#stanfest

[firsttimesinceaugust]

My Schedule at the Stan Rogers Folk Festival on July 23rd

On Saturday, July 23rd, I will have two big shows at the Stan Rogers Folk Festival in Canso Nova Scotia.  The first will be my new Woody Guthrie show, “This Machine Kills Fascists,” featuring special guests such as James Keelaghan and Lennie Gallant. The second one will be a 50-minute performance of music and spoken word poetry with my good friend and colleague Tony McManus. After 25 years of booking artists at the festival, I am very excited to be performing there for the first time this year!

Get your tickets here.

#music #poetry #songwriting #stanfest #Stan Rogers Folk Festival

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Years ago, I was at folk festival with my dad. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence; he and I have tried to hit at least a couple per year, sometimes more, since I was very young. Since I was too young to have a say in where we were going, but as soon as I got old enough to be interested, I wanted to visit as many as possible. My mother will go along to some and my brother stopped going as soon as he got old enough to opt out, but my dad and I have shared folk festivals for my whole life.

Anyway. Years ago, I was at a folk festival with my dad. I don’t hesitate to say where it was, because we’d traveled quite a long way to get there. It was the Stan Rogers Folk Festival in Canso, Nova Scotia. One of the biggest folk festivals in Canada, in this tiny town by the Atlantic Ocean. My dad and I planned that trip for months, packed up tents and drove fifteen hours to spend several days there. It drew the best folk musicians from across Canada and North America and even the UK, it was an absolutely lovely time, and it was worth all the logistics. I saw my favourite singers multiple times each, and discovered many new ones.

One of my favourite singers at the time was J.P. Cormier. He’s a Canadian master of folk and bluegrass music. He can play an absolutely ridiculous number of instruments as though he were born with them. He does East Coast-style and Celtic-style music, despite technically having been born in Ontario. He played Stanfest every year, but he wasn’t on the schedule that year, because he’d agreed to perform elsewhere. This was a pity, but I’d seen him at other festivals, and there was lots of other good stuff to enjoy.

On the Saturday noon show at the mainstage, where most of the festival attendees had gathered because there was big stuff going on there at noon, they announced that they had a special performance. They asked us to put our hands together... and then a door opened from this tiny little shed at the back of the field where the audience was gathered, and out walked J.P. Cormier. He has quite a distinctive appearance, so everyone recognized him instantly, even just from his outline. The entire field erupted in cheers. I will never forget how it felt to stand in that crowd and see him emerge, take a moment to realize what was happening, and then just get caught up in the euphoria. I was nineteen years old. My father, in his early fifties, standing next to me and also erupting into applause, had to be close to the second-youngest person in that field. And still, I felt surrounded by my people. My dad pointed out to me later that they’d never said J.P. Cormier’s name when they announced him; the entire crowd just knew who he was and cheered.

The crowd noise did not die down once he got to the stage; he had to pick up the microphone and then wait a while. Once he was finally able to talk, he informed the crowd that he was on a plane to some other place (the Sudbury Folk Festival, I think, where he’d agreed to perform on the weekend of StanFest), when he’d realized he belonged at StanFest and couldn’t miss it. So as soon as the plane landed, he purchased a ticket and flew straight to Nova Scotia, and got himself the folk festival. Renewed cheers occurred. I only thought later of how the people at the Sudbury Festival must have felt about that. I still don’t know how much notice they got, or if Sudbury found a suitable replacement. But StanFest fucking benefitted that day.

J.P. Cormier than played an absolutely beautiful set, to an audience that did not settle down. One song he played was a new one that my father and I did not know, called Molly May. It’s a classic East Coast folk song, about a ship that is beloved by its captain but ends up going down in a storm. The incompetent replacement captain who leads it into its downfall was described, in the lyrics, as: “A young boy from Canso.” Canso is the small town where StanFest takes place. After the set ended, and after we’d finished marveling at how fucking cool it was that we’d just seen all that happen, my dad and I speculated about what the real song was. What was the real lyric that he’d replaced with “Canso” to appeal to the Canso crowd? As folk festival veterans, we were of course used to hearing singers modify their songs to put the location’s name into the lyrics. But we did agree that it was... an interesting choice to put the local town name into a song to make it say a boy from that town had sunk a ship.

We bought the album, of course, and when the festival ended and we got in the car for the long drive home, we put it in the CD player. When Molly May came on, we listened excitedly to see what the real lyrics were, and the CD said: “They put a young boy from Canso/At the wheel of the Molly May”. We discussed how cool it was that he hadn’t changed the lyrics, we’d just happened to hear a song about Canso for the first time while we were in Canso.

I’m telling this story because of something that happened yesterday, while I was listening to my music at work. The song McRory came on, sung by the Newfoundland band Celtic Connection. It’s a song of theirs that I’ve always liked, but I’d never looked up before. I know Celtic Connection mainly does covers, and McRory references the Canadian province of Saskatchewan in its lyrics, so I’d always assumed it was written by some older Canadian composer. But after hearing it yesterday, I decided to look it up. I was quite surprised to learn it was written by Pete St. John, an Irish folk singer/songwriter. An Irish songwriter wrote an Irish folk song referenced Canada. That is not how that normally happens. Normally, Canadian folk bands/singers, particularly our East Coast bands/singers, write their own Celtic-style songs that reference Canada and Ireland or Scotland (depending on the background of the writer - basically our East coast is full of people who came over here from Celtic countries and write songs about/in the tradition of said countries), and they cover folk songs that are written by actual Irish and Scottish people that reference Ireland and Scotland. Meanwhile, Irish and Scottish folk bands/singers write songs about Ireland and Scotland and cover other songs about Ireland and Scotland and do not write about Canada, because we are not part of the great historic tradition of Celtic music. We’ve just sort of latched onto it from over here. So it’s cool that McRory is an exception, being written by a guy in Ireland.

It’s like that time, when I was in my early twenties and got really into the Steve Earle for the first time, that I learned he has a song called Justice in Ontario. I excitedly played it for my dad, showing him that this American country singer has a song about the Canadian province of Ontario. My dad knew Steve Earle a bit, but hadn’t known that song  before, and after it, he told me there must be a city called Ontario somewhere in the States, and Steve Earle was singing about that. I told him it is actually about the Canadian Ontario, and he didn’t believe me until I actually Googled the song.

That feels like a very Canadian thing. I realize the international joke is that we’re very polite, and there’s some level of truth to that in some ways, though day-to-day, lots of people here are dicks. And we have a lot of national problems, most prominently the fact that we’re built on a genocide of native peoples that was committed historically but has effects, ranging from garden variety discrimination to in-built systemic racism to intergenerational trauma and poverty to straight-up continued cultural genocide, that persist today. And when we get reduced to “the country of polite people”, that get swept under the rug pretty easily. So I do hesitate to say Canadian identity is based on anything non-horrifying, because first and foremost, it is based on some horrifying shit.

But as far as non-genocide-based summations of Canadian cultural identity go, this feels like one. The idea that someone from some other place can’t possibly mean you. You’re not important enough for them to know about. They must be talking about the States. I guess the J.P. Cormier example doesn’t really apply because he was Canadian, but it’s the general idea that Canso’s a tiny town and we were surprised to learn it actually was the subject of a song by this giant of the folk music scene. Being surprised when people notice us is a culturally Canadian thing, maybe on par with what the British mean when I watch panel shows and hear them joke about queueing.

Anyway, J.P. Cormier is a genuine musical genius, Steve Earle is a global treasure, and McRory is just a really good song. Here are the songs in question, they’re all lovely and worth hearing:

[doecrossing]

okay im so glad to be back in school and so happy its fall bc its my favourite season but also i had so much fun this past summer i cant wait for next year... thinking abt planning a roadtrip with my friends... maybe I'll get to go to stanfest or the cloggeroo folk festival... more chances to hike and camp and fish.... so exciting ♡

#txt

[atlanticcanada]

#newfoundland and labrador #news #politics #canada #CBCNL

[avengewash]

Here's part 2 of my annual Stanfest photodump! ❤️ #Stanfest2022 #Fall #autumn #autumnvibes #leaves #landscapephotography #nature #naturephotography #roadtrip (at Bethel, Maine) https://www.instagram.com/p/CjgvywurBYY/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#stanfest2022 #fall #autumn #autumnvibes #leaves #landscapephotography #nature #naturephotography #roadtrip

[bluegrasshole]

watched this stan rogers documentary last night on youtube and thought of you! /watch?v=SC4GA8FxPxQ

just sat my arse down with a big bowl of (lactose-free) ice cream to watch this!!!!! thank you!!!

#my aunt goes to stanfest every year im going to ask her to take me with her this year #i suspect she just goes to get super stoned with other stan fans #stans? #wow #mypantsflewoff #ask

[bisexualhobi]

honestly, mixed feelings. i like that you are critical of BTS and army, but sometimes it seems like u treat army as this one problematic monolith which bugs me. also u dunk on songs i love a lot QQ lmao. but i like that you make my dash less of a one dimension stanfest if that makes sense... also i respect that u hate the fandom but still fuck with jikook lmao

.

#asks #send me your honest opinion about me and i will only post it

[lipsticklashjunkie-blog]

Say hello to @gospellee we all became BFFL at #StanFest go add him!!!! Woot woot (at Ed & Bertha Fitzpatrick Arena)

#stanfest

[oreithya]

Coachella style has nothing on Stanfest style. Rubber boots, orange rubber rainpants and a garbage bag or two mandatory.

[didgerydont]

Stan State Gears Up for Another Stanfest

Every year ASI holds a festival in the fall for the Stan State students and the community called Stanfest. The festival has music, food, a photo booth and ... from Google Alert - Photo booth https://ift.tt/2CwKSGL

#IFTTT #Google Alert - Photo booth

[firsttimesinceaugust]

Performing in Pictou, Nova Scotia and at Stanfest!

Just a quick note here to let you know that I have a couple of summer gigs coming up.  I’m really looking forward to performing at Stanfest (The Stan Rogers Folk Festival) in Canso, Nova Scotia on Saturday, July 23rd, when I will have two mainstage shows.  Tony McManus and I will be doing a set of my spoken word poetry, with Tony showcasing his incredible guitar skills.  This show will be similar to the one we recorded in Brisbane, Australia in March of 2020.  You can listen to that show here on Spotify. 

I am also excited about the premiere of my new show, “This Machine Kills Fascists,” celebrating the music, poetry and prose of Woody Guthrie, whose 110th birthday would have been on July 14th.  As a lifelong fan and follower of Woody and his friend and colleague Pete Seeger, I thought given the current political climate, a show featuring Woody’s work would be most appropriate and timely.  I also believe that for people who might not be familiar with his songs, it presents a great opportunity to introduce them to a fresh audience.  I think those who are new to his canon will be surprised at the depth of his writing, how incredibly catchy his songs could be, and what a talent he had for writing beautiful melodies.   That show will kick off Stanfest’s Saturday morning on the main stage at 10:00 a.m. and will include numerous special guests, including my old friends Lennie Gallant and James Keelaghan, both of whom I have collaborated with in the past.

    Decoste Centre, Pictou, Nova Scotia

I will also be appearing at the Decoste Centre in Pictou, Nova Scotia on July 21st in a triple bill with James Keelaghan and Tony McManus.  My part in this show will again feature Tony and myself performing my spoken word poetry.  Really thrilled to share the stage with these very talented guys.  If you don’t come for the poetry, then by all means, come for the music! 

Get your tickets here

.

#poetry #spoken word #Stanfest #Stan Rogers Folk Festival

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I got to see Garnet Rogers live last night, the last time I saw him was probably at the Edmonton Folk Festival when I was seven years old. The tickets were my Christmas present to my mother this year, which I loved because it was the first the in a very long that I could afford to get her an actual gift. I had a lot of years of financial precariousness where I’d do nice sentimental things for gifts, and of course my parents are lovely people who appreciate the thought that I put into things, but it was nice this year to be financially stable enough to get her a regular gift (I mean, I’m not doing financially well by any means, I’m just not in imminent danger of losing my ability to pay rent if I buy a few non-essential things, and that is true even once I take into account the money I’ve set aside for/already spent on a trip to the UK this summer, so I feel pretty lucky these days). The tickets weren’t expensive or anything, but still, the price of two of them was more than I’d have spent the year before.

Someone at work asked me if I had any plans for this weekend, which immediately made me feel awkward, for which I mainly blame the backlash against hipsters that took over all of culture in about 2010. When everyone became obsessed with making fun of the prototypical hipster who, when you ask them what music they’re listening to, says “You’ve probably never heard of it.” This has caused a problem for me, as it leaves me with no polite and acceptable way to answer if someone asks me what music I’m listening to.

There’s no winning. If I say the name of an artist they haven’t heard of as though I expect them to know it, then it just sounds weird, they look at me strangely and I feel the way I did when I was ten years old and brought my Lennie Gallant CD in for show and tell and all the kids made fun of me. If I explain who the singer is, then that sort of feels more pretentious, or at least, gets into a longer conversation than the person was asking for when they just asked what my weekend plans are. And the people who perpetuated anti-hipster backlash have taken away the option of saying “Oh it’s a guy you won’t know.” Like. I don’t think I’m better than you for it. Quite the opposite, my personality today is largely driven by the inferiority complex I developed when I was ten and other kids thought my music was weird. It’s fine that you’ve probably never heard of it, I’m not saying that as some sort of power play. I’m just saying it because, you probably haven’t heard of it. And you don’t want me to explain who it is, and I don’t want to explain who it is while you listen politely and try to get out of the conversation, why can’t we just bring back “You probably don’t know it” as a normal and value neutral thing to say?

Anyway, this time, I was pleased that I did have a way to explain who I’m seeing via a reference point that most people know. Because Garnet Rogers is the older brother of Stan Rogers, a very famous Canadian folk singer. He died in 1983, and I think my music collection contains at least five different songs, written by various other Canadian folk singers, in tribute to his death, which is how you know he was a hell of an influence on the culture.

There’s an entire folk festival dedicated to his memory, called StanFest in Canso Nova Scotia. I’ve traveled the 15-ish-hour drive to attend that festival twice in my life and it’s been two of my favourite weekends ever.

Stan Rogers was so famous that he became one of the folk singers to break the containment of the folk niche, and he’s a cultural touchstone for most people in Canada. I’m pretty sure most people in Canada can sing at least the chorus of his most mainstream successful song, Barrett’s Privateers. So when my coworker asked me who I was going to see, I said, “Okay, you know Stan Rogers?” And she said “No”, and I just wanted to call in a referee and say "Hey, that's not fair! I know that usually a flaw in the social interaction is my fault, but this one can't be on me, it was a reasonable expectation on my part that a random person would have at least heard of Stan Rogers. This social interaction field has been stacked against me, how can I be expected to perform under these conditions?"

Anyway, I was totally unprepared for that answer to I sort of stammered, “Oh, right, well I’m seeing his brother,” and she looked at me like “Why have you told me that you’re seeing the brother of a guy I’ve never heard of?” and I looked at her like “Because I’m not allowed to just tell you you’ve never heard of it for some reason” and it was awkward and this is why I don’t usually try small talk with coworkers.

Anyway. I remember being a kid and asking both my parents who their favourite singer was; my dad said Gordon Lightfoot and my mom said Garnet Rogers. My dad briefly revised that to Emmylou Harris when I was a teenager, but I think my mom’s answer has stayed the same for about thirty years. My dad likes Garnet too, but not as much, and this is a rare music thing that I share more with my mom than my dad, which is cool.

My mother likes music, but not normally as intensely; she’ll come along for the first day or so of the folk festival, if it’s nice weather, and doesn’t want to do the whole long four-day, rain or shine adventure the way my dad and I do. Music has always been a big bonding thing for my dad and I, so I really enjoyed getting to have it as a bonding thing with her last night. She was so excited, she kept talking about how she used to see him at folk festivals all the time but hasn’t seen him since about 2006. She bought his book at intermission and got him to sign it. She had two glasses of wine and had me drive her home.

He was great; he looked older than his age (which is presently 68), but his voice hasn't started fading at all. He played mostly acoustic, but plugged the bass guitar in for his really famous song called Night Drive, about touring with his brother, which was amazing. He did some of his old stuff and some new stuff and an unexpected Greg Brown cover and ended on a Stan Rogers cover. It's got to be weird to spend 40 years best known for being a dead man's brother.

And the crowd was great. First of all, great Canadian folk singer James Keelaghan was in the audience, and it's always cool as fuck when that happens. When you go to one person's gig and someone else is just walking around. That used to happen all the time when I lived in Nova Scotia. In one Halifax bar, I once saw Bruce Guthro with Jimmy Rankin in the audience, and a few months later saw JP Cormier with Lennie Gallant in the audience.

Anyway. It was at this folk music club that just opened in 2021, and it brought all the folk people back. All the people who used to go to our local folk festival, until 2012 when they sold the festival to some people who overhauled it and brought in the "indie rock" acts, and then the just regular rock acts, to draw in younger crowds at the small cost of having a folk festival with no folk music. I kept going for a few years, and then stopped bothering because it had stopped being a folk festival at all, it was full of drunk young people and indie rock bands (I've recently started getting over my prejudice against things labeled "indie rock" that was caused by that, because some of that music I quite like, I just don't like it taking over folk festivals) and it was shit, it still is. Folk festivals are meant to be for hippies who are 60+ years old, wearing tie-dye and makeshift ponchos and with grey ponytails. I fucking love going to a folk festival and seeing all the grey ponytails, on men and women. Makes me less anxious about getting older, seeing that some people who reach that age don't feel the need the cut their hair or dye it.

Anyway, it turns out all the hippies with grey ponytails in the city didn't disappear when the folk festival got sold, they just stopped coming out. But now this folk club opened and that's where they all were last night. Both my parents and I have tickets to see JP Cormier and Dave Gunning there in April and I can't wait to go back.

I've realized this is the only thing in my life where I get to be in the liberal bubble. The rest of my life has been taken up with this sport where you're considered fairly left-wing if you were open-minded enough to be willing to get a COVID vaccine, even if you still had "concerns" about it. I've now started sometimes hanging out at local comedy places; I went to a club comedy night the other night with 8 men and 2 women on the bill, almost all the men had some amount of racist or sexist material, and that's still considered one of the more progressive nights because they had women on and most of the material wasn't like that. I know that sometimes I overlook bad stuff because my standards of what counts left-wing is skewed by a community where only being mildly bad is considered centrist.

But folk festivals. Folk festivals have always been my one point of access to the liberal bubble. The performers and the audience full of people who were hippies in the 60s and then just kept on being that way after everyone else stopped. It's fucking great. I'm a big fan of the liberal bubble, and have less and less tolerance these days for people who deride it, because even if it's imperfect it's so much better than the alternative.

My favourite Garnet Rogers song is Underpass, and annoyingly there's no good quality version on YouTube of just that song, but here's a video of him playing it along with Twisting in the Wind, which is another great song. It's from 2011, apparently, but last night he looked pretty similar to that, aside from a few more wrinkles in the face. He definitely still has the same hair as in that video, though. Last night, the most impressive grey ponytail in the room was on the guy on stage.

While we're at it, here's my personal favourite Stan song:

There's this thing at the end of the John Robins/Elis James radio show called the Keep it Sessions Sessions, as an outro to the podcast and separate from the live radio broadcast, where they'll take turns picking a musician or band they love, will talk for a few minutes about who they are and what they do, and then they'll play 30 seconds (all they can do without running into copyright issues) of a song by them. Usually used for bands that are not on the Radio X playlist, so they can share music they like the listeners even if it's not something the station will let them actually play.

I've quite enjoyed those segments, and it's introduced me to a couple of singers where I've ended up downloading and enjoying their stuff (like I said, I am overcoming my anti-indie rock prejudice, to be honest listening to Kitson's radio shows went a long way toward getting me to overcome that and a lot of the Robins/James recs are in the same vein). But every time I hear it, I think, that sounds like fun, I wish I had a platform to just spend a few minutes every week telling people about a band or singer I like, explaining where they come from and what they do and then playing people one of their songs and offering recs on their best stuff.

Then I remembered, I have a Tumblr blog where I can post whatever I want. So I might just start doing that. Here, this is a decent quality version of his song about touring with his brother.

#Youtube

[hon3ycor3]

@queerava was just browsing ao3 until she fuckin saw a stanfest fic

#yellow screams #im screaminfg

[atlanticcanada]

Summer festival cancellations piling up in the Maritimes

Summer festivals of all sizes all across the Maritimes have had to make the difficult decision to cancel their events amid the COVID-19 crisis.

It's a big blow to the organizers who dedicate months to planning, and the host communities that reap the financial benefits.

The Halifax Jazz Festival has been bringing music to the Maritimes for more than 30 years, but this year the show won't go on.

"There's so much value to the community, to the artists to us, and all the work that we put into, just to cancel that was really difficult," said Andrew Jackson, the festival's senior program manager.

Described as the largest festival in Atlantic Canada, the organizers had to make the tough call to cancel because of Covid-19.

It's a decision many have had to make with the summer concert season getting closer. That includes Area 506 in Saint John, which was set to host its fifth festival.

"We had great momentum," festival founder Ray Gracewood said from Quispamsis, N.B. "We see this as a small setback. I think the reality is, nobody can control these kinds of factors."

Other cancellations include Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival in Fredericton, the Atlantic Balloon Fiesta in Sussex, and the Cavendish Beach Music Festival.

President Jeff Squires says "the safety of our community remains a priority and we will forego Year 12 and reunite in 2021."

The organizers of Stanfest in Canso, N.S., have posted a statement saying "the situation is devastating for the festival and its parent organization. We must now turn the page and begin to plan for 2021."

This year's much anticipated edition of Touchdown Atlantic, featuring a sold-out game between the Toronto Argonauts and Saskatchewan Roughriders is still on -- for now.

The league says its plans are in the hands of public health officials as it shapes up to be a quiet summer season.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/3aOOW1g

#new brunswick #prince edward island #nova scotia #news #politics #canada #CTVAtlantic

[avengewash]

Had fun at Stanfest yesterday with Dan and my Dad ❤️ Here's part one of my annual Stanfest photodump! These ones are from the drive up to the mountains ❤️ #Stanfest2022 #Fall #autumn #autumnvibes #leaves #landscapephotography #nature #naturephotography #roadtrip (at Bethel, Maine) https://www.instagram.com/p/CjguxG1LOfs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#stanfest2022 #fall #autumn #autumnvibes #leaves #landscapephotography #nature #naturephotography #roadtrip

[storywonker]

Nathan Rogers - Mary Ellen Carter Live At Stanfest 2012

This might actually be better than his father’s version.