If this is indeed a National Folk Festival, then it only makes sense that it takes a nation to stage it.

And so it goes that the people who set up the festival are not only from the Bangor Public Works Department and local volunteers and staff, but also from all along the East Coast.

Some are volunteers, while others are professionals in technical fields necessary to erect the temporary city on the waterfront that is the National.

Julia Olin, associate director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, estimated the value of the expertise and labor contributed by volunteers to be about $75,000.

“I don’t think we could do it without it,” said Dennis Blackledge, director of production for the festival. “They’re stone-cold pros in their own right. Most have done concert and festival work, or have been around it for so long that they understand it. They’re a very eclectic group, and they bring such a wide array of experiences.”

Who are these people?

One is Dwain Winters, by day a policy analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C.

Winters, 58, of Bethesda, Md., first volunteered for the festival in 1974. For the past 15 years, he has been its technical director.

That makes him responsible “for everything that physically gets set up,” he said. “This includes site design, tents, sound systems, portajohns, traffic control, all the systems that will support a temporary city of 100,000.”

Winters takes vacation time to spend 18-hour days preparing the site on the week of the festival.

“They’re very long days, and we work hard to see that people don’t get too tired,” he said. “We look out for each other, to make sure we work safely.”

Winters does this job for a couple of reasons:

“Most of us are strongly interested in traditional music and culture, and we want to make that available to as many people as possible. The festival is an extremely good [medium] to introduce people to things they couldn’t normally see or hear, to showcase quality.

“Also, there’s an adrenaline to knowing that … this place is going to be filled with people, and we have to be ready,” he added. “It’s just fun to build a site.”

Mary Boeckman, the assistant technical director, has been with the festival for 17 years.

“I got involved because I was a dancer, going to festivals, and I saw they needed help,” said Boeckman, 40, of Baltimore. “So I started to help. Now I do more festivals than dancing.”

Boeckman’s day job is being a computer programmer for Fannie Mae. During her vacation at the National, she runs the operations center, fielding calls and stamping out little fires as they pop up.

“I like the festivals, and like to help them work,” she said. “It’s a joy to see all these people come out and enjoy the music I like to hear. That way, the music is promoted, and more people know about it. Also, these are a great group of people, and I love working with them.”

Pete Reiniger’s station at the festival is the Railroad Stage, where he is the house engineer, mixing the sound for the stage and sending out a signal for public radio.

The Maryland resident’s primary job is as a recording engineer for Smithsonian Folkways Recording. As such, he goes out into the field to record diverse traditional music. He also remasters material in the Smithsonian’s archives.

Reiniger, 55, first got involved with the National in the late 1970s, when the festival still was being held in Washington, D.C. In addition to working with the festival, he works with the National Council for the Traditional Arts on the Lowell (Mass.) Folk Festival and does sound work for the National Heritage Awards.

What keeps a man who normally focuses on recording helping out at the National?

“This festival focuses on traditional music … which, to me, is important to document and preserve, so that it’s not all just popular music that is fed to the masses,” Reiniger said.

Working with the council is a good part of audio engineer Barney Kable’s year.

“The NCTA gives me a list of dates that they need me, I pencil them in, then work around that,” said Kable, 38, of Washington, D.C. “The NCTA has treated me very well over many years.”

Kable, who has worked with the council since 1990, is a monitor engineer at the Kenduskeag Dance Stage.

“I specifically tune in microphones and instruments through separate speakers for each musician,” he explained. “I make sure they sound correctly so the musicians can make music.”

Kable said the National is more than a diverse offering of music.

“It’s hearing great music, then hearing how that style of music came about,” he said.

Dean Languell has done sound engineering for rock tours and at folk clubs. So working at the festival was a natural progression.

Languell, 51, of Haddenfield, N.J., now designs infrastructure systems for corporate communications and marketing initiatives. He began working with the council in the mid-1980s and also helps out at the Lowell festival as well as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington. At the National, he serves as house engineer at the Penobscot Stage, mixing the sound there.

“Because of doing this, I’ve gotten to know most of the musicians, and know how they like their sound,” Languell said. “Also, there’s a real camaraderie with those I work with, so this is like a family reunion.”

Languell also gets to engage in a little amateur ethnomusicology: “You can see where the traditions start swapping back and forth musically. They start melding together, and those lines go away. People get to experience a culture they would never get a chance to see otherwise.”

Normally, Gregg Lamping, a mobile unit TV engineer, is busy with an Atlanta Braves or Hawks game for Turner Broadcasting. For the past 16 years, he has left his home in Atlanta to lend his skills to the festival.

This year, he’s working on sound at the Heritage Stage.

“I’m balancing every mike onstage, trying to find the most realistic presentation of what’s going on,” Lamping explained.

What does he get out of the festival?

“It’s really enlightened and enriched me to be exposed to so many cultures and music, and the same thing happens to the audience,” he said. “Sitting up here, I can almost see the ‘Oh, I get it’ look come over the faces. The best way for different people to connect with each other is through music, culture, traditions and folklore.”

Such a polished staff behind the scene is essential when trying to recruit performers for the National.

“We would be remiss if we didn’t provide world-class support for world-class bands,” Blackledge said. “We’re very careful that our engineers, stage managers and crews are quality people with the industry. This is a group that’s been collected over the past 20 to 30 years.”