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Folk to the future
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Folk musician and Whitehorse, Yukon resident Kim Barlow will be making the lengthy trek to Montreal as part of the travelling Pan-Canadian New Folk Ensemble tour, and her warm voice couldn’t come at a better time. Her new album, Champ, is rife with cool harmonies grounded by rough and raw clawhammer banjo, and delivered with an innovative technique that has earned her comparisons with fellow Canuck and progressive folkie Joni Mitchell. Much like Mitchell, or even Papa Zimmerman when he had the gall to show up at the 1965 Newport folk festival with (gulp) electric guitars, Barlow has also found herself taking up the sword against the enemies from within—the folk Nazis. “There really are different factions within the Canadian folk scene,” says Barlow, “but there are still these people that are just into traditional folk and won’t support anything that doesn’t stick to that. Thankfully, there is a whole new generation of young people that are really doing new and different things in folk now. I just played the Sappy Festival in Sackville, New Brunswick, and all of these indie kids were doing some really interesting things with folk. I thought that was great.” The Pan-Canadian New Folk Ensemble has Barlow travelling with two likewise innovative folk performers, Manitoba’s Christine Fellows and Nova Scotia’s Old Man Luedecke, in a round-robin atmosphere, exchanging songs with each other while a string duo and percussionist backs them up. Sadly, the folk Nazis seem to be the least of these progressive folk artists’ problems. With Stephen Harper’s recent plan to make federal cuts to the whopping tune of 45 million clams, and publicly calling Canadian artists “subsidized whiners,” it could become harder for this grassroots genre to survive. “It’s not like musicians are greedy people,” says Barlow. “It’s a little frightening as I will definitely be affected, because artists like myself, from Whitehorse, really depend on funding just to be able to get out of the Yukon and play on a level playing field in the rest of the country. We’ll always keep playing, but it’s going to get a lot harder for us to get to an audience.” AT CASA DEL POPOLO ON |
