Canmore Folk Music Festival: The Thin Green Line

Way back when we were first married, we went to the Mariposa Folk Festival on Toronto Island. They were running six stages all day with a variety of performers. We didn’t know any of them, so we chose our workshops by topic. The first workshop, about folk music in the urban setting, had a guy on it named Murray McLauchlan. He sang The Farmer’s Song because it had the word ‘city’ in it. We thought he was pretty neat, so we went to all the other workshops he was on. Along the way we met some other new performers: John Prine, Steve Goodman, Ken and Chris Whiteley, and the venerable Jean Ritchie. We learned a whole lot of new songs and went away with a couple of rolls of film and a determination to spend more time playing our instruments.

Forward forty years. After a drought of folk music in our lives, we attended the Canmore Folk Music Festival in Canmore, Alberta. They were running three stages during the day, and one main stage in the evening. The main stage was a large wooden structure in front of a large flat grassy area, surrounded by tall pines. Beyond them, the Rockies. We didn’t know many performers on the schedule, but there were our old friends Murray McLauchlan and Ken Whiteley, so we started by going to the workshops they were on. Blam, five minutes into the first workshop, the Sunday Morning gospel hour with Ken, we had met a new batch of performers. We learned a whole lot of new songs and went away with seven new CDs, a hundred digital photos and a determination to spend more time playing our instruments. I think if there had been a tent in the shopping glade selling instruments, they would have been sold out of ukeleles in six hours.

When talking about an event like the CFMF, it’s easy to string together a bunch of superlative adjectives, so I will do that now: fantastic, marvellous, wonderful, terrific. Okay, a string of adjectives doesn’t tell you much, so I’ll get on with it.

First, let’s talk about the organization. The website explained the rules of festival etiquette, and we were glad to see them and hoped they would be enforced. The tall chairs vs the short chairs is an issue that can enrage you within seconds of having a tall chair plonked in front of you when you are sitting short. Their rule was, tall chairs must sit at the tree line. So the tall chairs got the shade, but the short chairs got prime space, and it is amazing how many people were able to make it to Canadian Tire and pick up some short chairs for $20. Although there was no tree line at the other two stages, people in tall chairs mentally drew in a tree line and sat there. There was even a chair police, a guy going around with a painted yardstick: your chair cannot be above this height if you are in the centre viewing area. A special thank you to him for doing a touchy job and making sure people followed the rules. Have you guessed yet that we had short chairs?

There was another rule that advance sales people got first dibs on seating space, so everyone was held at the gate until an hour and a half before the first performance. People started lining up two hours ahead of gates open. The line snaked down the street and around the corner, with everyone calmly sitting on their chairs drinking coffee or reading books. At the appointed hour, the gates opened. The line moving looked like the Joads traipsing across California with all their meagre worldly goods strapped to their backs. A phalanx of volunteers checked wristbands or email printouts, and we were ushered in to stand in long lines. Now, we looked like massed pipe bands waiting for the drum major to start the music. Normally, this mass of people is piped to the main stage area, but this year they couldn’t find a piper so they asked the guy selling Native American flutes if he would oblige. This is all done to stop people from running. It worked. Gotta love this about the British system of orderliness. Line up, wait, and don’t jump the queue.

One of the rules was cameras were not allowed. I wanted a couple of photos for my memory bank, and I know the photo ban was to stop people popping flashes in the eyes of people while they were performing, and to stop people from making bad videos and posting them on Youtube. I watched, and found that many people had brought in cameras and phones that took pictures. So I decided I could take a few photos as long as I respected the performers and their copyrights.

Everything about this festival was orderly. The sound guys had a white board for each stage setup and worked fast and hard to set up, in some cases, ten mikes, ten electrified instruments, and six monitors. It made them a little late sometimes, but the wait was always worth it because the sound was impeccable. The green shirt volunteers were everywhere, helping with every facet of the festival. Even those who had pulled garbage duty were cheerfully directing compost and recyclables so they could achieve their target of 90% recovered waste, with only 10% going to the landfill, making them the greenest Folk Festival in Canada.

A foot-stomping cheer for the organizers and their rules and their attention to detail. It made our days at the festival relaxed. Even the chairs were happy.

We often find when we go to a play or concert we are bobbing in a sea of grey hair. People of all ages attended this festival. There were lots of kids, and a kids area for them to enjoy. We met Molly and Sam, a couple of delightful redheads, who shared a crevice of shade with us. Sam didn’t have a lot to say, since he’s too young to talk, but Molly was tuned in to the program and chatted with us between blueberries.

I have lots more to say about the festival, but because we got home so late every night, I am four days behind on blogging, and here we are out on the jaunt of the day with stories piling up. Please bear with me as I work through the backlog.
www.canmorefolkfestival.com