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Souper Star

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Correspondent

Mary Edna Thompson peers into a pot of soup.
“There’s still some left,” she says, stirring it with a wooden spoon.
White Christmas tree lights blink above the three pots atop camp stoves and the long table littered with spices and hot sauce, crackers and watermelon. It had been a long night. A lot of people had come through looking for a bowl. And it wasn’t over yet. At 3:30 a.m., they were still lining up.
It was about this time of the morning, 30 years ago, Thompson said she and friends sat around tired, dehydrated, hungry and thoroughly “Galaxed.” She thought back then how great it would be to have some soup.
“So I threw what I had in a pot and folks around me threw in what they had and pretty soon we had two pots of soup,” she said.
That was when Thompson was 30 years old, on a long ago trip to the Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax’s Felts Park. Local Moose Lodge 733 organizes the weeklong festival every August, drawing crowds in the thousands play, listen and dance to old-time and bluegrass music. Beyond that big yellow tent where the official competitions take place, is a sea of campers and tents and the soup kitchen, now 30 itself.
“The first year I’d just go to the stage,” she said. “The second year I realized there was something more. Walking around the camping area I saw community, family. I realized that there was something deeper.”
Tompson sat in the shad of her tent last Saturday, the 73rd annual Fiddler’s Convention, reviewing her shopping list. Someone found a bag of potatoes under her cooking table.
“Do you want them peeled?” they asked.
“Just chopped is fine,” Thompson said.
Another person walks away with her grocery list.
“Now that’s how it works,” she said. “I call it the recycling center. Somebody comes by and leaves it, another chops it and another reclaims it later.”
Her tent never stops moving. Soup goes out and music comes in, along with the musicians.
For Thompson, the motion, the openness and the sharing is what the Fiddler’s Convention is all about.
“Yesterday, while I was cutting veggies, I watched someone come up and start playing and others joined in, and by the time I was done there was a whole different group,” she said. “Galax is about people sharing with one another. It’s the sense of community, fellowship and working together.”
For nearly as long as the soup kitchen has been a tradition at the Fiddler’s Convention, the same tent has also played host to the Galax kazoo contest. It all began, she said, 26 years ago, back when the horse stalls were still at Felts Park. The kitchen in those days was perched at the end of the stalls. It seems that that year a band was disqualified from competing because it had a harmonica player in the group. One thing led to another and pretty soon a second, non-sponsored, unofficial contest, a kazoo contest, sprang up there at the end of the old horse stalls.
The prizes were bags of Galax mud.
“There was no malice behind it, just having fun with the rules,” Thompson said.
Nowadays, the kazoo contest doesn’t always even feature a kazoo. Some make a music of sorts with their cheeks. Others blow bubbles. Or juggle. Or throw confetti. The whirl of color and noise descends on Thompson’s tent at 1:11 on Saturday. Anything serious gets turned on its head. Seriously turned on its head.
Thompson said the kazoo contest is about paradox, communicating, having fun. It recaptures a little of the Galax glory gone by.
“It brings back the spirit of the stalls; anyone can come in and join,” she said. “We’re all children at heart and it brings out the artistic nature of people. It’s an opportunity to be a child.”
Prizes this year for competing, wearing a costume or just showing up to watch were handmade clay butterflies.
Fiddles, 17 of them, showed up immediately after the kazoo contest. The jam, a 13- or 14-year tradition, included four children cradling their own instruments.
Hours later, after the fiddles have faded, a nearby old-time band rides a rhythm through the night.
A young man with a banjo on his back, holds a cup of hot soup in one hand and hugs Thompson with the other.
“I just wanted to thank you,” he said in the dark.
For what? It’s not Thompson’s soup kitchen, she said. It’s everyone’s.
“This is not mine,” she said pointing to the sky. “It’s not mine at all, it’s His.”