Folk Festival founder gives voice to power of song
Chris White has devoted his life to bringing people together in song
“The Beatles, Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot … they’re all in my DNA.
“I grew up in a musical family. There was a piano in the living room and my dad played. I remember him coming home late at night, when we were just falling off to sleep, and he’d be playing downstairs. Those are really positive memories. He played piano and was a song leader, as his mother was before him. She was the choir leader and organist at the Cornwallis Baptist Church in Halifax. So my father came by it honestly. And now I’m leading songs in different singing groups in the community, but I wasn’t really planning that. When I think back, I absorbed that from childhood.
“Coming from a mixed-race family and growing up in a Scarborough that didn’t have any other mixedrace families was interesting. My dad had choirs all his life, including a kids’ choir in our town, in Agincourt. At the peak there were 70 kids who used to come over to our house on Saturday night and sing, and I absorbed all those songs. My dad was very charismatic and very musical and engaging, and everybody was on board. He’d get everybody singing in harmonies, including my brothers and sisters and myself, so we were singing in harmony from an early age and getting up and performing from time to time. We made a little record to send to our grandmothers, and things like that.
“In terms of purchasing my first music, 45s come to mind, like Question Mark and the Mysterians’ 96 Tears. I remember listening to that over and over again and asking my dad, ‘How do you play those chords?’ It turns out there’s only really two chords. So I soaked all that up, and then I started going to the Mariposa Folk Festival, and that is where I heard all kinds of diverse music from all different backgrounds and cultures and styles.
“And the way that Estelle Klein, the artistic director in those days, programmed it — she was unbelievably brilliant — she would put different musicians from different backgrounds onstage in what she called workshops, and they’d take turns and comment on each other’s songs and be influenced by what the person before them played, and they would join in and jam on each other’s songs. This became, for me, the model of what a folk festival is, and when the opportunity came up to start an Ottawa folk festival, that was my model.
“I’ve been writing songs since high school, and performing. But more so when I hit Ottawa and discovered Rasputin’s Café, in 1978. Here’s a little hole in the wall on Bronson Avenue, right beside the old Folklore Centre. It ran for 38 years, and got to the point where seven nights a week there were performances in there of some sort. It had a profound influence, because not only was it a space where people would listen to your songs — that was strictly enforced; there was no talking when anybody was onstage — but that was also the place where we would meet.
“All the early folk festival planning sessions were at Rasputin’s, as well as any special events or media launches. And that was the place where touring musicians like Stephen Fearing or Jane Siberry would play when they came through town. So Rasputin’s, the Ottawa Folklore Centre and CKCU’s Canadian Spaces were the triumvirate, and the folk festival came out of those things. The strength of the listenership of Canadian Spaces was the reason that Max Wallace, who was the station manager at CKCU, said, ‘Let’s start a folk festival.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, let’s.’
“I had a big epiphany at a certain point. I brought in Andy Rush, this brilliant choral director who lived in Kingston. Every year at the Blue Skies Festival, people could rehearse over the weekend. Andy would lead it, and then they’d get up on the mainstage and sing. So
I said, ‘Let’s do that at the Ottawa Folk Festival.’
“So we did that, and it just so happened when that choir of people who came to attend the festival went to a couple of rehearsals and then got to be a part of it and perform for everybody, I looked up and saw the looks on their faces, and I looked out at the audience and saw how much they all loved this. These aren’t professionals — this is us.
“The commercialization of music, to me, is a tragedy, and I’m using that word very deliberately. All the people that I run into every day, who believe that they cannot and should not sing because it’s only for professionals or only for people who have some sort of seal of approval, when my thing is that people are designed to sing. Humans are designed to sing. Parents all over the world instinctively sing to their babies, and that’s as it should be. And we should not stop just because when we were in Grade 1 some teacher said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t sing because your voice is in the wrong range.’
“I could go out on the street right now and talk to 10 people, and nine of them would tell me they can’t sing. But they should sing. It’s a healthy thing to do. It bonds us together. It creates a positive vibe, a healing vibe. It brings us together. All I have to say is, ‘We shall overcome,’ and 200,000 people singing that is a powerful thing. Of all the evil that’s going on in the world today, the weird thing is that singing can counteract that.”