Folk festival follow-up: keep music, dance, art alive

By any measure, the National Folk Festival held last weekend along the Bangor waterfront was an unqualified success. Bangor should be most proud of exceeding even the most ambitious estimates for attendance and enthusiasm. The performances were enhanced by the unbridled and energetic response of the audiences. The astonishingly minor glitches and difficulties experienced this year are all easily remedied, and the professionals who brought year one to us will surely iron out these wrinkles with dispatch.

I was the artistic director of the Hartland Folk Festival and Roaring Brook Concerts for 13 years, and a fulltime folk singer-songwriter for nearly 20 years. I know what it took to get this festival, what it took to make it the great success it was, but more importantly, I know what it will take to keep a festival alive after the federal money and support is gone.

Cynics will argue that a free festival is bound to succeed. That is not always true, but to sustain a free festival requires an enormous fundraising effort. The same coffers will not always be there. Local banks, manufacturers, and foundations cannot, nor should not, simply underwrite this event for perpetuity. Instead, additional fundraising events, utilizing the waterfront and the charm of downtown Bangor, should be launched to become permanent funding mechanisms.

The waterfront in this city has advantages most other cities in the region can only imagine. Few New England river cities have not barricaded their riverfront with highways, or ruined them with poorly though out development. I offer Hartford, Springfield and Worcester, as examples of this. Interstate 91, in the first two cases, runs along the Connecticut River, and cuts the people off from the water. In Springfield the added insult of a redolent sewage treatment plant on Bondi’s Island, makes the waterfront recovery effort in that city problematic. Bangor has a nearly perfect site, as this past weekend proved, and the right mix of permanent performance venues, walkways, parks, piers, public moorings, and perhaps even shops and restaurants, can still be had without rerouting highways and rivers.

Future events should include local, by that I mean northern New England and adjacent Atlantic Canadian, artists and performers. When the local music and art communities feel invested in these events, they will grow and prosper. When this happens, the ancillary benefit to the careers of those artists is immeasurable.

A vigorous First Night celebration using the retail shops and stores, as well as the many possible concert sites in Bangor – Norumbega Hall, the John Bapst auditorium, the Penobscot Theatre’s two locations, for example – would be a good winter event. This could be tied to a Winter Carnival. A summertime River Festival that combined an historic look at the schooner days of the city’s past, with music and workshops, boat building demonstrations, and a lumberman’s exposition or composition, is another of the many ideas I heard people kicking around at the festival.

A summer jazz weekend with free outdoor performances and evening concerts in various venues, including clubs and theatres, is the type of event already successful in many places.

The exact events are less important than the need to begin envisioning the future now. It would be a shame if the National Folk Festival was the end of the run. Minor league baseball seemed to have a future here, but when the greater community asked to invest in that future the answer was a resounding, no.

I believe this will be different. I believe the community will embrace this festival and with to perpetuate it in some form. But, having said that, I worry that people will rely on the same funding sources, and not realize what a commitment must be made to keep the music, dance, and art along the waterfront for years to come.

We need greater year-round radio support. WERU is the only major station in the Bangor area with regular, locally produced, folk-related programming save for, “In Tune by Ten,” on Maine Public Radio. Reruns of national shows should give way to programs produced and aired from Maine. One, “A Prairie Home Companion,” and one, “Car Talk,” per week are enough in an age where the technology to tape such programs is in virtually every home. Just three hours a week of statewide programming featuring Maine performers, and those coming to Maine, would be invaluable in developing audience awareness and fondness for this music. The promotional benefits to venues and performers throughout the region would be innumerable. In some areas of New England it is possible to choose from over 75 hours a week of acoustic programming. In those areas, festivals and concert venues thrive. That is good for all those area’s businesses.

There are too few venues for music in our area. An enterprising person or business should capitalize now on the enthusiasm our fellow citizens have shown for this music. There are many Cajun, Zydeco, Celtic and other folk- style bands and performers in New England, and the growth of this music has been steady for nearly two decades.

The rub is this. The venues can’t survive without the media support and the media need something to cover. This apparent dichotomy is really easily solved. We need a meeting of minds. The arts community, public radio, the local chamber’s of commerce, and the city of Bangor, have all the talent needed to develop a comprehensive plan for making the arts a sustainable and profitable part of our area’s life. The one truth is this: the arts can be good for our wallets as well as our souls. The goose with the golden eggs is here. Let’s be sure to treat her well, and offer her a long and prosperous life.

Bruce Pratt, of Eddington, is a longtime artistic director of both a folk festival and a concert series, and also a veteran performer.