Every year at the Annual Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival, we honor the traditional performing arts of our province. This year, we will share those traditions with some of our fellow Canadians who have managed to keep their own culture and heritage alive in other parts of the country. The Common Ground Program at this year's festival pairs local artists with performers from mainland Canada. In their workshops together, they will share songs, tunes, personal experiences, and perhaps even a joke or two! Shelley Posen (of Finest Kind) and David Francey from Quebec, two performers from mainland Canada who are participants in this program, were kind enough to share some thoughts with The Broadside about their participation in this year's festival.

David Francey of Quebec paired with Harry Martin through the Common ground Program at this year's festival. Maria Dunn says of David, on his website, "David Francey finds the poetry in our everyday lives and the soul in our forgotten places. And better yet, Francey cradles his down-to-earth stories in infectious melodies that make it impossible to resist singing along."

I am both pleased and honoured to be a part of the 26th Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival in St. John's, and consider myself lucky to be attending at all. This program, linking me with the Labrador singer-songwriter Harry Martin is a unique and interesting one that I looking forward to exploring. Though the themes we tend to write about are, in essence, universal, I am sure that our take on similar subjects will nonetheless vary in the meat of the matter. There will be commonalities in the themes the songs, since we all experience love and joy, loss and disappointment. That being said, we each react to the world as it is presented to us. I look forward to discovering how our different perspectives manifest themselves in our songs. I have never met or heard Harry, and am just now arranging to swap CDs, but I have had the great pleasure of hearing Jim Payne's songs, and I recognized myself in his lyrics. I expect that I will feel the same when I hear Harry's music. I recently returned from Iqaluit. Speaking through an interpreter at the shows there, I found that our foibles produce the same laughter and our tragedies the same thoughtfulness. There will be common ground and there will be differences, and both should prove interesting to hear. I'm sure we'll have a good time, and when all is said and done, that's what matters.

Ian Robb, Ann Downey, and Shelley Posen are Finest Kind, a remarkable folk trio from Ottawa. They paired with A Crowd of Bold Shareman through the Common Ground Program at this year's festival. Shelley, a professional folklorist from Toronto, lived in Newfoundland in the 1970's. He is a versatile singer and multi instrumentalist who has spent a lifetime researching, teaching, writing about, performing, and sometimes composing songs.


Shelley Posen's reflections on playing in Newfoundland:

While each of us in Finest Kind is delighted to be performing at this year's Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival, the invitation has particular and special meaning for me. Singing on a Newfoundland stage will be something of a homecoming. From 1970 to 1974, I was a graduate student in the MUN Folklore Department. In those years, as now, my life was more or less balanced between folklore scholarship and performing, and I sang fairly steadily in St. John's folk clubs, bars, and concert stages. The music I was playing at the end of my stay wasn't the same as I'd been playing when I arrived. Newfoundland had transformed both me and my music. I don't know whether, as the Neil Young song puts it, "all my changes were there," but most of the important ones were.

One of the most significant changes had to do with repertoire. I had arrived on the island a folkie infatuated with the modal melodies of British traditional folksong and the lush harmonies with which they were often sung. What I heard most when I arrived in Newfoundland was country music. Now, I was a city kid from Toronto, and had grown up, not only "not listening" to country music and bluegrass. I looked down on them. Such country songs as I had learned, like Jimmie Rodgers's Mother Queen of My Heart--well, if one can sing with a smirk on one's face, that was me.

All of that changed in Newfoundland. When I sang Mother Queen of My Heart, people were clearly touched by it. Country music, I discovered, was serious, meaningful stuff. It was also evident that, historically and stylistically, country was of a piece with the traditional music, especially the old ballads, I had come to revere. It wasn't such a long step from The Wreck of the 'Ellen Munn' to The Wreck of the Old 97. More important, I saw that country was a vital component of the music Newfoundlanders listened to and loved--along with Irish, rock and roll, old and new pop music, and of course, the island's homegrown songs. If I was going to learn about music in Newfoundland, something I'd come here to do, I realized I'd better give country music some respect.

Country music figured in my performing life as well. I arrived eager to sing with others. My professor, Neil Rosenberg, had a band consisting of himself, his wife Ann, and St. John's folksinger Mary McKim. They were looking for a singer and guitarist, and I fit the bill. Only problem was, they sang mostly country and bluegrass music--Neil being not only an eminent scholar in that field, but a leading banjo and mandolin player as well. In hopes that I would find some songs I might like, Neil loaned me country music records and made me tapes, and I commenced a-listenin'. It didn't take long before the music stopped sounding all the same. I wasn't much longer before I realized that (a) there was some terrific musicianship to aspire to; and (b) many of the songs were just plain wonderful. I became an avid fan of the likes of Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner, Hank Snow, and Wilf Carter. There was no dearth of material there for our little band, soon named Sneed Hern and the Smiling Liberators. Don't ask!

With that, my world began to fill with country and bluegrass music: the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band released their groundbreaking Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Bob Dylan's Self Portrait maintained the country sound he'd explored in Nashville Skyline, country legends Doc and Chickie Williams performed at the Strand Lounge, and longtime Newfoundland C&W singer Dick Nolan had a monster hit with Aunt Martha's Sheep. Mary McKim departed Sneed Hern and Ted Rowe came aboard. The local component of our repertoire expanded and we morphed into a Newfoundland-country-bluegrass band called Crooked Stovepipe, playing downtown clubs, university shows, kitchen times, and church fundraisers. One night during Christmas we drove out to Heart's Content, Ted's hometown, and tried our hands at mummering--or at least some serious house visiting. In every kitchen, we were plied with rum and Christmas cake, and in return played every kind of music we could think of. I was a long way from Toronto, not measured just in miles!

I left Newfoundland to continue studying in the U.S., and Crooked Stovepipe played on, its membership and repertoire changing over the years. My own repertoire too evolved. Now with Finest Kind, I sing a wide variety of English, American, and Canadian material, including some country and Newfoundland songs I first performed with Crooked Stovepipe. With both bands on the festival program, it might be fun to get them together and see what magic Newfoundland might work this time.