The Hills Are Alive With the Twang of Texas : Every June, artists and musicians gather in the Hill Country near San Antonio.

How I managed to get my Northern California-bred sweetheart to agree to spend a week camping in South-Central Texas in June is beyond me.

Maybe it was visions of me there on my own, prey to muscle-bound Texas hunks clad only in shorts and boots in the tent next door, that got him. Maybe I neglected to tell him that it sometimes hails.

Known as the Hill Country, the region we were headed for stretches from Austin to San Antonio, and its appeal varies, depending on the visitor. Some come for its beauty, a kind of overgrown low-rider Texas lushness, with rolling green hills and easy-flowing rivers.

Starting about March, the fields and ditches become a constantly mutating canvas of wildflowers: First out is the purple-blue bluebonnet, a lupin that is the state flower. A few weeks later, the burgundy wine cup reddens the hills with goblet-shaped flowers. Then Indian paintbrush turns the countryside orange, followed in May by the firewheel, which grows in such profusion that from a distance one sees only a blanket of yellow and deep burnt-orange. Purple Texas thistle blooms throughout the summer.

Scissor-tail and mockingbirds take up residence in the trees, and deer are abundant throughout the region.

From San Antonio to Austin, in Kerrville, New Braunfels, San Marcos and dozens of other hamlets, the area is full of summer camps and rustic resorts that line the Guadalupe and San Marcos rivers. Antique-seekers invade the little German towns that dot the countryside, where homemade wurst and time-worn furniture are served up in a host of shops, galleries and bed and breakfast inns.

I go every year for the arts and music festivals that take place near the town of Kerrville, about 60 miles northwest of San Antonio, down stark Texas roads dotted with wildflowers.

The rivers and hills here are very different from their California counterparts. While I always think of the California hills as sort of majestic and still, in Texas there’s always movement--in the scrubby but plentiful trees, in the rivers, in the air. There’s none of the almost-manicured look that, to me, California has even in its wilderness.

In the spring, this part of Texas doesn’t hold back: The sky turns purple and pours, then flips to a painfully beautiful blue. The sun wakes you up with its heat, a great white globe with a rainbow-like ring all the way around it.

For the past five years, I have flown, and then driven, from Los Angeles to attend the Kerrville Folk Festival, which lasts 18 days and features concerts by acoustic bands and singer-songwriters from across the country.

It’s an absolute gem among such events, drawing as many as 7,000 people from all over Texas and surrounding states, as well as die-hards from both coasts.

Many festival-goers stay in motels or rent cabins at one of the area’s riverside resorts. But to get the full experience of the festival, I always go native, hauling in my tent from Los Angeles and setting up housekeeping for a week on the sprawling ranch outside of town where the folk festival is held.

Quiet Valley Ranch, as it’s called, is owned by the festival’s promoter, Rod Kennedy, and it basically consists of a giant hunk of land with trees you can camp under if you’re lucky, a couple of grass-covered hills, a big parking lot and a lot of Texas sky. It’s not as beautiful as the nearby resort camps--just a sprawling ranch with a few horses.

But if you can handle heat, sun and the occasional cloudburst, and you’re really interested in the music, camping is the way to go. Music at the ranch continues long after the concert stage closes down, as songwriters and performers settle in to play until dawn at the hundreds of campfires dotting the ranch grounds.

“This is our annual convention,” explained songwriter Tim Keller, a Pacific Palisades native now living in Dallas. He leaned back against a carved wood “guitar chair”--so named because it has no arms to hinder playing--as we sat around a campfire at last year’s festival. “It’s the only chance we get to see each other and swap songs or check out how business is going,” Keller said.

And if the person next to you in the circle around the fire does a tune that you recognize, be sure to (subtly) find out the person’s name--knowing the Kerrville Festival, he or she probably wrote the song and may have even been the one to make a hit out of it.

Texas troubadour, now rock star Michelle Shocked was discovered at the 1986 festival, when she stayed up all night singing into the Walkman tape recorder of a British music-business type. He went back to England and dubbed the tape onto a record, and the resulting album, “The Texas Campfire Tapes,” became a No. 1 hit on pop charts across Europe.

Jon Ims, writer of last year’s country hit “She’s in Love with the Boy,” is a festival regular, setting up shop every year in a wooded area of the ranch called “Camp Cuisine,” so named because of the elaborate meals concocted by those who camp there.

Sixties folk singers like Peter Yarrow, one third of Peter, Paul and Mary and writer of “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” and Carolyn Hester also perform regularly, and can sometimes be heard around the fire at night.

Being Texas, even in June it gets pretty hot during the day, and since there’s usually a break in the concerts in the afternoon, I like to get off of the ranch every now and then to go for a swim in the Guadalupe. Kerrville State Park is a well-tended oasis in the town of Kerrville, where the river meanders flat and wide between grassy, tree-covered banks. The river also passes through some of the cabin resorts, and if you’re staying in one of those, you can just come home to swim. Some festival-goers have been known to just strip off their clothes and go bounding au naturel into the river wherever they can find a private spot, but in recent years local landowners have gotten a little miffed at this practice.

Once on the road and out of the festival, I make an annual pilgrimage to the town of Fredericksburg, about 22 miles northeast of Kerrville on Highway 16. This neat German town is full of bed and breakfast inns and antique shops, and just on its outskirts is the restaurant of my dreams, the Hilltop Cafe.

Located in an old gas station on Highway 87, the Hilltop is crammed full of Texas-style antiques. Its owner, Johnny Nicholas, was once the piano player for the Western swing group Asleep at the Wheel, and if he’s inspired, he might just get going on the upright piano in the corner of the restaurant while you’re waiting for your meal.

Nicholas is of Greek descent, and his wife is Cajun. Both were reared in Texas and the South, and between them, they’ve concocted a spicy, fresh cuisine that includes a lot of seafood and a healthy dose of Southern style.

The specialty is crab, deep-fried in the shell in a spicy batter. The gumbo has a rich brown broth--light, not thick--with crisp green onions and fresh shrimp. An order of chicken fried steak--always a test of true Southern cooking--is enormous: two steaks, breaded and fried, with a light brown gravy that is not at all salty.

Nicholas drives more than 200 miles to the Gulf Coast to get his fish and bring it back on ice--he says he can’t get it fresh any other way--and sells his albums at the front counter.

Like many Hill Country towns, Fredericksburg was settled by German immigrants, and to this day a portion of the town’s visitor guide is written in German.

In Fredericksburg, as in many other parts of this German-influenced region, it’s clear where the ordinary Texans leave off and the Germans begin. All of a sudden, the scruffy brush and messy farmyards give way to neat-as-a-pin fences and fields. Houses and barns switch from peeling Texas-style whitewash to fresh paint.

The first German settlement in the area was New Braunfels, about 30 miles northeast of San Antonio and a good place to visit as either a first stop from San Antonio or last stop on the way back to San Antonio from Austin.

New Braunfels today is host to one of the region’s biggest Oktoberfests--Fredericksburg has one, too--and is known for antiques and homemade wurst. According to local historians, German settlers branched out from town to settle Comfort (they had such a nasty trek from New Braunfels that they named their new home Comfort) and Fredericksburg.

The Hill Country is also rich in traditional Texas lore. The Cowboy Artists of America museum on Bandera Highway near Kerrville is both an exhibit space and teaching center for painters and sculptors whose subject is the Old (and New) West. Many artists live in the nearby towns and sell their works through the museum.

Willie Nelson fans will want to see Luckenbach, literally a dot on the map. It consists of no more than a couple of stores on the highway. Made famous by Willie and Waylon Jennings in the song, “Luckenbach, Texas,” this mini-town was a gathering point for poets and singers in the ‘70s, when tale-spinner Hondo Crouch held court in the bar.

Crider’s Rodeo and Dance Hall, on Highway 39 about 20 miles from Kerrville, near Hunt, holds real, old-fashioned Saturday night dances all through the summer. No cosmic or rhinestone cowboys can be seen at Crider’s--just families and couples out for a soda-pop-swigging good time. Crider’s is the kind of place where you can see grandmothers two-stepping with toddlers, and young couples sashaying under the watchful eyes of their elders.

The area is also home to a number of big game ranches, the most established of which is the 50,000-acre Y.O. Ranch off Highway 41, about 32 miles from Kerrville. The Y.O. has a lodge (complete with a giant stuffed grizzly) and cabins for guests, with meals served in the bunkhouse. Lunch is Texas barbecue, with plenty of baked beans, corn on the cob and endless glasses of iced tea.

The Y.O. is a working ranch, with a herd of 1,200 longhorn cattle, but in recent years it has also catered more and more to tourists, setting up horseback riding trails, the game area and an annual cattle drive.

Some visitors come to hunt deer and other game on the ranch, but we were happy to take the van tour of the ranch’s exotic game (which our guide insisted were not available for hunting).

I’m not usually impressed with events designed specifically for tourists, but I must say it was fascinating to see these animals up close and running free. Our guide got into a fight with an ostrich that tried to ram the van, and we saw zebras, giraffes, a variety of rare gazelle and antelope.

The LBJ Ranch is also nearby. Lyndon Johnson came from an old Texas family and the ranch, in Johnson City, is open to the public. While we didn’t visit the ranch this trip, we did find some incredible postcards from the ‘50s and ‘60s--LBJ posing with his dog, LBJ in a cowboy hat--at a gas station on the highway not far from the ranch. The cards were in an old rack and looked as if they hadn’t been disturbed in years.

In a way, that sense of being frozen in time is an integral part of the Hill Country experience. But it’s not as if life there is frozen in any particular time: The little filling station with the Johnson cards was holding onto 1962. But Crider’s dance hall is somewhere in the Dust Bowl days. And the giant supermarkets and upscale bed and breakfasts in Kerrville are pure ‘80s.

The festival itself is a little bit ‘60s--like the people who come every year and camp in the school bus with the piano in it--and a little plain old long-haired Texas of the ‘70s. There’s a bit of health-food and cosmic consciousness a la ‘80s. And the ‘90s come out on the stage when Michelle Shocked sings of trouble in the cities and local conjunto bands blend traditional Mexican music with German polkas.

This year will mark the second time that the festival devotes five of its 18 days to The Festival of the Eagle, featuring Native American singers, storytellers and crafts. Last year, Floyd Red Crow Westerman was a featured speaker, as was storyteller Ron Evans.

It’s fun just to wander around the campgrounds. Night and day, circles of singers trade songs in any number of unlikely places. One afternoon at Camp Cuisine, known among regulars as the campground at which to see and be seen, we happened upon a bachelor party for a woman who was to be married at the camp the next day. There was a formal tea (consumed by sweaty people in shorts and bathing suits), followed by a performance by a male stripper.

Time has a different meaning altogether around the festival campfires. On our last night there, I let my fiance go to sleep, and spent the last hours way down at the bottom of the meadow near a barbed-wire fence, following a wave of song around a circle of singers.

The sun came up, quietly cracking the last precious cool.

“I’m going to bed,” somebody said. “But please don’t stop. I’ve been waiting for you to sing me to sleep all year.”

GUIDEBOOK: Hollerin’ in the Texas Hills

Getting there: I usually fly into San Antonio and rent a car from there; Kerrville is about 60 miles northwest. All the major airlines, including Southwest, fly LAX to San Antonio for $250-$400 round trip, depending on advance purchase and discount seat availability. To get to the Kerrville Folk Festival, take Interstate 10 west from San Antonio, then Highway 16 south through the town of Kerrville to Quiet Valley Ranch.

A possible scenic loop through the region would go from Kerrville to Fredericksburg, 22 miles northeast; then to Johnson City, 32 miles east on Highway 290; then Austin, another 45 miles east. From there, take the interstate south through San Marcos, go 15 miles southwest to New Braunfels, then 30 miles southwest back to San Antonio.

Where to stay: Accommodations are fairly plentiful, with 16 hotels and motels, plus a dozen more river cottages, ranches and bed and breakfast inns in the town of Kerrville alone. Private camps rent riverside cabins for weeks or days at a time. The Kerrville Chamber of Commerce, 1200 Sidney Baker St., Kerrville 78028, (800) 221-7958 or (512) 896-1155, has information on lodgings throughout the Hill Country.

Camping at Quiet Valley Ranch, (512) 257-3600, is free with a festival pass for three or more days, or $4 with a single-day ticket. The ranch has outhouses instead of toilets, and cold showers.

Frequent visitors recommend the Inn of the Hills River Resort (during festival time, be prepared for a full hotel and lots of musicians), the Hillcrest Inn or the Y.O. Ranch Hilton, which is located in Kerrville, not on the Y.O. Ranch.

Inn of the Hills: 1001 Junction Highway, Kerrville 78028, (512) 895-5000; $70 per night double.

Hillcrest Inn: 1508 Sidney Baker (Highway 16), Kerrville 78028, (512) 896-7400; $44 double. Y.O. Ranch Hilton: 2033 Sidney Baker, Kerrville 78028, (512) 257-4440; $75 double, to increase to $85 June 1.

Y.O. Ranch: Mountain Home, Tex. 78058, (512) 640-3222; $75 per person weekdays, $85 weekends, including three meals.

Events: Kerrville Folk Festival, May 21-June 7 at Quiet Valley Ranch, (512) 257-3600 or (800) 842-6156. Three-day pass, which includes camping privileges, is $32 in advance, $38 at the door; single-day passes are $9-$17 depending on day of the week.

Texas State Arts and Crafts Fair, Friday through next Sunday at Schreiner’s College in Kerrville; $6.50 for adults, $3.50 for children over 6, under 6 free.

Texas Fringe Festival, May 30-31 at Schreiner’s College, is modeled on the Fringe at the Festival of the Arts in Edinburgh, Scotland, and features musicians, crafts and street theater; adults, $4; children under 6, $2; children who bring teddy bears get in free.

Jimmie Rodgers Jubilee, a festival and concert series honoring the pioneering yodeler, also at Schreiner’s College, is the third weekend in September; three-day passes are $15.

Kerrville Folk Festival Too is held Labor Day Weekend at Quiet Valley Ranch. Described as a condensed version of the Kerrville Folk Festival.

For more information: Call the Kerrville Chamber of Commerce (phone number above), or the Texas Tourism Division, Department of Commerce, P.O. Box 12008, Dept. TIA, Austin 78711, (800) 888-8839 or (512) 462-9191.