The 32nd installment of the Goderich Celtic Roots Festival was one to remember
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
The Goderich Celtic Roots Festival (GCRF) has come and gone for another year, and all the musicians and visitors who gathered in Lions Harbour Park have returned to their far-flung corners of the world infused with a profusion of new memories.
The 32nd edition of the event was a roaring success, featuring artists that came from as nearby as Goderich and as far away as Australia to make music and be merry together. In addition to all the wonderful tunes, this year’s GCRF featured a weekend full of dance classes for people of all skill levels, a sprawling artisan market, an international food court, a pastoral pop-up pub and some fabulous arts and crafts workshops for children and adults. Rather than attempt the Herculean task of relating all that went on, here are just a few highlights from a most musical weekend in Canada’s prettiest town.
The Greeting Stage is close enough to the Park House restaurant that diners seated on the patio tended to clap at the end of a really great set. And that stage saw more than a few great sets last weekend. The idea behind each of the workshop stages is to showcase a different facet of the talents possessed by all of the artists at the festival, whether it be through unusual pairings, common groupings, or just a stripped-down showcase of what a band does best.
The combination of Torontonian shanty boys Pressgang Mutiny with pitch-perfect polyphonic preceptors Windborne led to an all-out acapella alliance. Those who can never get enough fiddling finally found what they’ve been looking for during “Fiddle Frenzy,” which featured the northern hemisphere’s Shane Cook, Jane Cory, Erynn Marshall, Laura Risk, and the southern hemisphere’s Luisa Hickey. Those arriving early on Sunday were treated to a little bit of rain and some heavenly harp playing from married singer-songwriting duo Martha and Dennis Gallagher. The “Songs From Abroad” set was a crowd favourite that featured artists from Scotland, Ireland, Mexico and the U.S. performing their favourite songs during one of the sunniest parts of the afternoon.
The Greeting Stage was also the space where this year’s winner of the Young Tradition Bearers Award, Abigail Pryde, performed with bandmate Ben Muir and Scottish musical legend Archie Fisher, who wrote many of the songs that Pryde grew up learning and loving. Fisher has been writing and recording folk songs since the early 1960s, and recorded his first album in 1968, and he has since written some of the best-loved tunes in the folk world. Pryde and Muir are members of Heron Valley, a Scottish band that brings together a vast variety of eclectic influences into electric live performances that feel both innovative and ancient. The cyclical nature of life is a thread that runs through a great deal of Celtic music and culture, and this was truly a full-circle moment in the history of Scottish music.
The other workshop stage is tucked away in the most distant region of the tiny park - the shadowy western corner. Fittingly, it is known as “The West Stage”, and its remote location overlooking Lake Huron makes it the perfect space for both big jams like “Irish Kitchen Party” and intimate moments, like Rory Makem’s rendition of the songs of Sarah Makem, his grandmother. While each and every workshop set on this stage is worth mentioning, it’s hard to not single out O’Jizo - the Japanese three-piece that won the Robinson Emerging Artist Showcase in 2021 and returned this year to win the hearts of pretty much every single person they encountered.
O’Jizo is made up of three very charming young gentlemen - guitarist Koji Nagao, flautist Kozo Toyota and accordion player Hirofumi Nakamura. Their take on Irish Celtic music is an absolute joy to watch - they make music that is lively and timeless, and their enthusiasm for their craft is infectious. Their afternoon set on the West Stage didn’t just entrance the audience - it seemed that the circumjacent trees and plants also fell under O’Jizo’s spell. Grape vines waved along with the rhythm of the music, and all the leaves on the trees ruffled together to show their appreciation at the end of each tune.
GCRF Artistic Director Cheryl Prashker recalls what it was like to encounter these rising stars for the first time. “They came out of nowhere. And they are phenomenal.” she said. “When they came over, they were a little bit tentative about playing - that was two years ago. I was at a conference in Ireland in January and I saw them again, and they blew everybody away. They, beyond a doubt, were the best band of the entire weekend. They are on fire.”
Nagao was in high school the first time he ever heard the bagpipes - in the film Braveheart. Toyota was going to school for Ethnomusicology when he first saw Back To The Future, Part 3. Nagao and Toyota’s twin cinematic inspirations brought them together to form Jizo - a combination of their first names. When Nakamura joined them, they became O’Jizo. They started out teaching themselves Celtic tunes through YouTube, and later participating in workshops offered by Celtic musicians passing through Japan, which led to a real Irish education. Now, just a few years later, the members of O’Jizo have become teachers at Goderich’s Celtic College. The various members of the band could also be found in other workshops throughout the weekend, all of which were a lot of fun.
The band members’ English has really been coming along - this week, they became known not only as one of the most uniquely talented groups at the festival, but also one of the funniest - any O’Jizo set is almost guaranteed to be punctuated by at least a few jokes. In humour, as in music, there are no real language barriers.
During the afternoon, all the GCRF featured performances happened under the big tent of the Kevin and Regina Dailey Stage, which served the dual purpose of keeping everybody safe from the heat of the sun and creating a sort of enclosed, dark, nightclub vibe in the middle of the day. Each artist or band typically does one Main Stage set and one Dailey Stage set over the course of the weekend, which is a great way for festival-goers to experience their favourite musicians in both the big, breezy vibe of an outdoor summertime festival, and in the intimate closeness created in a dark, little indoor venue. The stage is named after the Dailey family - longtime volunteers and supporters of the GCRF.
It is fascinating how the different settings can bring out such different feelings from the same artist on the same weekend. When they’re way up on the Main Stage, Archie Fisher and Garnet Rogers carry with them the proper air of two absolute legends doing their thing, while the low wooden riser of the Dailey Stage transforms them into a couple of older gentlemen, having a go at a tune in their local pub. Karan Casey on the Main Stage rightfully commands the crowd with her world-class Celtic songs, but Karan Casey under the little tent is just a bit jazzier - a tip jar on top of her piano wouldn’t feel out of place. The shanty-singing Pressgang Mutiny seems most at home on the Dailey Stage, likely because the canvas tent with wooden supports reminds them of a sailing ship, and, even though Heron Valley impresses wherever they play, there’s something extremely powerful about hearing bagpipes in an enclosed space. And, of course, the band RUNA generates a sound far too large to be even somewhat contained by either stage.
But perhaps the best things to happen on the Dailey Stage each year are the Student Showcases, where all those who went to the annual Celtic College and the Kids Camp are invited to come on the Friday of the festival to show off what they’ve learned. This year, there were advanced fiddle students, beginner mandolin players, shanty singers, ensemble performers, and many more groups of talented students who came out to Lions Harbour Park to entertain the crowd and inspire those who have always wanted to pick up a musical instrument, but have been afraid to try. Many of the students are just there to learn from world-class teachers and have fun, but it’s also possible that the future of Huron County’s Celtic music scene is also in the mix there somewhere. The Celtic College is one of the keys to the longevity and vitality of the GCRF, and watching the students show off their skills is always a real treat.
It would be erroneous to claim that the Main Stage is where the magic happens, because there’s magic happening absolutely everywhere during the GCRF. But it’s perfectly reasonable to claim that there are a lot of really cool things that go on there every year, and this year was no different.
Ontario’s own Allison Lupton and her band put on a stellar set on Friday night, which was followed immediately by a deeply haunting set by Windborne, whose members sang a selection of working man anthems that spanned the globe and traveled across the centuries. The Friday night portion of the festival came to a crashing conclusion with an incredible performance from house band RUNA, which would have blown the roof off the place if there had been one in the first place.
On Saturday, this year’s Robinson Emerging Artist Showcase winners Apolline proved to the whole audience that it was worth the trip all the way from Australia - they gained a ton of new fans before they even finished their first song. Previous winners O’Jizo also came a long way to be there, and did a lot with the time they were given on the big stage. Karan Casey, as the evening’s headliner, turned in an utterly stunning performance, with assistance from Niall Vallely and Niamh Dunne. Her set was followed by a one-stop Scottish showcase from Heron Valley’s latest line-up, after which all reasonable people went home for some rest and all the performers went off to the Park House to carry on.
A marvelous Main Stage moment came during the opening ceremonies of the festival, when Artistic Director Cheryl Prashker surprised festival founders Warren and Eleanor Robinson when she announced that they were being inducted into the Canadian Order of Folk. The Robinsons must have been quite surprised indeed, considering that the Order of Folk has only recently come into existence - they are among the very first recipients!
When the Robinsons began mulling around concepts for the GCRF, they thought back on all the festivals they’ve ever been to, and decided to do all the things that they like about music festivals and none of the things that they don’t. They wanted their festival to be inclusive, well-organized, child-friendly, and focused on not just the roots of Celtic music and culture, but also its future. Now, 32 years later, it’s obvious that they came up with a winning combination.
The weeklong celebration of all things Celtic culminated in a wild, warm rainstorm that was potentially brought on by Nicolle Fig’s powerful bodhrán playing during the hotly-anticipated performance of her band, Fiárock. The crowd took shelter, but did not disperse entirely, and everybody who braved the rain was treated to a spectacular rainbow and an incredible closing performance by Bourque-Gloutnez and 30 of their closest friends.