Lily Goldberg’s dispatch from Burning Ma’aM, a DIY country-punk festival deep in Amish country.
Nine months ago, about 140 miles east of where Donald Trump caught a bloody ear, I was waiting at the State College Greyhound station for a stranger to pick me up. An overstuffed hiking pack teetered on my shoulders; a man without teeth wanted conversation. Penn State students flitted down Atherton Avenue on their bicycles, not one stopping to ask where I was headed with my cooler and my tent. Truth was stranger than fiction: I was off to party in Amish country.
Burning Ma’aM – a DIY “country-punk” festival held on a farm in the unincorporated community of Woodward, Pennsylvania (population 106) – was an unlikely place for me to end up over Memorial Day Weekend. I didn’t know a soul attending and I’d never been farther west in Pennsylvania than Philadelphia. The festival was hosted by Ma’Am, a Central Pennsylvanian six-piece alt-country band who put together a lineup of eighteen acts spanning rockabilly to sludge. Godcaster, a Brooklyn-based band I’d seen a few times, was on the lineup, and had posted a flyer for the festival on Instagram promising a “weekend-long party for rockers, rollers, punks, flunks, honkers, tonkers, and plain ole music lovers alike.” I wasn’t sure if I was a “honker” or “tonker,” but I was definitely a plain ole music lover, so I signed up to volunteer – I was curious to see how Pennsylvania kicked it, and curious about the overlap between country and punk, an intersection I couldn’t fathom from my vantage point.
On a Thursday in late May, I caught an afternoon Greyhound from Newark, headed west to Pittsburgh. The coach hummed serenely through the spring greenery, past waterparks, parcelled farms, heritage museums, and a miniature replica of the Statue of Liberty tucked into the Susquehanna. Araelia, Ma’aM’s lead singer and guitarist, graciously offered to put me up on the couch the night before the festival, and offered to scoop me from the Greyhound station in State College. Just outside of Harrisburg, she shot me a text: her friend Melany had to run some pre-festival errands in State College, and would be picking me up from the bus station instead.
My volunteer shift begins with the arrival of Melany’s silver Honda. “Getting shit done” is Melany’s motto, her superpower – in a trucker hat, cutoff shorts, and a pink bandana, she runs errands with the efficiency of a stage manager and the concentration of a huntress. In the span of a manic sunset hour, we stalk the aisles of GIANT for seltzer, cop multiple handles of “Tito’s Branded Vodka,” purchase bulk hand sanitizer from Walmart, scoop cigarettes from Sheetz, and pick up Pizza Hut pies to bring to “The Ma’aM House,” the mythical cabin where Araelia lives with her bandmates.
Burning Ma’aM, Melany explains amid the checkout aisles, began five years ago as a one-day birthday bash for Araelia. Originally the party wasn’t a “festival” so much as a birthday throwdown, a musical party with sets by local band friends of Ma’aM. But as word got out about the hottest party in Centre County, operations expanded. The festival moved from a quarry to a farm. The lineup doubled. Now there were porta potties, a rented stage, vendors. For the first time this year, the festival would be held over two days instead of one.
Melany’s boyfriend Isaac played at the very first Burning Ma’aM – he’s in an alt-country-rock band called Old Lady, whose members are close friends with Ma’aM. Melany and Isaac are frequent fliers at the Ma’aM House, a log cabin that Ma’aM and friends rent from a local Amish farmer (the house is prominently featured on the album art for their latest record, Rules 2 Ramblin). True to Amish life, there’s no Wi-Fi; they use data, Melany explains, to fuel their Vanderpump Rules addiction. After our errands are through, we begin the starlit drive over there – Melany has Dixie Chicks and Ramones CDs in the car door, but she puts on Morgan Wallen for the ride. The flower moon rises above the fields as we smoke our Sheetz cigarettes out the car window. After a few turns and a long gravel road, we arrive.
Inside, it’s like Santa’s workshop on Christmas Eve, if the elves were into retro kitsch. The house buzzes with musicians and friends — visiting bands, festival volunteers, and the members of Ma’aM. Wooden walls and glowing lamps envelop the space in soft mahogany light. By the bar cart, a cutout Elvis strums his guitar towards a framed portrait of Jesus. There are horseshoes on the walls, posters of Linda Rondstadt and The American Dreamer and The 5.6.7.8.s. Stoners pack bongs, honky tonk angels paint their toenails scarlet.
Names and faces, tattoos and mustaches, Keebler cookies and Tito’s chased with Capri-sun – the details get dizzy. But when I’m ready to crash, there’s a couch bed made up for me, and when someone tells me “Welcome home,” I feel it.
Woodward, PA is located three hours from both Pittsburgh or Philadelphia in a broad region of Pennsylvania that some call “The T,” and some – whether affectionately, condescendingly, or perplexedly – have referred to as “Pennsyltucky.” “The T” describes the shape of 48 rural counties that lie between Pennsylvania’s two major metropolitan areas; “Pennsyltucky” takes a swing at the stereotypical similarities between this area and Central Appalachia. Oversimplified as the portmanteau may be, there’s at least one similarity between the two regions – parts of both have been described as “Trump Country” in recent years (in 2024, Trump won 73.4% of the rural vote in Pennsylvania). And country music – an American heritage strongly entwined with working-class audiences in Central and Southern Appalachia – likewise has a history and audience in non-metro Pennsylvania: Rosalie Allen, the first woman inducted into the Country Music DJ Hall of Fame, was from Pennsylvania coal country, and Warren Zeiders, a rising star who topped the country charts with “Pretty Little Poison” last year, hails from Hershey.
Since 2012, Centre County has been a Blue dot within the Red “T,” and Burning Ma’aM’s country-punk ethos offers something unique in this landscape: the opportunity to celebrate the finer things in rural life – beer, banjos, bikes, babes, brush piles – without Making America Great Again. The visual markers of the country-punk aesthetic become immediately apparent as festival-goers start to arrive on Friday afternoon: leather vests and crocheted tops, occasional keffiyehs and ubiquitous cowboy boots, American Traditional tattoos poking out everywhere. Atop the hillside where dozens of car campers set up folding chairs, a yellow banner mocking the Gadsden flag read “NO STEP ON SNEK.” On the right side of the grounds, local vendors sell buttons printed with slogans like “Redneck Socialist,” “Hillbilly Communist,” “Recovering Academic,” and “Non-Practicing Intellectual.”
I arrived at the Burning Ma’aM grounds around ten in the morning, and pitched my tent near the collective campsite of Phil Spector’s Gun, a Philly-based garage-rock band whose members I’d met briefly at the Ma’aM House last night. Their guitarist Mark, who I’d met that morning over Pop Tarts and an eight a.m. bowl, had given me a ride to the farm. Mark was raised near Greenville, North Carolina – he grew up playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, but with PSG, he’s gone electric.
“Down south,” Mark said, “we grew up on country, but we played punk because we didn’t want to do what our parents were doing. Then, you realize you can combine them.”
The cross-pollination between country and punk has been a thing for decades: if you stop to think about it, the two genres are like second cousins. Like most musical genres, punk emerged from many influences and lineages. But the maniacal fusions of punk and country that emerged soon after punk’s emergence – like “psycho-billy” and the “hectic, slam-dancing tempos” of “cowpunk” – proved that country and punk shared enough musical DNA to make a harmonious lovechild from twang and distortion.
But politically, the subcultures most frequently associated with punk and country have often been cast as polar opposites, representative of incompatible ideologies – as punk emerged as a visceral expression of dissent and revolt, mainstream country was becoming the sound of the state. In a 2007 interview with NPR, music historian Lester Feder dates country music’s conservative turn to 1969, the year that Merle Haggard released “Okie From Muskogee,” an anti-hippie anthem denouncing drug use and student protests during the Vietnam war. From the late 1960s until 1986, the U.S. Air Force sponsored a radio program called Country Music Time that promoted military recruitment using country music. Post-9/11, the flag-waving tunes of artists like Toby Keith and Darryl Worley cemented pop country’s marriage to patriotic ideals. Bands like Green Day were left to distance themselves from “the redneck agenda” and “subliminal mindfuck America.”
Country-punk offers an alternative to this binary. It champions a vision of country music that hasn’t been co-opted by corporate or right-wing nationalist interests – it also welcomes punk’s harder rocking edge. Araelia and her partner Tiger both came from punk and heavy metal backgrounds before founding Ma’aM – their love of country music inspired them to incorporate country influences into their rock, but punk clearly takes over on tracks like their cover of MC5’s “American Ruse.” This is a far cry from Jason Aldean – what Ma’aM is making and curating feels more in line with the anti-establishment energy of tracks like “Take This Job and Shove It” (a country song so punk, it was covered by the Dead Kennedys).
Dusty the Kid, a ginger-haired, Missoula-based musician who performs solo and on banjo with Ma’aM, takes a more acoustic, folk-punk approach to the same principles. When he hits the main stage around 7 p.m., festival-goers wave anarchist flags. Dusty’s music draws from union songs and murder ballads – on songs like “Bethlehem Steel,” Dusty poetically captures the toll of industry with a mournful intensity. But Dusty’s access to anger feels capable of stirring the audience into political indignation. Towards the end of the set, Dusty pulls out a slow, bluesy version of the Dead Kennedys song “Let’s Lynch the Landlord.” It’s a jarring, visceral song, and Dusty snarls every word.
Burning Ma’aM is still a big ol’ birthday party, and while there’s room for political expression here, there’s also time for partying. Shenanigans get underway shortly after Dusty’s set. The guys from Phil Spector’s Gun set up 99 Coors cans at the foot of the stage and instruct the audience to finish them by the end of the set. Bloodshot Bill, a Montreal-based psychobilly icon, wears the freshly-emptied Coors box as a hat, and performs a fair portion of his frenzied set completely blinded by the cardboard. At midnight, everyone staggers over to the “Revival Tent” for a rip-roaring set from Howlin’ Brian Hurd, a harmonica player and blues guitarist with sideburns and St. Louis swagger. I crash into my tent around two in the morning, lulled to sleep by a fireside cover of “Wild Horses” drifting from some cricket-filled beyond.
On the second day of Burning Ma’aM, I’m awoken by an announcement:
“Goooooood morning, Burning Ma’aM! Please rise for your national anthem!”
Are they really going to play The Star Spangled Banner for 300 hungover campers?
Of course not: Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do (Is Have Some Fun)” blares through the speakers.
We’ve all still got headaches from last night, and it’s only nine in the morning. Not the worst time to start drinking again.
Mark and the Phil Spector’s Gun boys let me drink some of their beer and hang out at “The Naughty Tent,” the name they’ve designated for the pop-up canopy where their friends chain smoke cigarettes and engage in running banter that sounds like a Cum Town audition tape. Topics include: shitting in a hole; enforcing your second amendment rights inside your tent; the inability to hold an erection since Joe Biden became president; sunning your asshole; whether your Dad would punch you if you called him gay. At some point, the conversation gets Philly/Jersey specific.
“My friend’s Bible camp teacher was JT Ramuto’s mom,” says one guy.
“My friend got his hair cut by Bon Jovi’s mom,” says another.
I don’t talk much, but at some point, I make an offhand comment about moving to Philly. New York is ridiculously expensive, and…
The lead singer of PSG cuts me off: “Don’t raise our rent,” he says. “Tell all your friends we eat puppies.”
Pennsylvania roll call: from the City of Brotherly Love, we have the aforementioned PSG, a sludge-y group called Sun Organ, and the alt-country rockers Mandy Valentine. From Western Pennsylvania, there’s Jagwire (who, the emcee declares, “Put the Punx in Punxsutawney!”). From Milheim and State College, there’s Ma’aM and The Wild Shoats (formerly known as The Shoats), a folk group with members based between Millheim, PA and West Virginia. The rest of the lineup hails from all over – Richmond, Troy, Rochester, even Flagstaff by way of Jersey City.
Throughout the day, folks mill about pleasantly. They grab sausages from the food trucks, or visit the vendors (yesterday, I helped one of the vendors with her vintage pop-up, sweating as we moved racks of leather and lace through the hot bald sun on the hill). Couples sprawl on picnic blankets, punk teens slamdance in the pit. It’s all peaches and cream until the thunderstorm.
The rain comes in the early evening, a summer torrent dousing us by the bucketful. Good luck if you left your tent unzipped (I did). When the thunder began, I was stationed down the hill at an evening volunteer shift, checking tickets in the parking lot. Buckets of rain means mud, and mud means stuck cars – so in a leadership choice that benefits me greatly, the head of the volunteers decides to bar any new cars from entering the grounds, and I’m off the hook for the night. I take shelter with the other volunteers inside a cavernous barn behind the stage. There, The Wild Shoats are rehearsing fiddle tunes for their late night square dance. As the rain begins to clear, I peer out of the barn into a baptized world. Tangerine clouds blaze across the sky. In a nearby field, a pack of horses traipse through lavender fog.
The night is a bright blur from here on out. Godcaster takes the stage around nine, gyrating and twitching, droning and shredding. At half past ten, two lovers sway as Old Lady croons my favorite line from their grungy ballad “Infatuation”: Stab me in the eye with your look so dangerous. Fuck in front of all these fucking people. Ma’aM tears the roof off from eleven to one. Armed with horns and fiddles and guitars, they glow like the heralded angels of the country punk vanguard. During a cover of “God Only Knows,” two of the musicians from Mandy Valentine take the stage for a surprise double lesbian marriage proposal?!!! (The answer was an emphatic double YES).
Like Burning Man, Burning Ma’aM ends with a giant bonfire. Sparks pop like BB guns from a massive brush pile as attendees mill about, flirting and chatting. It’s nearing one-thirty in the morning, but The Wild Shoats are just getting started with the late-night square dance. Around two a.m., attendees swing arm in arm, do-si-do. At three-thirty, Mary Linscheid – the lead singer of The Wild Shoats – draws an Appalachian waltz in the air with her voice, plaintive and clear. We spin and twirl to the fiddle. We make a bridge.
On Sunday morning, I carpooled off the farm with a fellow volunteer, who let me hang out on his couch and made me Chicken of the Woods harvested from his backyard while I waited for my delayed Greyhound to come. 48 hours later, I arrived back at Port Authority with a hoarse voice and a backpack of soaking clothes. I went to a bar that served a “Redneck Woman”-themed cocktail for $16. The weekend had felt like a fever dream, and while I ran into a couple of festival acquaintances at gigs and jams in the months to come, I didn’t think too hard about Centre County specifically again until October, when State College showed up on TV.
Eleven days before the election, Trump held a rally at Penn State. During it, he welcomed a grinning gaggle of PSU wrestlers onstage, several of whom sported red “Make America Great Again” hats. “Thank you for recognizing us,” one of the wrestlers said. “Pennsylvania is a super important state.” Two weeks later, the “super important state” swung red; two months later, country singers Carrie Underwood (who, aptly, was born in Muskogee) and Lee Greenwood rang in Trump’s presidency with performances on Inauguration Day. On February 13, Trump appointed Greenwood to the board of the Kennedy Center. “The prevailing view in a stunned Washington,” reported the New York Times, is that the performing arts center “will now feature more country music.”
As country music is being deployed as the battle hymn of the right-wing’s culture war, it feels more important than ever that festivals like Burning Ma’aM, situated in increasingly conservative-leaning pockets of the country, are building resistance and community with their own vision of what DIY country music communities can stand for. In 2025, a portion of the Burning Ma’aM ticket sales will go to Centre County LGBTQ+, an organization that provides resources and support to LGBT+ community members in need within rural PA. The festival is also now an officially-registered nonprofit.
Just before dawn on the final night of the festival, the standards came out around a sputtering campfire. Howlin’ Brian Hurd and his disciples plucked out “Mountain Dew” by the Stanley Brothers, “Big Iron” by Marty Robbins. Members of Ma’aM drifted over to the dwindling embers, having put away their instruments, cleared out the bar, and shut off the lights. One of the band members made a song request: “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.”
Written by songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard and made famous by outlaw country pioneer Jerry Jeff Walker, the song was recorded in 1973 to decry country’s conservative turn. I learned later on that the song riffs on the leftist revolutionary slogan “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker” — a phrase originated by Black socialist poet Amiri Baraka and adopted by anarchist organizers. In the moment, all I heard was the chorus, belted by a dozen rock-and-rollers as the sky began to lighten:
Up against the wall, Redneck Mother!
Mother, who has raised her son so well
He’s thirty-four and drinking in a honky tonk
Kicking hippies’ asses and raising hell!
That’s a country-punk finale for you: a song about bourbon, trucks, and honky tonk based on Baraka, shouted into the sliver between darkness and American morning.
