Blues Skies Music recovers from COVID, celebrates 50 years

Jeff Green | Aug 09, 2023

The COVID pandemic may have been the biggest challenge that Blue Skies Music Festival has faced since it started as a community picnic back in 1974.

Oskar Graf hosted the festival on part of the property where he built a house and Luthier shop and began making guitars. The festival grew from there, and has been run by a consensus-based board for decades, establishing a registered, not-for-profit charitable organisation to run both the festival and Blue Skies in the Community, which sponsors arts programming in Frontenac and Lanark Counties.

Graf eventually sold the festival grounds to the festival, and has since moved to Westport, but still attends the annual August long weekend festival, and was part of the 50th anniversary party this year.

A virtual festival was organised in both 2020 and 2021 due to COVID, and a careful, smaller scale in person festival took place in 2022.

Over that three-year stretch, festival reserve funds were depleted, but with a return to the site capacity of about 2,500 people attending each of the two days, 60% of them staying on site all weekend, the 2023 was a real return to normal for Blue Skies.

And in addition to a varied program of performers brought in by Artistic Director Margaret Sullivan, some of the people who were involved in the festival in its early years graced the stage again. The first to do so was Greg Forbes. He lives and continues to play music on Wolfe Island, but back in 1974 he was living in a cabin on Oskar Graf's property.

“I think I was the first one who went up on stage,” he recalls, “not that it was much of a deal because nobody really wanted to perform.”

Later in the weekend, Dave Dawson, who lives down the road from the festival grounds, took the stage as well.

Dave, who is 91, moved to Clarendon in the mid 1970's, and worked for the North Frontenac Telephone Company for many years, in addition to publishing numerous books of poetry and stories, and dozens of albums.

Musically, he takes his inspiration from Jimmy Rogers, the “The Singing Brakeman” credited as one of the founders of country music along with Maybelle, Sarah and AP Carter,

Dave performed one of his own songs, and two Jimmy Rogers tunes, yodelling as he did, for a rapt audience early in the Sunday evening show.

Afterwards, when asked what it was like to be a “rock star” after all these years, he said “I'll get over it, probably by the time I get home.”

Dave Dawson has a new book coming out in the fall.

Aside from the nods to the past, Margaret Sullivan’s focussed on diversity and youth this year, with some political edge thrown into the mix.

The finale bands for all three nights of the festival, Angelique Francis on Friday Night, Abondance on Saturday Night, and Ketsmy on the final night of the festival, were fronted by young, black performers.

Angelique Francis, who performs with members of her family, is a 24 year old blues singer and bassist, who got the audience off their chairs for her whole set.

Abondance, who performed the Finale on Saturday Night, is a Montreal based collective with roots in both Martinique and Guadeloup, bringing both the joy and spirituality of Carnivale to their infectious sound. Ketsmy, who ended the festival on Sunday, is another Montrealer, of Haitian descent. His music is a mix of styles, R&B based but infused with Haitian rhythms.

Other highlights of the festival were the performances on Saturday Night by Medusa and Polky.

Medusa is a band of four women who are devoted to telling stories from a women's point of view and exploring the sounds of forgotten or obscure traditional european stringed instruments, including not only the Swedish Nickleharpa but also a couple of Polish stringed instruments that have almost been lost to history.

The music of Medusa features intricate rhythms, and has a meditative quality as well. By contrast, Polky (Ewelina Ferenc, Ala Stasuik, and Marta Solek) are very much about Polish rhythms, but their set was a full on dance party. Their backing band, Peter Kalssen (bass) Sam Clark (fiddle and guitar) and Oisin Hannigan, have had learned polish rhythms from the band leaders, but have taken to them well.

One other highlight of the festival was Maria Dunn, from Edmonton. Accompanied by herself on guitar, she easily commanded the audience for an hour long set of songs about social justice struggles waged by individuals in work and community settings. Her songs are powerful, unsentimental and clear, propelled by her assured guitar work.

Finally, Janice Jo Lee and the QT's brought a whole new energy and poetic vision to the Clarendon stage.

This was the final year as Artistic Director of the festival for Margaret Sullivan. She took on the role as the pandemic started, and after programming a virtual festival for two years, and a recovery festival in 2022. This one was a chance for her to bring a wide range of newer musicians to the backwoods of Frontenac County.

The festival now heads into its second 50 years with it sights fixed on diverse and unexpected music for an audience that this year spanned the generations, with a 4 week old baby in attendance as well as many in their 80's and 90's.