Tonda_Barker_Oral_History.pdf

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Tonda Barker Trivette

North Carolina 1960s Counterculture Oral History
4/19/2026

Growing Up in Love Valley
My dad built Love Valley when I was six years old; he was a general contractor who had dreamed since childhood of
creating a Western town. He incorporated it in 1962, but he had already built the town back in 1954, and before long we
were hosting rodeos and horse shows.
We moved up to this little community in rural North Iredell County, and it was wonderful—we settled into a tiny
one‑room shack with no electricity and no running water. The original town sat down below, around the arena where
the rock festival would later take place. My dad first built Love Valley in 1954, and he eventually incorporated it in 1962.
The same year he cut into the side of the mountain and moved the whole town up to the ridge where it stands now.
Daddy served as mayor for years.
Growing up in Love Valley was interesting because every summer we were expected to work. In our family, work
mattered. By the time I was twelve, I was running concessions at the rodeos, and later I even had a little clothing store in
one of the downtown buildings—I bought all the clothes, boots, and hats, sold the merchandise, and kept all my own
books.
We’d come home from school every day, climb onto our horses, and disappear into the woods to play cowboys and
Indians, chasing each other around until dark. It was fun—we had a good time. I went to the county schools until my
junior year of high school, and then I left for Raleigh to attend Peace College.

Dreaming a Festival into Being
Daddy had been watching the news and kept saying, ‘These kids just need a place to come.” They’re wandering around,
they’re lost. All these hippies are just lost—they need somewhere to go.’ He’d heard about Woodstock, and one day he
said, ‘Why don’t we do a festival?’ Now, that was not my idea—I had no desire to go to Woodstock—but he told that
story for the rest of his life.
He said, “What do you think, kids? Maybe we could do a little festival here. We could have a few people, book some
bands.”
We knew a man named Bucky Odom, who was the booking agent for the Allman Brothers. He said, ‘I’ve got this
up‑and‑coming blues‑rock band that could actually headline your festival. He offered to bring them up to Love Valley so
they could see the place for themselves and decide what they thought.
The Allman Brothers thought Love Valley was the coolest place they’d ever seen. We sat on Mother and Daddy’s front
porch talking and laughing, and they said, ‘This is great, we’ve got to do this.’ Then they told us, ‘Here’s what you’re
going to do: you’re coming to the Atlanta Pop Festival. Come through Macon on July Fourth, we’ll leave you tickets, and
we’ll show you the ropes. We’ll introduce you to the lighting people, the sound people, everyone you’ll need.’ After that,
we hardly slept, trying to pull everything together and get the bands lined up.

People started coming in to volunteer, offering to do whatever needed doing. We ended up with around two hundred
volunteers who helped build the stage.
We printed tickets, and our main outlet was a head shop over in Winston‑Salem. The guy there printed bogus tickets,
and in the end, we only collected about $25,000.

The Festival Unfolds
Everybody came straight from the Atlanta Pop Festival to Love Valley.
Friday night was beautiful. We sat up on top of the arena, looking out over nearly seventy‑five thousand people
gathered down around the stage. The acoustics were perfect, the stars were shining, and the music drifted across the
valley. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a concert since that felt any better. But on Saturday morning, we woke up to a sight
I’ll never forget—people everywhere, cars in every direction, body to body. You couldn’t move. We had a fence around
the place, but it didn’t matter; they came in walking, climbing, pouring in from every side. Our best guess was over two
hundred thousand people, just judging by the town and the valley—you simply couldn’t move. There was no way to
keep them out. On Sunday it rained a little and the mud came, but the kids had fun in it, and honestly, it was still nice.
It was peaceful. The kids were kind, and nothing felt disruptive. The music was so good—truly wonderful—and the
whole atmosphere had this unmistakably Southern feel.

The Lost Documentary
Daddy had already been talking to a movie crew. Dale Hennessy, a Hollywood art director, wanted to come film the rock
festival. He brought a crew of about twenty people—film, lighting, and sound. The sound team set up in a log building
down by the arena and turned it into a soundproof recording studio.
We negotiated at my parents’ dining‑room table. My husband and Mother and Daddy sat there for a year, talking
through that movie deal over and over, because there was no money to pay for it. They talked and talked, trying to make
it work. In the end, we wound up with the rights to the film—I own the rights to it.
It’s never been edited, but it definitely exists. It’s out there somewhere kept in a secret place. They even sold it once or
twice just to raise money. The Allman Brothers have a five‑ or seven‑minute piece of it, and part of that footage was
used when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The last I heard, maybe twenty years ago, it was sitting
in a vault in California. I keep thinking, why are you hiding it? Bring it back out—let’s do something with it.

A Legacy That Faded Into Legend
There’s no acknowledgment of it. They want to sweep it under the rug—nobody wants to admit the rock festival ever
happened. The area is so conservative, and people were embarrassed by the idea of hosting a rock festival with hippies
and drugs in a North Carolina community. They wanted to bury it, to pretend it never happened, because they didn’t
want anyone to know something like that took place here.
There’s no historical information about it, nothing that recognizes Love Valley. But that’s history, a Western town being
built in North Carolina is history.