Festive Future

With a catchy name, colorful logo and lots of enthusiasm, the Bangor folk festival committee unveiled plans for a continuing arts festival on the waterfront when the city’s stint as host of the National Folk Festival comes to an end this summer. Without missing a beat, the American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront is slated to begin August 2005. This is great news for a city that proved itself an arts destination over the last two summers and likely will again this year.

When Bangor was chosen to host the National Folk Festival, there was skepticism that the city could pull it off. Bangor is the smallest city to host the 66-year-old festival, which stays in a location for three years, but the city boasted the biggest crowd on opening night – 10,000 in 2002 – and visiting artists raved about the appreciative audience they found along the Penobscot River.

The aim of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, the group behind the national festival, is to bring high-caliber performances and artisans to smaller communities and then to have the cities continue with a festival of their own. Lowell, Mass., for example, hosted the National Folk Festival in the 1980s and is now home to the largest free folk festival in the country.

Making this happen in Bangor will not be easy. It will take a lot of effort and money. The Bangor folk festival, chaired by Michael Crowley, deserves much credit for its hard work and vision. As Mr. Crowley says, this is Bangor’s time to capitalize on the success of the National Folk Festival and to move forward as a city that is viewed as appreciating and cultivating the arts and culture. “The American Folk Festival … will be a litmus test of our resolve to begin to shape our own destiny and to not blame someone else for where we are or are not headed,” Mr. Crowley said at a reception where the new festival was announced.

The National Folk Festival, which drew nearly 200,000 people to the waterfront the past two summers and added an estimated $3.7 million to the local economy, filled Bangor with a sense of promise. That feeling must be kept going. The new festival will need many volunteers and financial backers. Investing time or money to ensure that the festival lives up to the high standards set by the National will be a down payment on the city’s future.