Music Fans Get to Pick and Choose : Americana: The festival and contest at Paramount Ranch attracted the ‘blue jean crowd,’ characterized by casual dress and intense interest in bluegrass and old-time music.

Banjo went rancho Sunday at the 30th Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest, where traditional Appalachian music was the featured attraction at a former Western movie set.

An estimated 5,600 people--many of them wearing cowboy hats and boots, gingham skirts and suspenders--attended the bluegrass and old-time music festival at Paramount Ranch in Agoura, according to rangers of the National Park Service, which owns the 336-acre site.

“We’re the blue jean crowd,” said festival publicist Mary Wordin. “Down-home folks.”

About 100 singers and players of the banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin and bass competed solo and in bands, delighting the crowd with popular numbers such as “Cripple Creek” and “Cumberland Gap,” or rendering ballads so stark and sad they raised goose bumps on a perfectly sunny day.

Wordin and others attributed the festival’s appeal to the relative ease with which amateur musicians can pick up bluegrass and old-time tunes, which evolved from traditional Scottish and Irish melodies in the impoverished hills of Appalachia.

Devotees also described their appreciation of a native American art form that evokes struggle and survival.

“They’re peppy songs about people starving,” said Mary Ellen Clark, one of the founders of the event.

“What’re you going to do when the well run dry, honey? Sit on the bank and watch the crawdads die. . .” sang Clark, citing the classic “The Crawdad Song” as an example.

“What you’re singing about is your only source of protein.”

The event began as a Quaker fund-raiser in a Topanga Canyon back yard and in recent years has been held in several outdoor settings and benefited area folk music programs. This year, the setting was Paramount Ranch, the scene of numerous Westerns prior to 1980. And, for the first time, cowboy poetry and story reading rounded out the entertainment and what Wordin described as the oral tradition embodied in folk music. There was also square-dancing and clogging--a sort of Appalachian tap-dancing said to have started when an enthusiastic foot-stomper could sit still no longer and jumped to his feet.

But for many musicians who came from throughout Southern California the festival is mainly a yearly jamming reunion with friends who live far away or lead completely different lives. Far from the central stage, spontaneous concerts could be found all over the ranch, their musicians surrounded by rings of observers with nodding heads and clapping hands.

“Most of us know each other from these kinds of events,” said guitarist Allen Ard, a bearded, rotund mechanic from Los Angeles who played several sets with fiddler Michael Mendelson, a reed-thin computer engineer from Santa Barbara, and 10 other musicians.

“It’s just a good time,” Ard said.

Irene Flowers and her fiance, Carl Sachs, both of Newbury Park, said they enjoyed bluegrass and old-time music because it reminded them of their native Arkansas and Missouri.

“It reminds me of how my brother used to have jamming sessions in our living room when I was a kid. He played the steel guitar,” said Flowers, an accountant.

William Broide, a native of Poland who survived a Siberian labor camp, said the music reminded him of his youth and innocence before World War II.

“I was fascinated with the cowboy songs and used to love Westerns,” Broide said. “I never dreamt I’d actually come out here and see a cowboy.”