Some kind of magic

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/07/2025 (470 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Every July, thousands of people descend upon the tall grass, boreal forest and poison ivy of Birds Hill Provincial Park for the annual Winnipeg Folk Festival. For some, this seminal and iconic coming together of people and music is ritual. It is church or ceremony. Festival goers tell tall tales of how many years they have been attending, who their favourite artists are, who they fell in love with and how many sleepless nights they have endured in festival camping.

And folkies are also good for deep conversations as to whether there is too much banjo (or not enough), whether the festival has become too corporate or even the very definition of folk music.

This ritual surely did not happen by chance. Like much of human history and the powerful connection between cause and consequence, the right ingredients, including some luck, are required for significance to emerge.

Local filmmaker and popular historian Kevin Nikkel (On the Trail of the Far Fur Country, Establishing Shots: An Oral History of the Winnipeg Film Group) attempts to capture the initial sparks that would erupt into 50 years of the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

In Founding Folks: An Oral History of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Nikkel suggests that the purpose of the history is “both celebratory — coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Festival — and exploratory; to contribute to the primary source knowledge of the Winnipeg Folk Festival and the broader understanding of culture on the prairies.”

How did the festival start? What impact did it have on Winnipeg? What influence did Winnipeg have on the festival? These are all questions contemplated by Nikkel, whose inquiry began by happenstance — tripping over a box of Super 8 film at the Winnipeg Film Group with the late Dave Barber.

Within the fragile Super 8 film, they found old footage of a 1975 failed documentary from the Winnipeg Film Group seeking to capture the second version of the Festival, in 1975. Sparks flew and Nikkel and Barber began to develop the idea for this book and an accompanying documentary, entitled When We Became Folk Fest (which was released in June).

Framed around multiple “semi- structured” interviews, Founding Folks is packed with interviews from those involved at the beginning, from 1974 until the early 1980s.

Volunteers, musicians and staff were interviewed during the pandemic to help shed light on the why and how of this unlikely community and cultural enterprise.

Unlikely, perhaps, because the beginnings were solely locked up in the mind of one person.

All roads point to the Mitch Podolak, who died in 2019. (This reviewer was introduced to folk music by Mitch in the form of banjo lessons every Wednesday after school at the West End Cultural Centre, where I clawhammered my way to the top.) A communist, opinionated and passionate, Podolak landed in Winnipeg because of love and a desire to share his passion for folk music with the masses as a means to “engage in community activism.”

The festival, which takes place this year from July 10-13, began as more than spectacle. While working with the CBC, Podolak saw an advertisement for the bicentennial celebration of Winnipeg and an invitation for funding applications.

The 1974 Winnipeg Centennial Folk Festival was held in August.

It was fully molded on the Mariposa Folk Festival and on the ideals of its artistic director, Estelle Klein, who focused her program on the development of workshops — a critical ingredient to the success of the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

Nikkel, through his commentary and his artful way of creating conversations with his interviewees, unearths why the initial decade of the festival was not only successful, but so influential to the cultural landscape of Winnipeg and Western Canada.

“For Mitch, his politics and activism were a source of motivation for the type of work he did before founding the Festival and in the work he did after he left,” Nikkel posits.

Through interviews with other founders (such as Colin Gorrie, Ava Kobrinsky and Harry Paine) to legendary early artists including Bruce Cockburn, Tom Jackson and Big Dave McLean, Founding Folks is a story of brute determination and an obsession with Trotskyite ideals founded on respect for everyone — and sprinkled with maniacal and chauvinistic behaviour.

For, as Nikkel comments, as a limitation to his methodology, his sources were full of lovely folks “who are careful not to say anything derisive about their beloved founder, who was all too human.”

Founding Folks elegantly leaves space for the voices of those who were there — perhaps not all the volunteers, but critical participants who recall the rain, the care and the egalitarian nature of the festival. Big Dave McLean cleverly argues that Mitch Podolak was “the only communist I know that knows how to work the capitalist system so well.”

With over 100 photos (enough reason to grab the book) from the early years and fully wedded to the art of doing oral history, Founding Folks is a tribute to the early ideal, and as Mitch’s son Leonard Podolak suggests, to the “aesthetic” of what happens when audiences, volunteers and performers come together to treat each other well and dream of a new world.

As Leonard surmises, “You can sell lots of tickets. Anybody can do that, but the cultural impact on the community, in terms of how we behave and interact and will pride together, is by far the greatest lasting legacy.”

Founding Folks brilliantly captures the early magic, idealism and courage that made Winnipeg just a bit better.

Matt Henderson is superintendent of the Winnipeg School Division.