By Ron Devlin - Reading Eagle

After 23 years of down-home fiddling, the music has died at the Lyons Fiddle Festival.

Lyons Borough Council has announced that the festival will not be held Sept. 10 as planned.

Councilwoman Suzanne F. Reed said at a meeting Monday that the people who ran the annual festival were unable to continue this year and that the borough didn't have enough time to organize the event.

Arlan and Donna Schwoyer, the driving force behind the festival, notified the borough in a July 1 letter of their inability to continue as organizers.

“We're getting up in years, and we were running out of help,” said Arlan Schwoyer, 70, a retired Kutztown University maintenance worker. “We just couldn't handle it anymore.”

The festival, which put the tiny hamlet on the map, drew thousands to Lyons Borough Park each year. An estimated 8,000 music lovers attended the 20th fiddle fest in 2002.

Anyone who showed up with a fiddle could compete for the grand prize. Children as young as 5 and seniors in their 90s performed bluegrass, folk and gospel classics for an audience in lawn chairs.

Adding to the down-home flavor, scores of amateur musicians gathered under huge maple and oak trees to play mountain music handed down from Scot-Irish fiddlers who settled in Colonial America.

Coming a month before the festival, news of its demise caught longtime fans off guard.

Adam Schlegel, 25, grew up with the Lyons Fiddle Festival. He's attended every one and served as sound engineer for the last 10 years.

“It's going to be weird,” said Schlegel, a professional musician. “You always kind of expected that it would be there, like a family tradition or going to church on Sunday.”

Schwoyer conceded that the festival began to show signs of aging in recent years. Where once there would have been 35 fiddlers competing, there were 13 last year, he said.

Many of the old-timers are dying off, he said, and the competitors are now mostly children.

Over the years, Schwoyer noticed that the music was changing, too.

Bluegrass, which came to prominence in the 1940s, was replacing the old-time fiddle music.

As much as the music, Schwoyer will miss the wide array of Pennsylvania-German culinary favorites. The festival was noted for its corn chowder and chili, cooked in black cauldrons on an open fire. Hungry music lovers washed it down with apple cider and had apple dumplings and peach ice cream for dessert.

“A lot of community organizations, like Hope Lutheran Church, depended on the festival as a fundraiser,” Schwoyer lamented.

Borough council is exploring the possibility of creating a recreation committee to revive the festival next year.

For Schwoyer, though, it's the end of an era.

“It's sad,” he said. “We're really going to miss it.”