First Annual Ferndale Front Porch Folk Festival - 2024 07 14

For our annual block party this year we tried something new. We hosted a folk festival on our front porch. Our concept was simple, we wanted to invite our family, friends, and neighbours to share a song or a story from our makeshift stage on the front porch. Any one musician could share up to three songs, and they could ask anyone they wanted to come and join them on the instrument of their choosing. There was no requirement for professional polish to the song sharing. It was more important to try something that took courage and passion, than it was to do something that had been polished to perfection.

The stage was open from 2 pm to 6 pm. It was full of music the entire time. We had a tap-dancing ukulele player, performing for the first time. We had a well-known art furniture maker singing with a microphone for the first time. We had an accomplished general contractor singing in public for the first time. We had musicians who have performed for decades sharing their songs with a rag tag back up band.

Our ninety-three year old Mom was sitting front and centre facing the stage in her wheelchair, enthralled with the program. She sang harmonies and beat out her own special rhythms on with a soft mallet on her her hand drum.

As neighbours collected around the porch, we had a chance to meet each other and say hello, to learn each other's names, and find out more about our neighbourhood. We made new friends, and made new connections amongst our households, strengthening the bonds of community up and down the street.

Perhaps, more than ever before, we need to spend time with each other, enjoying the adventure of creative, artistic and musical expression. It is what we do, as humans, to learn to coordinate, to work together, to cooperate, to get on the same page, to work together toward a shared purpose. We need to feel that we are not alone, even as we spend inordinate amounts of time working in solitude or in isolation from each other and from human companionship.

Folk music is accessible, it is designed for quick learning, open harmonies, and diverse voices and instrumentation. It is made for us folk.

Folk songs give us an outlet to express our feelings, they make it possible for us to energize our efforts to accomplish difficult tasks, they tell stories that put our experiences into words and help us to make sense of them.

We all live in neighbourhoods. We are all folk. We all need to be part of Neighbourhood Folk.