The theme of the 2024 Mariposa Folk Festival was “playing in harmony,” but it could have easily been “what took so long?”
For starters, Bruce Cockburn was inducted into the Mariposa Hall of Fame during a ceremony Sunday that featured an all-star backing band, including Colin Linden, Tom Wilson and many others who performed at the festival throughout the weekend.
Since 2005, the folk festival has been honouring those who have made lasting contributions to Mariposa through the hall of fame, with the likes of Ian and Sylvia, Murray McLaughlin and Gordon Lightfoot entering the hall over the past 20 years.
Cockburn was lauded as arguably the most deserving inductee by Mariposa Folk Foundation president Pam Carter, having first played the festival in 1968 and eight other times since. He was thrust into the spotlight that first year, filling in for Neil Young on the main stage, and hasn’t looked back since.
Carter was the first to suggest Cockburn should have been inducted years earlier.
In the 56 years since his Mariposa debut, Cockburn has become a pillar of social justice and conscientious songwriting.
Wondering Where the Lions Are, one of his signature songs, can seem cheery enough to evoke a mass singalong on a sweltering afternoon, but its lyrics are fraught with the potential for nuclear war. If A Tree Falls, which also received a rousing reception Sunday, remains a damning critique of how humans continue to beat our planet into submission.
Perhaps more than any working musician alive — Canadian or otherwise — Cockburn carries the values of the protest singers who came before him, many of whom took the Mariposa Folk Festival stage in their early days.
Tom Power, host of CBC Radio’s Q and the main stage emcee for Sunday, summed it up succinctly in suggesting Cockburn belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Canadian songwriters.
But even if he never sang a note, Cockburn would hold vaulted status for his guitar playing. The early afternoon main stage sets on both Saturday and Sunday featured masterclasses in the guitar, with Cockburn’s majestic six-string strumming on the final day of the festival and Jesse Cook’s flamenco playing on Saturday.
The Pub Tent was also the location for some of the most unforgettable moments of the weekend, with one of the more eclectic lineups of performers in recent memory.
The pub was kicked into high gear mid-afternoon Saturday with the I Love This Town workshop, hosted by Guelph’s Royal Canoe. A strong college rock band, they wore their influences on their sleeves and had the crowd singing along to a cover of Weezer’s The Sweater Song.
But they were second fiddle to Shad, the second Q host to join the proceedings at Mariposa this year, who stunned the room into silence as he rapped a capella, and BA Johnston, who lived up to every expectation ever given to a performer.
Johnston writes clever songs that straddle the line between punk and rap, explaining how frozen lasagna is still lasagna, the perils of buying cannabis from the government and how Jesus has settled down in Hamilton, which is exactly where Jesus would live if he were around today, considering he’d be about the age where most tradespeople realize they can’t afford to live in Toronto anymore.
Johnston is like Buck 65 had been a burnout in high school instead of an all-star baseball player and never took a job at the CBC. He made the pub tent feel like a front porch show and his closing solo set Saturday night was rivalled only by Sunday’s penultimate pub performer, Maestro Fresh Wes.
Perhaps more than any other year, Mariposa leaned into hip hop, and showed there is an overlap between the bars and the sonnets, itself long overdue. Maestro is one of the OGs of Canadian hip hop, and while there were more than enough pre-teens at the front of the stage Sunday night, his set was for their parents — or even grandparents — who still know every word to Let Your Backbone Slide.
It is an absolute shame that those who were at the entirety of Maestro’s set missed arguably the best headlining performance in recent Mariposa memory.
If it is possible for a top-billed act to steal a show, Old Crow Medicine Show did it. From the moment they entered the stage to the final bars of their cover of The Weight — featuring guest spots from Power and Dwayne Gretzky’s Carliegh Akins, Lydia Persaud and Jill Harris — the festival was theirs for the taking.
Band co-founder Ketch Secor was drenched in sweat before they finished set opener Tell It To Me. Instruments and cowboy hats were swapped with regularity. The reaction from the crowd got louder and louder with each song. It reached a fever pitch as the band showed its appreciation for Canadian folk music traditions.
If you’ve watched the Ken Burns Country Music documentary, it is no surprise that Secor is as much a historian of bluegrass and folk music as he is a performer. It allowed his band to display how close the lineage is of the folk music celebrated at Mariposa to the traditional music throughout Appalachia and the southern United States. It was first expressed by a shocking cover of Stan Rogers’ legendary Barrett’s Privateers that sent goosebumps down my arms.
It would have been the crowd’s favourite, if not for Wagon Wheel.
If Spirit of the West’s Home for a Rest is the de facto national anthem for Gen X and millennial Canadian college students, its American counterpart is Wagon Wheel, from Old Crow Medicine Show’s 2004 album OCMS, and later covered and taken Top 40 by Darius Rucker.
It is tragic that Spirit of the West never got the Mariposa moment they deserved. Sure, they played the festival earlier in their career. Having seen them in a Toronto bar shortly after I turned 19, I’m sure they tore the roof, metaphorically or otherwise, off whatever incarnation of Mariposa they were featured.
But they never got to experience a capacity crowd at Tudhope Park singing along to Home for a Rest, prior to John Mann’s tragic death from early onset Alzheimer’s.
Old Crow Medicine Show had that moment with Wagon Wheel. Even the bugs that notoriously terrorize the main stage performers — Saturday headliners Noah Cyrus and Band of Horses were no different — seemed to step aside and watch the magical scene play out.
The set was probably the best I have seen in my 10 years of coming to the Mariposa Folk Festival and it was the first time Old Crow Medicine Show had the good fortune to play it.
What took so long?
