Folk fest thrives as a paragon of collective optimism

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This article was published 07/07/2023 (1121 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This weekend brings with it a heady and nostalgic tradition. A time when many of us throw off our workaday selves. We become sudden and fervent adherents to love, music and friendship. Skin is bared and hearts are opened in Prairie sunshine. We dance barefoot in long grass with complete abandon. Fragrant with patchouli and sweat, the air fills with competing melodies and rolling waves of applause. Birds Hill Provincial Park becomes a utopia filled with peace, love and everything that makes summertime wonderful in our province.

The Winnipeg Folk Festival is like a new year’s celebration to many. It is a place we return to and feel restored. Our memories of the festival are layered in our minds, year on year, as are the generations of footprints of festival-goers throughout the site. It is a nest of stories and interactions. A place where relationships flourish or are laid bare. Folk fest thrusts us into communal living where all we have is each other and the music.

The festival began in 1974. It was a free event, presented to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of our city. About 22,000 souls descended upon the park that summer. Through their attendance, they reawakened land that had already hosted millennia of travellers, families, music and community. Birds Hill Provincial Park had only been designated in 1967, during Canada’s centennial year. The festival and the park were born out of a time of intense hope and investment in our collective future, and the festival specifically appealed to youth to join in this optimism.

The skyline of 1974 Winnipeg boasted a single skyscraper, but we still spent our holiday money at downtown department stores. There were no skywalks crisscrossing Portage Avenue, but plenty of pedestrians. Winnipeg was flush with centennial cash. The Winnipeg Convention Centre, Centennial Concert Hall, Living Prairie Museum, Manitoba Museum and Millennium Library were all conceived as centennial showpieces. More than 10,000 Winnipeg vehicles boasted centennial licence plates. We were proud of our city and assured of our continued growth and success. We were a city finally coming of age. With that first folk fest, when we flocked to our new provincial park, we saw and felt the energy of a Winnipeg that was growing and celebrating youthful possibility along with us.

Today, Winnipeg feels markedly less optimistic. Undeniably, our city is now in a period of decline. Crime, homelessness, addiction and desperation walk downtown streets that used to bustle. The Millennium Library, venerated in the ’70s, now has airport-style security following multiple violent incidents. Infrastructure along Portage Avenue is crumbling and decaying. “For lease” signs adorn an embarrassing number of downtown shopfronts. Abandoned houses pepper our inner-city landscape.

Untouched by this urban decline, the festival has rolled on. As the years pass, older folkies have found ourselves dancing a little less vigorously, and taking a little longer to get up from our low lawn chairs. We move through our own life stages as our city moves in parallel. Feeling a bit creakier and dustier, we marvel and reminisce of the days we could gyrate the way the new generation does.

Those new youth now enjoy ownership of this summer tradition, dancing joyfully in our footprints. They are the ones to inherit the hope and energy handed down since that inaugural first festival year. In time, their steps may slow, but another generation of barefoot young people will dance upon Birds Hill’s Prairie grasses come July. Folk fest continues to grow, nourished by a limitless youthful confidence.

Sunday night, when folks pack up tents and tarps, they will carry with them that intergenerational hope for our city, seeded in Winnipeg’s centennial. The selection of singalong finale songs has remained unchanged through the years. The final cadence will wash over a sunburned and satisfied crowd for the 48th time. Across generations, under the stars, we’ll sing to one another to “put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain, and like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.”

The names and faces change. Our city endures its cycles of boom and bust, but the festival has remained an unfailingly optimistic manifestation of the vigour of a youthful city. It is a living time capsule, fountain of eternal youth and perennial reminder of our possibilities.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca

Rebecca Chambers
Writer

Rebecca explores what it means to be a Winnipegger by layering experiences and reactions to current events upon our unique and sometimes contentious history and culture. Her column appears alternating Saturdays.

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