Cheers to 50 years of the Folk Fest — & 50 more

Five years ago, there were no festivals.

It was the summer of 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic meant no live… anything. No music. No theatre. All the festivals that have come to define summer in Manitoba were purged from the calendar.

Organizations did their best, of course, offering smaller, virtual presentations for a time defined by staying home. But it wasn’t the same.

Five years on, music festivals, in particular, are still feeling the aftershocks of that time, owing to both financial losses sustained as well as increased operational costs in a post-pandemic landscape. A spate of cancellations of American music festivals last summer prompted NPR to call it “the festival recession.”

It was a trend we saw on this side of the border as well. Just for Laughs cancelled its 2024 events in Montreal and Toronto.

And some of these festivals — popular, beloved festivals, even — never recovered. The Regina Folk Festival, which was supposed to celebrate its 53rd year in 2025, announced it would be permanently shutting down in March after going on hiatus in 2024. The Vancouver Island MusicFest is not happening this year, while the 2025 edition of the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival could be its last.

It’s against this backdrop that the Winnipeg Folk Festival is celebrating its 50th anniversary this weekend. Fifty years is an incredible — and, these days, an increasingly improbable — run.

Especially since it was supposed to be a one-off, originally conceived by founders Mitch Podolak, Ava Kobrinsky and Colin Gorrie as a celebration for Winnipeg’s centennial in 1974.

But a legacy festival isn’t built by mere endurance — or survival — alone. It’s built by people who have a vision for it, who can recognize both where it came from and where it could go.

It’s built by the generations of people who have grown up with it, who take their kids or grandkids to Birds Hill Park every year during the second weekend of July.

It’s built by the people who dedicate hard-earned vacation days and money to attend every year, regardless of who is performing.

It’s built by the people who volunteer their time and energy to making sure the whole thing runs as planned and can pivot when it doesn’t.

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Festivals need stewardship. We all saw the grotesque failure of Woodstock ’99 and its wholesale abandonment of the peace and love ethos that made the 1969 event so iconic; organizers didn’t care about making it a safe temporary community. So much of what makes folk fest what it is is exactly that: community.

Sure, there’s the annual kvetching about the lineup — someone’s best-ever year is always someone else’s worst-ever and vice versa — or even the definition of “folk” music. But even that is part of the ritual.

Creating the kind of place where people want to return again and again, year after year, decade after decade is no small feat and it doesn’t just happen. Nor will it continue to happen if we don’t keep supporting it and our new normal will look a lot like that summer of 2020.

Folk fest is special and rare and ours. Cheers to 50 years — and here’s to 50 more.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.