On the Road Again @012 intermission - folk festivals

me home from my second folk festival of the year.  Now I know that summer is over.

The first folk festival was at Providence Farms on Vancouver Island and this weekend was the Shelter Valley Folk Festival near Grafton, just off the 401 near Cobourg. The two festivals have a lot in common. They are both in rather idyllic settings; they are both small and very family centered, and all of the performers tell the audience at both festivals that theirs is the best festivals with the nicest volunteers and audiences. I must confess that I find the last point a bit confusing as on occasion I see the same performer both out west and then later the same year back east. It makes it difficult to believe them. But such comments do please the crowds and make them feel special.

The major difference between the two festivals is that out west on both Friday and Saturday evening large dance bands are the only acts. Everyone there gets up and dances. Everyone who wants to.... the rest just go home or back to their campsite. (The camping area in the woods is really quite remarkable) Whereas at  Shelter Valley the mostly folk music goes on til 11:00.

Small folk festivals feel very much like living in a small town. People who have attended the festival for a long time are sometimes awarded a bit more status than newcomers. The one out west in particularly is quite "cliquey" (I suspect that is not a word), with for example the daughter of one of the founders doing both the opening and closing ceremonies and lots of what feel like inside jokes. But then some of them have been attending the festival for 28 years. It is not surprising that they people are close to each other. The one near Grafton is "only" nine years old and there appears to be much less of a hierarchy.

People who attend regularly usually camp in the same area. At both festivals I know people simply because we have "lived" across the path from each other for four to five year. I don't know their names nor do they know mine, but we chat about who we have seen and whether or not we liked them; the cost of tickets and the weather. Things that ordinary neighbours talk about. It is a nice feeling to be known and welcomed even if it is only for two and half days a year. This year I moved my tent to a new, slightly bigger spot ten feet up the path and one of my neighbours noticed immediately and commented on it. He wasn’t exactly crushed by my move,  but he did wondered why I had left the "old" neighbourhood.

I like folk festivals. I like the food, the people who attend and of course I like the music. At most festivals there are a few performers I know of or may have seen, but quite frequently I have never heard of most of the acts. And that is the exciting thing about festivals. There are always two or three beautiful surprises. I "discover" either an individual singer or group who have the most extraordinary voices or who perhaps writes the most amazing lyrics (or both). And then I follow them around to different workshops just to hear them. And then there are those occasions when in a workshop - performers who may never have met the others on the stage start to play together. Something organic in their mutual chemistry occurs and a special music is created. A music that can only exist when talented and generous musicians are having fun playing together. Those times are magical. People walk away from those workshop sessions with a smile and can talk about nothing else except for the music that started off being created for them, the audience, but ended up being music created only for that player who has been, for a few minutes, transported to a unique and beautiful world. Even a few years later people talk about those truly great moments when a handful of players created something so special that the memory of the sound and the look upon the players faces becomes burned forever into that part of our brain that is reserved for images of heaven.

I only buy two CDs at each festival. It is sometimes a very hard decision which ones to buy. There have been other years when I have not bought any because no one attracted me enough to spend $20. I not have yet listened to the ones I bought in July. It may be another month or two before I unwrap the cellophane and put them on the CD player. I am saving them for a special day, perhaps the first true day of fall. And on that cold, rainy day when summer seems so far in the past that one has to dig deep into the memory’s core just to retrieve a faint glimmer – those singers will warm my soul and bring those memories alive once again.

My singers this year are: Jon Brooks and Mary Gauthier who I heard at the Cowichan Folk  and Del Barber and the Once (a group from Newfoundland) who I heard just this weekend