I first went to a Festival in 1978. It was the Good Entertainment Festival held in Killdevil, and I was amazed. I had come from a family where traditional music was respected, and I had even learned to dance as a child, but where I came from, that was exceptional. If you liked traditional music when I was a kid, you were a freak. Yet here were people who respected and enjoyed the music, who even gloried in it! I was amazed.


A couple of years later, I came to St. John's to study, and submerged myself in that for a while. When I finally came up for air after a couple of years, I found out there was this thing called Folk Club at the Ship Inn. Again, I was amazed. Aside from that brief experience in Killdevil, I had had no contact with anyone for whom our music was anything about which you could feel anything but shame. And yet, here were people MY OWN AGE who enjoyed the music as much as I did, and were quite nationalistic I might add. Well, my studies went out the window; I lost myself in the traditional music scene. I entirely missed the North American pop culture of the eighties, a fact for which I have no sense of loss at all. Our own culture was (and is) more important to me than anything that comes at us over the airwaves.


I went to my first Festival in St, John's in 1983. Now, to the people among whom I studied, this still made me a freak, a "granola person" but there were now a lot more like me, and that gave me a sense of freedom. I still remember the lightness of it all, the realization that it was good to be proud of where I came from, that our culture was something to be enjoyed and explored, not hidden away and denied. The first time I walked into Fred's Records and saw Newfoundland music on the shelves right next to the "real" music, I couldn't believe it!


I began volunteering with the Folk Arts Council in 1984 or so, and I've been at it one way or another ever since. I remember a few years ago, standing back stage one Sunday night while Minnie White played. It was warm with a damp wind blowing, the way it gets that time of year. The park was full, and right in front of the stage were a huge number of kids, mid-to-late teens mostly, dancing and getting into the music. I remember one in particular with her Dead Kennedies T-shirt, lost in Mrs. White's accordion. I remembered how I had felt at that Festival in Killdevil and the way my friends had reacted to my involvement in the folk scene. She didn't have that; she knew traditional music as something good right from the start. She didn't have to react against a cultural sense that it was a bad thing to be a Newfoundlander and to inherit that culture. She was benefiting from a movement that's been going on in this country for a while, a movement that is putting us, and those who come after us, back in touch with our roots. The Festival has played a role in that, and I'm proud to have been a part of it. It hasn't been easy. There have always been personality clashes, and so many different ideas about what actually is the culture of Newfoundland and Labrador. There'll always be those for whom the whole thing isn't dignified enough, and let's not even think about funding issues! Through it all we've managed somehow. The Festival has developed into something that people plan their summers around, and we have a base of very generous sponsors without whose help we would have folded long ago. More importantly, we played a part in bringing a generation of young Newfoundlanders into closer contact with their roots. As I watched her dance that night, that girl in her Dead Kennedies T-shirt, I figured we must be doing something right. Please God we'll keep doing it.