Safety and numbers
Once again, Folk Fest proves to be a great big group of your best friends
John Kendle



Round about midnight on the first evening of the 2006 Winnipeg Folk Festival, Steve Earle stopped singing and strumming long enough to try to explain why he recently moved to New York City after living in and around Nashville for 30 years:

“There’s something about seeing a mixed-race, same-sex couple walking down the street holding hands that makes me feel safer than I do anywhere else,” Earle said.

The maverick country/folk singer/songwriter was trying to explain his vision for America, but he could just as well have been talking about the atmosphere that pervades Birds Hill Park every July.

That the Folk Fest can be a cultural haven for people who prefer to live outside the mainstream is almost a cliché after 33 editions, but its essence is far from the hoary old maxim about beards and banjos that a couple of FM-radio boneheads insisted on perpetuating as I scanned the airwaves on my way to the festival on Friday afternoon.

Yes, there were people in the park on the weekend who could loosely be described as ‘hippies,’ both young and old. And yes, there were plenty of banjos expertly clawhammered all weekend. But I would bet the down payment on my next house that those not-so-mirthful jocks would have their minds opened wide if they ever actually set foot on the festival site .

More than anything else, the Winnipeg Folk Festival is about inclusion. There’s something for everyone here, from barefoot, bewinged Wolseley angels to Columbia-clad, gotta-have-the-gear Whyte Ridgers.

The Folk Festival is the only place, for example, that I am able to hang out with my mother, my girlfriend, my ex-wife and my kids without feeling the least bit uptight about how everyone’s getting along.

It’s also a place where the likes of The Wailin’ Jennys, Alejandro Escovedo, Jerry Douglas and Steve Earle can all be heard in the same evening, as happened at the opening mainstage show. The Jennys are a harmonizing folk trio whose oeuvre is about as far removed from Escovedo’s muscular roots rock as Slayer is from Bedouin Soundclash (who also played that night but is clearly a band whose popularity exceeds its ability and repertoire), yet both acts shone brightly on this night. Douglas and Earle may come from similar places, musically speaking, but Dobro-swinger Jerry is more of a straight-up muso while the ever-brilliant Earle has transformed himself from belligerent junkie and wannabe biker into a radically minded protest singer and budding novelist.

This all-for-one, all-in-one programming philosophy has been a part of the festival from its inception, though each artistic director has had his or her take on the formula.

Winnipegger Chris Frayer is the newest occupant of the AD’s chair, and his is a typical music geek’s background. A highlight of his younger days was an annual road trip to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, where he soaked up the musical traditions of the American South.

It was certainly Frayer’s affinity for those sounds (and the availability of the acts, of course) that led him to program the likes of Neko Case, Terrance Simien & the Zydeco Experience, and Solomon Burke back-to-back-to-back on Friday night. Case is definitely the hippest of the three, and her neo-traditional, old-school country approach to modern heartache was a joy to hear, even if her inability to fill dead air between songs was frustrating.

Simien and Burke, meanwhile, put on shows to behold for different. Terrance tends to slip into tour-guide autopilot with his ‘Let’s go to the bayou, iko, iko’ stage patter, but he and his band de kick up a mean groove when they rock out on their own material. Never mind cowbell — give me more frottoir any day.

The great hunk of flesh that is Solomon Burke has to be seen to be believed. Wearing a sparkling purple suit that could probably reupholster my entire living-room set, Burke was literally wheeled out by his backing singers to a throne at centre-stage, where he perched for over an hour, looking for all the world like a pimped-out Jabba the Hutt as he belted out soul standards with a voice that retains all its power despite the strain his heart and lungs must bear. Watching him was the only time I was anxious for anyone’s well-being all weekend. But Old King Sol held up, and a bemused, transfixed crowd roared its approval well into Saturday morning.

While Burke wobbled and Simien bopped, the slow, angular wailings of Duluth’s Low enthralled and entranced the indie-minded scenesters who packed the festival’s Firefly Palace tent for a 75-minute set that was accompanied by video footage and montages by Winnipegger Hope Peterson.

Saturdays and Sundays at the festival have become family days for me and my friends, but this doesn’t mean they’re without musical highlights. The Bur Oak stage is our favoured spot for a base camp during the daytime workshops, and plenty of wonderful performers dropped by to entertain.

As predicted, Crooked Still, a Boston-based quartet of neo-trad folkies, did indeed become one of the must-see acts through this festival weekend. Fronted by the beautifully voiced Aoife O’Donovan, the quartet breathes new life into its traditional setup, as Greg Liszt’s banjo carries melodies while cellist Rushad Eggleston literally carves out the rhythms with a percussive bowing style that is, quite simply, mesmerizing, musical and magnificent all at once.

Fred Eaglesmith was a talking point, too. With his trucker/farmer look, his permanently partied-out voice and his pseudo-redneck tales, the guy sometimes comes cross as if he’s playing for shtick value. But there’s no mistaking the earnestness and sentiment in his songs about working life and hard living, and he ultimately charmed both the Sunday-afternoon crowd and the rest of his workshop partners with his gentle insistence that everyone had to participate.

That all-in-this-together spirit had permeated the festival site by Sunday evening’s closing mainstage show. As the record crowd figures (total paid attendance for the weekend was 45,190) were announced, and as Richard Thompson and Rickie Lee Jones and Bruce Cockburn dazzled a smiling crowd with their timeworn brilliance, I watched over my sons, who were chasing a stranger with a bubble-making machine, and marvelled at how much they’d taken in over the weekend, with very few complaints (for six-year-olds).

The boys had seen and done and eaten everything they wanted. And they were playing, carefree, in an open prairie field, surrounded by 10,000 people they’d never met.

They’ve never been safer, Steve.