Blues Skies: Looking Back After 40 Years

Jeff Green | Aug 14, 2013

In the early 1970s, what we now call urban refugees were starting to land in Frontenac and Western Lanark County. They were young, they wore their hair long, and the local community probably didn’t know what exactly to make of them. But the newcomers proved more resilient than many thought they would be, and they were accepted, over time.

Sometime early in 1974, Oskar Graf, a luthier from Berlin, Germany by way of Toronto, who had built a home on the Clarendon Road after buying a piece of land a few year earlier, called a meeting to see if there was enough interest to organize a music festival on his property.

“We filled the house, which was a good sign,” he recalled when interviewed over the phone last week, just after the end of the 40th Blue Skies Festival. “Some of the usual suspects were there. I remember the Hales from Arden were, and the folks from Lothlorien near Ompah, and John Moffat from Brooke Valley and some others.”

A decision was made at the meeting to hold a festival on the August long weekend. “We thought it might be a one-off,” said Graf, “but it sort of took off. From those beginnings the festival was a group run event. It was never my thing; there were always a bunch of us working on it.””

Forty years later, on the Saturday night of this year’s festival, which annually draws somewhere over 2,500 people with no publicity budget whatsoever, some footage from that first festival was shown on a screen on the festival stage at dusk, as Oskar looked on from next to the stage.

One of the familiar elements to the footage was a square dance, called by Stan Dueck, who continued to call the square dance at the festival for at least another 30 years. The band was led by local fiddler Kenny Jackson of McDonalds Corners, and although there were only a few squares as compared to the dozens that danced this year on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, it looked much the same. The only discernable difference was that in the 1974 film the men were almost all shirtless, and were wearing jeans. There was not a pair of shorts in sight. The demographics of the festival were also different. Most of the people in the film were in their 20s and 30s, with young children in tow.

Nowadays Blue Skies is an all ages affair, with children a few weeks old being cared for by brothers and sisters, parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents on site.

“The other thing you might have noticed in the film was that at the top of the hill, watching the music, there were a number of local people who came out to see what was going on. That’s the same way it is now,” said Oskar Graf, “we’ve always had pretty good support from the local community, and the local council."

In the early years the festival was free and food was sold at “ridiculously low prices - you know - 15 cents for a cheese sandwich,” Oskar said, “and there was a 70s spirit to it; you know, we thought back then that we could change the world.”

Although Blue Skies and other events like it have not quite changed the world, the festival has made a real difference in the surrounding communities. The ripple effect of Blue Skies has affected communities as far-flung as Perth, Elphin/McDonalds Corners, Maberly and Verona, and down to Kingston as well. It is these connections that were influential in the founding of other festivals, groups and events as diverse as the Verona Festival and the Stewart Park Music Festival in Perth.

On an official level, Blue Skies in the Community has subsidised musical education in local schools for many years, and has been partly responsible for the renaissance of the local fiddling tradition. The Blue Skies Community Fiddle Orchestra, now 14 years old and larger than ever, has itself spun off at least two other fiddling groups.

Over the years the festival grew, and by the late 1980s a major concern that has pre-occupied organisers ever since had come to the fore: how to handle the fact that more people want to come, and camp out at Blue Skies than can be accommodated in a limited site that is accessed by1.5-lane gravel road.

Through it all the festival has maintained a few basic tenets. It is entirely volunteer run, and there are no commercial vendors at the festival, and no craft booths at all.

“When we first talked about the festival we kind of wanted the crafts-people, and I am one of them, to have a week off from selling,” Oskar Graf said, “and besides we didn’t see that a little festival like ours would be much of a market.”

This policy has been kept up, and there are still no commercial interests at play at Blue Skies. The amount and organization of volunteer labour is extensive. There are up to 40 areas that are separately organisd, from garbage/recycling to sanitation to food preparation, security, parking, first aid, holistic and music workshops and more.

The festival is organized by a very large group of people, and although there is a core group who live locally, there are now many people involved who come from outside the area.

Another aspect of Blue Skies that sets it apart from other music festivals is the egalitarian policy towards paying musicians, the only people who do make money from the festival. Instead of spending a large amount of the festival’s budget on one or two high profile acts, each musician, from headline to side players, are paid the same amount.

Because the festival is basically sold out in advance, the musical director has a fair bit of freedom when it comes to programming. This has enabled Blue Skies to bring in music from around the world in addition to the folk, blues/jazz and Quebecois music that the Blue Skies audience expects to see and hear each year.

Oskar Graf sold the festival site to the charitable corporation that officially runs the festival about a decade ago but he still participates in the many meetings that take place each year in advance of the festival (in Blue Skies tradition, all decisions are made by consensus) and still puts in time preparing the site.

“When I look at it after all this time, I can say that Blue Skies has made me a much richer man than I would have been otherwise. Without Blue Skies I might just be a crotchety old man living in the woods making guitars. I have gained a lot from all the people I have worked with on the festival, and from everything that the festival has brought about over the years,” he said.