Blue Skies Music Festival – smaller, but mighty return

Jeff Green | Aug 03, 2022

The Blue Skies Music Festival brings over 2,000 people to Frontenac County each year for three days, making it one of, if not the, largest annual gathering in the Frontenac region.

Yet, it has a deliberately low public profile.

It has always been promoted strictly through word of mouth, and pulls its audience from across the province, with as many people coming from Montreal and Toronto as from Kingston, Ottawa and Perth.

One of the features of the annual gathering, which has been taking place in Clarendon since the summer of 1973, is its no vendor policy. The festival sells hats, t-shirts and food to festival goers, and performers sell merchandise as a way of supplementing their revenue, but there are no outside sponsors or other sales booths of any kind. All the money that comes in from ticket sales goes to the musicians and to the festival's community outreach arm, Blue Skies in the Community, which sponsors arts programming in the festival catchment area, which stretches to east-west to Perth and Tweed and south to Wolfe Island.

Camping passes to the festival, which are sold through a draw system, as well as day passes for Saturday and Sunday programming, have provided steady funding to keep the volunteer run event thriving for decades, but COVID proved to be a significant challenge, as it did to many arts organisations.

The physical festival was cancelled in 2020 and 2021, with a virtual version running instead, which cut into festival reserve funds that had been created over years, and curtailed, but did not stop, the activities of Blue Skies in the Community in local communities.

Then came 2022.

Planning for the festival takes at least 9 months, and the cut off date to decide whether to tentatively hold an in-person festival took place at the end of last year, just as the Omicron shut down was taking place, but a decision was taken to go ahead and plan for the outdoor gathering, on the August long weekend, nonetheless.

Dale Driver has the role of General Coordinator, a job that is complicated by the fact that Blue Skies is managed by 100 or so volunteers who make decisions on consensus basis. His job took on a whole new meaning  on March 15, 2020, when the pandemic was declared. He had to keep a diverse group of people working together through two fallow years and a minefield of a third year, and deserves tremendous credit for keeping everything afloat.

While the festival's artistic director Margaret Sullivan was given the go-ahead to book the performers for evening concerts on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of the long weekend, much of the rest of the festival, which is as important or more important to festival goers as the concerts, remained in flux.

In December, it was hard to envision how the afternoon square dances, with a 25 piece band crammed onto a small stage and hundreds of people weaving around each other, would be possible. And the choir that meets at the beginning of the festival, and rehearses for three days before performing, seemed impossible as well. Intimate workshops on musical and holistic topics, and kids programming, were also in doubt.

As things opened up in the spring, and all COVID restrictions were lifted, the festival organisers decided to go ahead with all of the normal festival events, including the Sunday morning parade.

While weekend passes all but sold out, the 7th COVID wave resulted in attendance being down at Blue Skies for the first time in at least 20 years, and some key organisers could not attend because of their own COVID sensitivities, or last-minute exposure to the virus. In spite of all, the 49 year old institution managed to pull off its 47th on the ground festival.

Luckily, the weather co-operated. It was sunny and warm all weekend, which is always a bonus in a three-day outdoor festival, where the only buildings on site are out-houses and a small kitchen.

But there were some glitches. The Sunday night finale band of the festival was the Swedish group Frander, who performed as part of the virtual festival last year. Frander were set to make their Blue Skies debut as part of a North American tour. Ten-days before the festival, as the programs were being printed, Frander  cancelled their tour, dur to COVID. A quick reshuffle filled out the schedule, but the balance of intimate acts in the early and mid-evening, followed by dance rhythms deeper into the night, was thrown off a bit on Sunday night. And with a smaller stage crew than normal, there were longer delays between sets throughout the festival and even a ‘curtain malfunction’. Again, a long-time festival stalwart came through to keep everything together. The festival’s MC, Magoo, intervened whenever necessary, keeping the audience entertained throughout, even drumming up a funny story about his experiences on an ocean-going tugboat at one point, in order to pass the time when technical glitches made the break between performances longer than planned.

The music was at a very high level throughout the weekend, and the mix of styles that have been a feature of the festival easily made up for the loss of one act.

Margaret Sullivan was able to pull together a program that had something for everyone, with impeccable musicianship throughout.

Here are a few of the many highlights

The most striking element to Dawn and Shawna Redskye's powerful performance were the harmonies created by the sisters, who shifted from folk based vocalisations to more throaty Indigenous sounds seamlessly.

Other highlights on Friday night included the performance of Moskkito Bar. A Toronto based band founded by Tangi Ropars, who is from Brittany and Ahmed Moneka from Baghdad, are the ultimate Toronto band. The players come from all over Europe and the Middle East. They met at a gathering in rural Ontario, and got their name when playing outdoors at dusk, when one of them said, “we are like a Mosquito Bar”. Their music is full of diverse rhythms, pulled together by collective musicality and drive.

One of the Saturday night bands, The Fretless, is a string quartet (two violins, viola and cello) but instead of playing the classical repertoire, they lean towards Appalachian and Bluegrass and other traditions, often taking a simple theme from a traditional tune as a starting point to create their own, mesmerizing sound.

Much later in the evening, the Peptides took the stage. Looking like a cross between the B52's and an episode of Glee, they made it seem like Blue Skies – the Musical, was being brought to life. “We're so kitschy, I love it” one of them said at the end of one of their numbers. The crowd loved it as well.

On Sunday night, Lynne Hansen brought some Americana grit to her performance, carrying herself more like a hard luck Frontenac County Farmer than an Ottawa based singer-songwriter. She arrived at the festival alone, on Saturday afternoon, with her guitarist back in Ottawa with COVID, hired Elphin based guitarist/mandolinist Joey Wright on the spot, and was ready to go when the curtain broke as she was being introduced. It was a perfect setup for a set of songs that were as defiant and joyful as they were world weary.

Rae Kennedy brought the audience a spoken word performance. Her powerful poem that played with the images of a river and a human spine to encapsulate the fragile world we all find ourselves living in, both in her birth country of Canada and her adopted home, far away in Southwest Australia. She was followed on stage by Aussie David Ross Macdonald for a set of songs heavily influenced by his own poetic vision.

It was a fitting way to sum up all of the stresses that went into putting on such a large event as the Blue Skies Festival in the midst of a pandemic that continues to bring its own twists and turns.

(Editors note – this is an expanded version of the article that appeared in the print version of the Frontenac News on August 4.)