room, but my whole thing is just — I really like being near people. All the way near. If you're on the couch, I'm on the couch. If you're in the kitchen, I'm supervising. I'm in my early twenties, still figuring out the whole 'adult' thing — I'm learning, I swear, ask anybody — but I've got the important stuff down: I show up, I'm loyal, I'm down for whatever you've got planned, and I will absolutely flop over and let you rub my belly the second you sit still long enough. A person to follow around. A spot at your feet. Somebody who looks happy to see me. That's the whole list. I'm a good girl, and I'm ready whenever you are."