Musical favourites at Stanfest
Talk to any artist making a return trip to the Stan Rogers Folk Festival in Canso this weekend and they’ll refer to it as a kind of homecoming.
P.E.I.-based songwriter Irish Mythen certainly has a lot of emotion invested in the annual event, which she returns to for a mainstage performance tonight along with Saturday and Sunday workshops in the tents that dot the recreational grounds of the coastal Guysborough County community.
Mythen played her first Canadian show at Stanfest in 2006, when artistic director Troy Greencorn took a chance on her based on a friend’s recommendation.
“The reception I got there, and on the little tours I did afterwards, completely set me up to return the next year and try to live in Canada,” said the performer who will appear at the U.K.’s prestigious Cambridge Folk Festival only a couple of days after Stanfest.
“All my research told me that it’s the hardest country to break into, as a solo performer, just because it’s so vast. And I wanted to be known Canadawide. It would have been easier to go to the (United) States, and establish myself in a region there, and make money and live happily ever after, but I’m a touring musician and I wanted to get right across the country. And Troy is the reason why it all happened.”
Mythen comes to Canso this year with new songs from the forthcoming followup to her self-titled, 2014 East Coast Music Award-winning release.
One of them is called “Little Bones,” inspired by a historic tragedy in her ancestral home, where a mass grave was discovered in Tuam, County Galway, containing the remains of nearly 800 infants who perished at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home from 1920-50.
The first performer on this year’s schedule, Stanfest veteran Chuck Brodsky, comes to the event from his current home in Asheville, N.C., but the Philadelphia native’s first connection to the event lies even further away in Texas.
He initially heard of Stan Rogers and how he immortalized the fishing village of Canso in song at the Kerrville Folk Festival, where the Canadian folk icon spent his final days before his death in a 1983 airplane fire.
“There’s a campfire songcircle (in Kerrville) that I like to call home, and Stan’s story is very much remembered and talked about there,” says Brodsky, who also performs on Tuesday at the Carleton Music Bar & Grill in Halifax.
During his first visit, Brodsky made so many friends among the residents who volunteer and help run the event that he considers it more than just another folk festival.
“It took on a different meaning,” said the artist whose achievements include landing songs about legends like Dock Ellis and Moe Berg in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Inspiration has also struck Brodsky in Canso, which planted seeds for songs like
“The Ballad of Stan Rogers & Leo Kennedy,” “The Man Who Blew Kisses” and “People Up Here.”
Making friends at Stanfest also led Brodsky to return to Nova Scotia to make records like “Color Came One Day” and “Tulips for Lunch” with multitalented J.P. Cormier as his producer and one-man backing band.
If anyone knows about the importance of continuing a folk music legacy, it’s P.E.I.’s Catherine MacLellan, who’s currently presenting a show based on the music of her father, Maritimes music legend Gene MacLellan, at the Prince Edward Island Brewing Co. through September.
This weekend marks her fourth journey to Stanfest, an adventure that began with her old band New Drift.
“(Stanfest) feels like one of the last true folk festivals,” she said. “I understand why others have gone the route that they have with big rock and pop bands headlining, but it’s a pretty nice feeling to go to a place like Stanfest — and Lunenburg is kind of the same — where it’s really a folk festival and artists like myself don’t feel like we’re taking second place to anyone.
“These festivals were built on songwriters and the musicians who’ve played them for years, but it’s nice to go to a place where it’s still the focus and I really love that they’ve kept that in their heart.”
Coming from a province where one community is never very far from the next, MacLellan enjoys spending a weekend in the microcosm of Canso, where the entire town comes to life for one united purpose and opens its doors to the world.
“You go there and you feel, in a lovely way, so disconnected from the rest of the world. You just forget about the rest of everything, all your troubles kind of disappear, and you just worry about the weather,” she said with a chuckle, while concurring with Mythen’s comparison of Stanfest to Christmas.
“It is, you get together with your chosen family, your friends. I know people from here who go every year to Stanfest, and they have their favourite camping spot, and they’re totally in it. It only happens once a year, and everyone makes the most of it.”