FEST COMES FULL CIRCLE
Folky Ferron returns to stage, relevance
Forty years ago, the first Vancouver Folk Music Festival was held in Stanley Park. In 1979, the event moved to its gorgeous site at Jericho Beach Park. Back in those days, the civic conscience revolved around more than endless whining about affordability and “are we/aren’t we world-class, or not” debates. A healthy climate of activism was about, and the festival provided a forum for it.
This climate provided good breeding ground for emerging artists seeking new means of telling their stories. One of these was Vancouver’s trail-blazing Ferron (July 16, 2:25 p.m. on Stage 2), who performed such women’s movement anthems as Testimony at the second folk festival.
A pioneer on the then nascent “women’s music” scene, the acclaimed singer/songwriter would inspire subsequent generations and be cited by everyone from Indigo Girls and Le Tigre to Ani Di Franco as an influence. Her exquisite lyricism would be compared by music critics to the likes of Leonard Cohen. Albums such as Testimony (1980), Shadows on a Dime (1984) and Phantom Center (1990) all received five-star ratings on allmusic.com.
Ferron’s return to her hometown, to the festival main stage, and to the audience that grew up with her, makes perfect sense in this anniversary year. The musician, who divides her time between homes on Saturna Island and in Florida, says it almost didn’t happen.
“A while ago, I ended up with arthritis in my hand that was pretty bad, and touring around as a solo woman gets lonely and horrible, and since I wasn’t craving stardom or anything I backed off from it all,” said Ferron.
“But Barbara Higbie (Grammynominated multi-instrumentalist) contacted me and said this was all wrong, and set up this gig at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley (California), which I treated like my swansong. It was a really wonderful show, and after it I walked into the lobby and there was someone who wanted to manage me, another who wanted to book me, and now I’m busy through next summer.”
So much for retirement. In retrospect, it seemed a somewhat inappropriate time for an artist with such a strong feminist perspective and connections to the women’s movement to be retiring. If anything, Ferron’s material such as Stand Up (from Phantom Center) or Our Purpose Here (from Testimony), is a refreshing counter to rising sexism in the U.S., and elsewhere.
The singer notes that the times this music initially grew out of were “ferocious, but not in a deliberate way.” Perhaps now, reminders of what struggle requires are needed?
“Maybe that’s what happened, people wanted these songs and here I am working,” Ferron said.
“Perhaps I was born into that time to be one of those women who just wasn’t going to lie about anything, and here we go again. All the gals on my stage are younger than me, and perhaps I was their mentor.”
A while ago, I ended up with arthritis in my hand that was pretty bad, and touring around as a solo woman gets lonely and horrible, and since I wasn’t craving stardom or anything I backed off from it all.
Decades after she first started strumming at the groundbreaking women-only Full Circle Coffeehouse in Mount Pleasant, she still feels both pleased and amazed that Vancouver proved such a key centre for the feminist movement.
“I’m amazed that it happened from here, because back in the day this place was always five years behind in everything, including clothing,” Ferron said.
“We were just doing our own, little, fierce thing, which I didn’t think was changing the world but was certainly changing me, letting me be me.”
One of the things key to Ferron’s work has always been linguistic politics and how language subtly, or not so subtly, contributes to sexism. A book edited by Ezra Pound titled The Chinese Written Character As a Medium For Poetry played a key role in discovering her unloaded vocabulary, and she didn’t use the word “power” for an entire year in any context.
“What I learned from that book was how I wanted to be a writer who used verbs in the same imagistic way they are in Chinese poetic characters, active and in motion; relational language,” Ferron said.
“Understanding how thought can be controlled by controlling the language and how you could use it to get other results was a 10-year-long journey. With its subject verb agreements focusing on the object, English isn’t really a language of passion, because the verb — the emotion — might be the most important thing.”
Admitting that she has had both a lot of fun and a lot of distress working with this writing model, Ferron says she’s finding returning to steady working again is leading into an urge to record again. Her last full release was 2008’s Boulder.
Songwriting has always represented something like a personal road map of Ferron’s life. After turning 65 in June, she thinks there may be a record on retiring, but not retirement, in her future.
July 13 the festival presents Canada Far & Wide: Grand Esprits. This free (with reserved ticket) event is an initiative of the Vancouver, Winnipeg, Calgary, Canmore and Regina festivals to produce a touring collaborative project celebrating the Canadian songbook.
Performing songs by songwriters like Stan Rogers, Leonard Cohen, Snow, and K’naan will be Cris Derksen, Mélisande (électrotrad), Cold Specks, C.R. Avery, Jim Byrnes, Women in the Round, Carolyn Mark, Choir! Choir! Choir!, Leonard Podolak, The Funk Hunters and Paul Pigat.