#mariposa folk festival

[cactustreesmotel]

cover and album promotion from the 1969 mariposa folk festival programme

[bobdylan-n-jonimitchell]

Joni Mitchell, Mariposa Folk Festival—Centre Island, Toronto, ON, July 28, 1970 © Joan Latchford.

[sonicmoremusic]

The 2023 Mariposa Folk Festival has Announced its Lineup

Tegan and Sara, Feist, Rufus Wainwright, The Wood Brothers, Rural Alberta Advantage, KT Tunstall, Wild Rivers, Judy Collins, Matt Andersen & the Big Bottle of Joy, Jeremy Dutcher, plus 39 more!  The Mariposa Folk Festival returns July 7 to 9 to Tudhope Park in Orillia with an amazing lineup.Nearly 50 acts were revealed today for the 2023 edition of the iconic music festival.Discover Your New…

[murderballadeer]

so the reason we're going to france is bc my dad booked some gigs at festivals there and it's gonna be interesting bc i haven't been in that position (experiencing music festivals as a family member of a performer) since probably like 2018 so this will be my first time as an adult. and also i genuinely have no idea how folk festivals in france might compare to folk festivals in canada in terms of organization and general culture & vibe. so i'm trying not to construct an image in my mind of like. the 2016 edmonton folk festival bc a) we will not be in edmonton and b) i am not 13 anymore. i'm curious as to how it's actually gonna play out tho much to think about

[fisarmonical]

Image of man sitting amongst trees, smoking a pipe and playing guitar; Mariposa Folk Festival: Innis Lake taken in 1966. Source:  Photographer: Popovich; Published in Toronto Telegram.

[desertangels70s]

Joni Mitchell at the Mariposa Folk Festival, 1966.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Joni Mitchell: “When I was 19 I went to art school. I had six months of teaching myself to play baritone ukulele under my belt, so was sort of a novice folkie. … I was singing folk songs at that time. At that time I was a folk singer. … Then I went to Toronto to see the Mariposa Folk Festival, actually to see Buffy Sainte-Marie. I still didn’t have an image of myself as a musician. I found I couldn’t work and I didn’t have enough money to get in the union, $160, I didn’t have it. I worked in women’s wear. I worked in a department store and I could barely make ends meet. I finally found a scab club in Toronto that allowed me to play. I played there for a couple of months. Then I married Chuck Mitchell and I moved across the border. We still were scrambling to work. As a couple, we were making $15 a night. There were clubs that were very cliquish that we couldn’t get into. In Detroit, we had a fifth floor walkup apartment and it had some extra rooms. When Eric Anderson and David Blue and Tom Rush, and people passed through Detroit, we billeted them there. Bruce Langhorne, they used to stay with us. Eric taught me a couple of open tunings. He taught me Open G and Drop D Modal tuning. Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.”

Interview by Joe Smith Photo by Jim

[rustvisioneil]

Neil Young Mariposa Folk Festival 1972 📸 Edwin Gailits

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Joni Mitchell: “When I was 19 I went to art school. I had six months of teaching myself to play baritone ukulele under my belt, so was sort of a novice folkie. … I was singing folk songs at that time. At that time I was a folk singer. … Then I went to Toronto to see the Mariposa Folk Festival, actually to see Buffy Sainte-Marie. I still didn’t have an image of myself as a musician. I found I couldn’t work and I didn’t have enough money to get in the union, $160, I didn’t have it. I worked in women’s wear. I worked in a department store and I could barely make ends meet. I finally found a scab club in Toronto that allowed me to play. I played there for a couple of months. Then I married Chuck Mitchell and I moved across the border. We still were scrambling to work. As a couple, we were making $15 a night. There were clubs that were very cliquish that we couldn’t get into. In Detroit, we had a fifth floor walkup apartment and it had some extra rooms. When Eric Anderson and David Blue and Tom Rush, and people passed through Detroit, we billeted them there. Bruce Langhorne, they used to stay with us. Eric taught me a couple of open tunings. He taught me Open G and Drop D Modal tuning. Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.”

Interview by Joe Smith

Photo by Jim Marshall

[prominentmen]

July 16, 1972, Bob Dylan at Mariposa Folk Festival on Olympic Island. Dylan was vacationing in the area and dropped in.

© Keith Beaty/Toronto Star/Getty images

[1264doghouse]

Joni Mitchell, Mariposa Folk Festival—Centre Island, Toronto, ON, July 28, 1970.

[fortheturnstiles]

you must be bob dylan at the 1972 mariposa folk festival if you think we’re fucking

[chaoticdesertdweller]

Joni by Henry Diltz, Mariposa Folk Festival, July 1970.

[sonicmoremusic]

Mariposa in Concert presents: Union Duke at the St. Paul's Centre in Orillia on March 25th, 2023

A Mariposa audience favourite, Union Duke, brings its explosive live show to St. Paul’s Centre in downtown Orillia on March 25. The Mariposa In Concert (MIC) show also features James Gray and Josh Kvasnak.Tickets are $35 (all fees and taxes included) and are available online or at the Mariposa Foundation office, 10 Peter Street South, Orillia. The show is on Saturday, March 25 at St. Paul’s…

[murderballadeer]

every time someone on here posts pictures of like 60s folksingers at mariposa folk festival i remember i was at that festival as a child and basically all i remember is 1. being bored in the musicians' tent while my dad was in soundcheck (but that happened at every festival) 2. my mom driving everyone into orillia to go to a health food store and 3. some local reptile rescue thing was there for unclear reasons and they were having a contest to pick a name for their new corn snake and i submitted the name corny (clearly i was a very creative child)

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Update to the list of musician deaths that have hit me really hard: Raylene Rankin (2012), Ron Hynes (2015), Leonard Cohen (2016), John Prine (2020), Ian Tyson (2022), Gordon Lightfoot (2023).

That’s not hugely different from my list of all celebrity deaths that have hit that hard; music, particularly Canadian folk music, is the big thing that’s been important to me for my entire life, so that's the main thing that’s made me care enough about people I don’t know to be upset when they die. The only two non-musical deaths I can think of that hit me particularly hard are Stuart McLean and Sean Lock. Stuart McLean was a Canadian radio broadcaster, a mainstay of CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – think the same concept as the BBC, but strip it to an infinitesimal fraction of the budget and prestige) whose stories and reports from various bits of Canada were a mainstay of my childhood and adolescence.

Sean Lock is the only one who affected me that much despite coming in late. Raylene Rankin, Leonard Cohen, Ron Hynes, John Prine, Ian Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot, and Stuart McLean are all people I first came to love when I was a child, and that only grew as I got older. I didn’t know Sean Lock’s name before 2020. But if you watch every single episode of 8 Out of 10 Cats and 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown between May and July 2020, just after the world has ended, you are going to end up feeling like you know the guy. You will feel like you know him well enough to be truly devastated when he dies.

People use the word “God” to colloquially describe human beings, but it applies to Gordon Lightfoot just because he actually was the god of Canadian folk music, in the sense that he created it. People have credited his song Early Morning Rain with being the beginning of contemporary folk music. Not even contemporary Canadian folk music, but contemporary folk music.

I’ve attended at least one folk festival for every year of my life (minus pandemic years), and three or more in most years. Want to see the lineup of the best festival I’ve ever attended? Because I can show you, it’s on the t-shirt I’ve had ever since I bought it there nearly 13 years ago:

It was the Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario. My dad and I had to drive quite a few hours to get there, stayed in a fairly shitty motel, but it was entirely worth the journey. Gordon Lightfoot headlined the whole thing. Ian Tyson, who died in late December 2022, played right before him. I will never forget sitting in that lawn chair next to my dad, knowing the people who shaped the entire genre were in that cold, mosquito-ridden field with me.

My dad, who introduced me to Canadian folk music before I was old enough to speak and has shared it with me ever since, has always said��“Gordon Lightfoot” as his answer to the question “Who’s your favourite singer?” Which was a big deal, because music was huge for him, he loves so much of it so deeply, and choosing a single favourite is an important decision. But he never wavered. Okay, he wavered a bit, there was a little while in 2003 when he loved Emmylou Harris’ new album so much that it combined with his love for all her previous albums to make him say she might have overtaken Gordon as his favourite singer. But after the initial shine wore off, he was back to saying she’s wonderful, many other musicians are wonderful, but no one is the equal of Gordon Lightfoot.

I messaged him in at 2 AM last night, when I first saw the news. My dad, who barely admitted to experiencing one or two emotions when his own mother died, replied today to say he’s been playing Gordon’s songs all day and feeling sad.