Folk Festival announces performers

The “first lady” of gospel music, blues guitarist Robert Belfour and a reunion of performers from the long-running “Stacey’s Country Jamboree” will be part of the Aug. 25-27 American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront.

The musicians are among an additional round of performers announced this week. Heather McCarthy, the festival’s executive director, said more announcements are forthcoming.

“Within a week we’ll have the final lineup announced, as well as the full schedule,” she said Wednesday.

The reunion of performers associated with the “Stacey’s Country Jamboree” television broadcast from Brewer in the 1960s and 1970s brings back a Maine institution.

“Country music in Maine had this nexus around Stacey’s,” McCarthy said.

“It was such a cultural phenomenon for eastern Maine and the Maritimes,” she said. “A lot of these folks still have stories to tell, and we wanted to give them an opportunity to share.”

One of the most popular genres from folk festivals past – gospel music – will be provided by the Ethel Caffie-Austin Singers.

Caffie-Austin is a pianist, vocalist, choir leader and educator who has been hailed as the “first lady of gospel music” and been the recipient of the Jefferson Award for Humanity.

Belfour, a blues guitarist and singer-songwriter who records on the Fat Possum record label, shares a tradition founded by John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins and carried on by his contemporaries Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside. He plays a down-and-dirty blues boogie and sings in a haunted, passionate, gravelly baritone straight out of the Mississippi Delta.

The Boston-based Chinese Folk Art Workshop will give lessons in traditional Chinese arts and will perform folk dances on the festival grounds.

Formed in 1998, the workshop travels around the Northeast educating people in the traditions and culture of the Chinese community.

Children and adults will be able to take a breather during the festival by sitting in on a performance by Yorick’s Marionette Theater. The theater presents traditional Czech stories through the longstanding art form of Czech puppetry. Founded by master puppeteer Dusan Petran, the troupe has used hand-carved marionettes to bring characters to life for audiences all over the U.S. and Europe over the past 15 years.

The Maine Folklife Center will offer new programming highlighting traditions in Maine food and crafts.

At the Taste of Traditions stage, Maine food such as smoked salmon, fiddleheads, sardines and needhams (potato candy) will be offered, and exhibitions of rug hooking and tole painting will be presented, as well.