At The Folk Festival, Listen For The Future With Fewer Big Names On The Bill, Attention Is Focusing On The Up-and-coming Performers.

Amid the stubble of new-mown hayfields and the long grass of ungrazed pastures, the Old Pool Farm launches a musical legend or two each August.

Some you know. Blues singer Bonnie Raitt, country songbird Emmylou Harris and the late Jim Croce lit up the Philadelphia Folk Festival's bucolic stage early in their careers, as did Joni Mitchell and, more recently, Nanci Griffith.

"Our kind of music," says festival music planner Andy Braunfeld, "has produced a lot of heroes."

Still other legends are outcroppings of the festival's peculiar culture. There is the annual rumor that Bob Dylan is somewhere nearby - surely the folk version of an Elvis sighting. And concert emcee Gene Shay's sense of humor is legendary - notoriously bad. Shay says his comic repertoire this year will include the truly terrible one-liner "Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?" and the equally witty "What was the name of Bojangles' dog? Up and Died."

You had to be there.

Today, the 31st Philadelphia Folk Festival opens on the green acres of a former dairy farm in Upper Salford Township, Montgomery County, with a musical lineup that suggests a star search is under way. There are fewer big-name performers, more up-and-coming acts among the 70-plus pickers, strummers and singer-songwriters on the three-day roster of workshops and concerts.

"There has been a concerted effort not to have the same old thing, but really to explore new acts, new performers, different feels for this great old festival," says songwriter Roger Deitz, who will co-host some concerts with Shay. "The thing I've always liked about this festival is that in a short span of time you get a crash course in folk music. This time, there will be lots of new styles, and new people who may have eluded the festival before."

So sharing the bill with mainstays such as bluesman Taj Mahal, fiddler Alison Krauss, and bluegrass wildcat Mike Cross are a Haitian voodoo band, five new-to-the-scene female songwriters, and a venerable gospel quartet whose members are velvet-voiced senior citizens.

Some will be spotlighted at small daytime workshops that have the feel of outdoor coffeehouses. Others will perform at larger, afternoon concerts. The luckiest won coveted spots on the well-attended evening programs, which draw most of the weekend's 20,000 festivalgoers.