Squish, squish.
Whatever else you heard at the eight stages of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, that was the one inescapable sound. Actually, it was several sounds, including the splat, splat of people walking barefoot through a slurry of mud; the definitive pock of a heel pulling out of a stickier patch; and the cry of dismay when the deepest muck had wrenched off a sandal.
The sun blazed continually Friday and Saturday, broiling the 15,000 people who came out each day but somehow failing to dry the grounds at Birds Hill Park. A deluge during Thursday's opening night show merely swelled the effects of the rainiest prelude to the festival in recent memory.
"[Festival founder]Mitch Podolak used to say that man makes plans, and God laughs," one festival volunteer told me. After a couple of days of good music at this resilient annual event, it seemed fair to assume that God was tapping his foot as well.
By all accounts, the festival's 31st edition was the most diverse ever. Music programmer Chris Frayer, who migrated last year from the Winnipeg Jazz Festival, made a point of featuring world-beat ensembles, R&B groups and rock bands, as festivals in Edmonton and Calgary have been doing for years.
"I want to see drum-kits on the main stage," Frayer said, after a propulsive Saturday set by The Campbell Brothers, a sacred-steel group from New York. "I want to see bands with energy engaging the audience in an active way."
There were still plenty of lone singer-songwriters on the scene, and the variety of offerings at the daytime stages meant that you could get as much or as little of them as you liked. There was even an option during the evening main-stage action, as a tented kids' venue morphed into the Firefly Palace, an audio-visual club without walls.
Friday's show on the big stage opened with a strong blues set by Sue Foley, whose cover of the Stones' Stupid Girl may have caused a few eyes to roam the motley crowd for the girl in question. Jackie Greene and Kaki King, a couple of young festival "finds," took lateral steps from that blues base, Greene by channelling it into a robust folk idiom, King by using instant tape loops to propel her yowling lap-steel guitar into a full-on dance-club number that marked the night's outermost point from any folk tradition.
In this setting, the old-sounding new songs of the Be Good Tanyas functioned almost as a recollection of the festival's core esthetic. Frazey Ford's chilled, quivery vocals came on just as the heat started to fade, and even the group's loneliest songs felt like a return to shelter.
The evening's latter half was all Louisiana, with music by Bo Dollis, John Mooney and Dr. John, who worked the night's blues theme into so many flavours of gumbo. In the Firefly tent, meanwhile, the Winnipeg pop-rockers Novillero played a hard-driving set with guitars, horns and theremin that seemed all the more exciting for its containment under canvas, after a day of open-air music.
The home-band advantage worked also for the Weakerthans, who sang about "how the weather used to be" to a large if not especially attentive audience on Friday afternoon. Martha Wainwright, who admitted that three-quarters of her public lives east of the Ottawa River, fetched a smaller crowd, as she tried successfully to fill up big tunes such as Ball and Chain with no band to help her.
Camper Van Beethoven played one of the outstanding sets from Saturday's daylight hours, bouncing through a polka suite, getting everyone drunk on their ferment of layered guitars, and launching the festival into still more new territory with a rendition of Take the Skinheads Bowling. It was the kind of performance that settled that festival anxiety that comes of the suspicion that however good the music you're hearing, something better might be happening on another stage.
Saturday evening tilted toward the world-beat side, with a sincere but chaotically unbalanced set by the New Age a capella group Madrigaia; a rousing performance by Lila Downs of her well-rooted Mexican-American originals; and a closing jam by Zimbabwean musicians Oliver Mtukudzi and Black Spirits. Well before the end, Frayer had made his point about widening the festival's focus, and he seems to have done it successfully: more passes were sold this year than last.
Over three decades, the Winnipeg Folk Festival has established its own traditions and social ecology, from the polite laissez-faire that prevailed on the grounds to the hard-partying ethos of the festival campground. Some of its traditions are charming and amusing. The nightly Tarp Run, during which people were loosed in squads onto the open area in front of the main stage, resembled an orderly gold-rush, or a running of the bulls with sheets of plastic instead of beefsteak. This being Canada, the rules of the Run do not permit running, which meant that each evening's entertainment began with the spectacle of everyone doing their fastest duck-leg stride.
I won't miss a few other things about the festival's 31st edition, including the Lake of Sorrows, as I came to think of the immense puddle that had to be traversed to get to the media tent. On the other hand, I now have renewed affection for the dragonfly, this festival's unofficial mascot, and the best damned mosquito-hunter on the face of the earth.