In the ’60s and ’70s, when Oberlin was still a fabled center of student anti-war activism, it was also a hotbed for folk music. Pete Seeger, of group-sing and left-leaning fame, played in Hall Auditorium as early as 1955, at the tender age of 36. Since then, folk music, encompassing a variety of instrumentations and performers, has bobbed in and out of popularity, but one thing has remained steady — Oberlin’s annual Folk Fest.

Or has it?

This year, Folk Fest intentionally aligned itself with the Big Parade, Oberlin’s biggest and most ostentatious community-building effort, to draw new listeners to its two outdoor stages in Tappan Square. As the parade ended on Saturday, people oozed over from the face-painting and puppetry booths to hear OC alum Guy Mendilow play a children’s set with his versatile band. By evening, a small but determined crowd remained, swaddled together in sleeping bags for Kris Delmhorst’s and Tracy Grammer’s sets. In between professional acts, student singer/songwriters filled out the main stage while rock bands like SPACE PENGIN! took over the second stage near Gibson’s. The transition from marching band music to bow-and-arrow (as played by Mendilow) was almost effortless.

The pre-festival collaboration with the Big Parade, though, was less than perfect in the eyes of College junior Rebecca Derry, one of Folk Fest’s two main organizers and co-chair of the Folk Music Club.

“We were supposed to advertise together,” she said of the Parade, “and that didn’t really happen.”

Fickle decision-making on the part of artists during the booking process, the spring rain-space reservation rush and few committed club members also meant that Derry and co-chair College junior Margaret Youngberg scrambled to assemble a musical lineup and plan the weekend. Derry said that Mendilow, who had been active in the Oberlin community for several years after graduating, gave her and Youngberg some useful feedback on the festival as a whole.

“We went to Black River [Café],” she said, to debrief. “I have a whole double-sided napkin full of notes.”

Mendilow encouraged the organizers to consider “whether they wanted to be a real festival or not.” Being “real” would mean advertising more, drawing in crowds from as far away as Michigan and western Pennsylvania, and assembling a solid corps of volunteers for the delegation of small tasks.

This year, the first time either Derry or Youngberg had taken the lead in organizing the festival, it was necessary to reinvent the wheel.

“[Our predecessors] did a great job, but they didn’t leave any notes,” Derry said.

She took Mendilow’s advice to heart, and was also impressed that he and his band asked for reciprocal feedback — what worked about their set, what didn’t, what to send in the screening process and how best to contact radio DJs.

“He really cared about my opinion, even though I’m just a student in Ohio,” she noted.

For those who bypassed the sparse advertisement and braved the spring evening chill, the festival was as fine a continuation of the Big Parade as could be desired. Even if Oberlin isn’t Destination Folkland anymore, with the inclusion of at least one enthusiastic sing-along per set, both students and professionals would surely have made Mr. Seeger pretty happy.