The fourth day of the 2004 Winnipeg Folk Festival was sunny and hot with moderate breezes. There was rain, but it arrived overnight long after the Finale.
I arrived in time to sit in the shade outside of the Shady Grove, apply sunscreen, have a cup of coffee, and listen to a workshop with Utah Phillips, Ember Swift, Paul Thorn and Joel Kroeker.
Category: Music
Winnipeg 2004 – Saturday
The rain stayed away. It was sunny, and it was humid at first. A reasonably steady breeze kept things moderately cool as the temperature climbed into the higher 20’s.
The ground outside and through the main gate was well trampled and starting to smell of rotten things, and there were some wet spots in the parking lot but the site stayed in good condition.
Winnipeg 2004 – Friday
The rain stopped, the clouds broke up and the sun came out by about 1:00 PM. There was a steady breeze. The sunshine and wind helped to dry out the festival site, which returned to a pretty good condition. There were some areas of the parking lot, including the area leading to the main gate that were wet and muddy but the working site was good.
My volunteer assignment was fence patrol at Site West, which involved watching sunbathers, kite-flyers, and frisbee players. I was able to get some of the music at Big Bluestem and the Green Ash Hollow. There were a variety of workshops at Big Bluestem. The Winnipeg bands the Duhks and the Mammals had a good crowd and good energy level. There was a workshop called Tortiere et Gumbo with Quebecois and Cajun music from Les Batinses, Genticorum and Granger & Dugas.
Winnipeg 2004 – Thursday – Rain
Forecasts and opinion polls seem to be pretty much equally unreliable.
It was cloudy when the gates opened and when the Winnipeg Festival started, but a light rain started around 7:30 PM and kept up all evening. The ground began to get wet, although I did not see any accumulations of standing water in my travels. The site supervisor responded by shutting down the carts and ATVS. No vehicular traffic. It was a sensible strategy. The mild impressions made by vehicles passing over dry ground in the preceding days became visible in the wet grass, and more traffic under wet conditions would have created ruts, puddles and mudholes.
Winnipeg 2004 – Showtime
The countdown is over. It’s Thursday. I’ve read my manuals and practiced radio speak and I’m ready to face life as blue vest volunteer at 8:00 PM.
The campground opened yesterday, the main gate opens today and the opening night mainstage concert starts at 6:00 PM with the Perpetrators followed by Spirt of the West, Tegan and Sara and Taj Mahal. The idea seems to be to give each performer a generous opportunity. Taj Mahal is scheduled for around 10:30. I should be able to see almost everything, as my floating security crew is assigned to support the mainstage tonight from 8:00 to midnight.
Winnipeg 2004 – Countdown: 1 day
The weather forecast has changed for the better. The forecast for rain on Thursday has been changed to mixed sun and clouds, high of 24. It will probably be cool later in the evening, but a dry day guarantees that the site will not be turned to mud on the first night. The forecast for Friday has changed to mixed sun and clouds, high 28, with a risk of showers. The mosquito situation has improved in Winnipeg. The number of mosquitos in the City entomologist’s traps has fallen drastically after very cool nights on the past weekend. The City has been fogging, but that isn’t why the bugs are gone. I live in an unfogged neighbourhood, and bugs are gone here too. The media have not reported the explanation for the drop. It hasn’t been cool enough to kill them, and there is a suggestion that many bugs have gone dormant with the cool temps and haven’t come back yet. I’d like to think that many bugs have died off and that larvicide programs have abated the new hatch, but I don’t know.
Winnipeg 2004 – Countdown: 2 days
Two more days to the Winnipeg Folk Festival.
On June 21, I spent a couple of hours being oriented and instructed in the duties of the Site Security volunteer crew. On June 30 I went to the T-shirt meeting to get my volunteer’s pass, T-shirt and Festival program.
The weather has been reasonable. There has been a little more rain over the last few weeks but nothing to adversely affect site conditions. The forecast for the next couple of days and the weekend is reasonably good. Friday and Saturday are forecast as sunny with temperatures in the mid-twenties (C) which is good. It will be warm enough but not deadly hot, although the steady sunshine will still require people to take care to avoid sunburn and overheating.
There is a forecast of clouds with a chance of rain on Thursday. Rain on opening night has been known to turn the main stage area into a bog that endures for the whole weekend. If the festival site is spared and the rest of the forecast comes to pass, the conditions should be very good.
There have been a few changes to the site. It would seem from the map that there is a large new shelter or tent in the area previously used as Stage 2, and that this area has become the children’s tent by day, now named the Chickadee Big Top. This area doubles as nighttime cabaret called the Firefly Palace, which is a new idea. The stage near the First Aid tent, which was the Children’s stage last year, has reverted to being a regular performance stage.
Most of the stages, formerly known as Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4 and the Children’s stage or Family area, have been renamed Bur Oak, Big Bluestem, Snowberry Field, Green Ash and Chickadee Big Top.
Since I call my Web site and this blog “A Sea of Flowers” I should applaud naming a stage “Big Bluestem” for one of the grasses of the tall grass prairie, but a couple of the names are just too cute for my taste.
Winnipeg Festival Countdown
The Winnipeg Folk Festival is only 3 weeks away, Thursday July 8 to Sunday July 11.
This year, I asked to be a Folk Festival Volunteer. I volunteered to become more actively engaged in the Festival, to try to avoid drowning in memories of attending as a happily married husband and father, and to meet new people. My application seemed to go into limbo for a while. I was told that the coordinators need to check with past volunteers on their crews, and to give priority to returning volunteers.
I got the call yesterday. I’m on Site Security, which is divided into a number of crews. I am joining the collateral crew which has some shifts supporting the Main stage crew, and some shifts supporting the Site West (Daytime stages) crew. I expect to walk and to use sunscreen and bug repellent, answer questions, rescue lost kids and capture fence jumpers.
Winnipeg Folk Festival News
The Winnipeg Folk Festival has released its brochure and updated its Web site with information about performers hired for the 2004 Festival.
Festivals are continuously tinkering with descriptive names to classify performers and inform fans. This year Winnipeg is grouping perfomers as Folk Legends, Sounds from Around the World, Singing the Blues, Contemporary Voices, Masters of their Instruments, Songwriters and En Francais.
The Legends group is Earl Scruggs, Dick Gaughan, Utah Phillips and Martin Carthy, and all of them are worthy of the label. I’m looking forward to Gaughan, a great guitarist and vocal interpreter with a crusty and realistic take on modern life. He was an interpreter of traditional music, but in the more recent part of his career, he tends to interpret more modern songs by a variety of writers. He does great versions of Ruby Tuesday, Townes Van Zandt’s Lefty & Pancho, and several Brian McNeill songs.
There are a few Legends, in my view, included in other categories, like Taj Mahal, David Lindley, Spirit of the West. Spirit of the West have been superb since they started 20 years ago.
The World group includes a couple of Scots groups. There doesn’t seem to be a lot for fans of Celtic or Canadian Maritime/Celtic although J.P. Cormier turns up in the instrumental group.
I’m looking forward to Martyn Joseph, a songwriter from Wales who started to tour in Canada a few years ago. He is a dynamic performer, with a great gift for words, progressive political sensibility, and a strong ethical line in his songs.
Brave Kelso
Canadian Folk musicians spend a lot of time driving long distances between the communities where they perform. In the late 1970’s Stan Rogers and his band (his brother Garnet Rogers and a small series of other performers) did their time on the road.
On reaching the prairies, Stan Rogers visualized himself as the “tardiest explorer” in the tradition of Franklin, Mackenzie and David Thompson. In his song Northwest Passage, he describes his own journey across the prairie:
“Three centuries thereafter, I take passage overland,
In the footsteps of brave Kelso, where his sea of flowers began”
While the narrative is anchored in the inner vision of the singer dreaming while he drives, the vision itself is heroic, claiming the vision of the first European explorers of the prairies, plains, rivers and mountains of the Canadian Northwest:
“Ah for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea,
Tracing one warm line in a land so wide and savage,
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea”
Most of the names in the song are familiar to Canadians, or easy to identify. Mackenzie is Alexander Mackenzie, a fur trader and explorer who navigated the river that bears his name to the Arctic Ocean in 1789 and then, in 1793 crossed the Rockies and descended to the Pacific – the first European Canadian to reach the Pacific overland, a full decade before Lewis and Clark. David Thompson was a great explorer and cartographer. Franklin is Sir John Franklin, the British naval officer who was lost in the Arctic in the 1840’s.
Kelso was Henry Kelsey who joined the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company at age 17 in 1688 and rose to become a governor of the Company. At the time, and for centuries, the Company set itself up in forts on Hudson’s Bay and let the Canadian First Nations bring the furs down to the Bay for trade. Very occasionally, a Bay man would explore inland. In 1690 young Henry Kelsey joined a group of First Nations travelling into what must have been the Canadian heart of darkness. His journals were preserved in the Company archives and rediscovered in the 20th century. He is believed to have travelled southwest from the Bay to the Grand Rapids of the Saskatchewan River, near the modern town of The Pas, and then west and south onto the prairie. He is believed to have been the first European Canadian to reach the prairie from the Bay.
Stan Rogers discussed the process of writing Northwest Passage in a radio interview in 1982 and admitted that he had been unsure of Kelsey’s name and had guessed Kelso while recording the song. He never said if he believed that Kelsey himself had described the prairie as a “sea of flowers” or what brought that image to his mind – since he would himself have only seen the farmlands that the prairies have become.
Kelsey kept a journal, and his only descriptive references to the prairie are as a bleak heath of short round grasses. This indicates that he saw the short sere grasses of the high plains, rather than the tall grass prairies of more fertile regions. It is also not untypical of 17th century aesthetic sensibilities toward nature. It was only in the late 18th and the 19th centuries, through the Romantic movement, that Europeans and European Americans began to see nature as beautiful in itself.
The image of the prairie as a sea or ocean of grass and flowers was employed by the American poet William Cullen Bryant to describe the edge of the plains in southwest Illinois in the early 19th century, and adopted by many later poets and writers, including the 19th century Canadian poet and essayist Charles Mair. The engineer and inventor Sanford Fleming described the prairies that way on arriving at the edge of Red River Valley near the modern town of Ste. Anne, along the Dawson Road from Lake of the Woods in 1870. Fleming and Mair were in the last generation to see the prairies that way, before the slaughter of the last great herds of bison and the breaking of the prairie to agriculture.
In reaching for the beautiful and true meaning of exploration, Rogers transcended geographical and historical accuracy to take us off the asphalt road and into the sea of flowers.