June 25, 1977 review: Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto
One
of my favorite assignments – the annual pilgrimage to
June 25, 1977
At
Mariposa Fest
Individual
Ingenuity Reigns Here
The McGarrigles from
Their high-school-girl harmonies were
expected to provide some of the rarest moments in these three days of picking,
singing, storytelling and dancing on the island park in
Their cancellation came at the last
moment. The reason: Anna’s pregnancy, now in its sixth month. Their big-name
replacement is an excellent one, though – David Bromberg.
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MARIPOSA
ALWAYS has a few so-called headliners – this year’s include Taj Mahal, Mike
Seeger, John Hammond and former Buffalonian Paul Siebel, but the festival is
set up to discourage stargazing and encourage a look at the many facets of
traditional music.
Instead of a central stage, there are
six performance areas under the trees. Instead of giving a single concert,
someone like Bromberg will show up for a few songs four or five times between
the start and the finale at dusk.
Sometimes they don’t sing at all. They
may just talk. Bromberg, for example, spent half an hour Friday afternoon
telling a couple hundred people sprawled on the grass how to teach themselves
to play the guitar.
“I’m chiefly a self-taught musician,”
he said. “The thing to remember is to use the thing that works for you.”
One of the six areas is devoted to
children’s shows, where someone like Steve Hansen, “the puppet man,” can be
seen doing Punch & Judy from inside a man-sized box outfitted with a
microphone.
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ELSEWHERE
THERE’S a section devoted to native peoples and a 38-exhibit craft display
which includes dollmakers, silversmiths and Mennonite quiltmakers.
The sum of it all is an enormous sense
of the limitless range of individual ingenuity.
The festival seems aimed less at
entertainment and more toward awakening its crowd to that possibility within
themselves.
Indeed, Mariposa’s aim this year is to
touch all elements that make up North American folk music – Anglo, Afro, French
and Spanish.
* *
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THE
VARIETY leaves the head spinning. In one trip around the grounds, one is likely
to hear French-Canadian Alain Lamontagne blowing up a storm with only a
harmonica and footstomping, Leonard Emmanuel, world champion hollerer;
Texas-Mexican singer
One reason for the festival’s enduring
success is that attendance is limited to less than 10,000. Today is sold out.
Tomorrow almost is and with all that’s going on, the McGarrigle sisters have
hardly been missed.
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IN
THE PHOTO: Future Canadian folk icon Stan Rogers, who made his first appearance
at Mariposa in 1977.
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FOOTNOTE: Beyond Stan Rogers, other notables on
hand in 1977 included David Amram, John Allan Cameron, Margaret Christl, Mike
Seeger, Peg Leg Sam, Rita MacNeil, Tony Barrand, Utah Phillips, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and
Anna McGarrigle gave birth to the
first of her two children, a son, Sylvan, later that year. Her sister Kate is
the one who’s the mother of Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright.
This was the first year that the festival’s longtime artistic director, Estelle Klein, shared her duties with Ken Whiteley, a much younger roots musician who appeared at festivals across Canada and played more than 20 instruments. Klein, who started the daytime workshops in 1970 and downplayed the big evening concerts, set the template for the other major Canadian folk festivals.
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