Thanks Don for setting the history straight. You're right, the NW Folklife Festival was started in 1972 by the Seattle Folklore Society. SFS had a brief account of the history of the Festival on their web site, but that and other historical information has disappeared from their web site in recent years. So much for history and folklore from the SFS! The Festival was later (I think around 1980) separated from the SFS and set up as it's own non-profit corporation.

The SFS was founded by a group of people interested in bringing traditional source musicians from the eastern US and the Delta region to Seattle before they disappeared. There was not any regard for local Northwest musicians or Pacific Northwest folklore. In the intervening years SFS has morphed into a concert-producing organization for mainly out-of-state singer songwriters. Your observation of SFS "declining to sponsor singers of tradition songs on the basis that they did not write the songs themselves" is not entirely true - they recently brought Mike Seeger to Seattle - but mostly so.

Back to the Folklife Festival - it has just gotten too big for its own good, trying to appeal to every conceivable community including many that have nothing to do with Pacific Northwest folklore, folk arts and folk music ("Northwest Folklife relies on the diverse communities of the Pacific Northwest to inspire programs. Northwest Folklife collaborates with these communities to develop public presentations of their culture.") including hip-hop and "world music" (whatever that means). In striving to appeal to every conceivable interest it has grown so big that it cannot sustain itself financially, so it has to add more and more commercialism in order to bring in more money so it can grow even bigger. But like our economy it has finally gone from boom to bust. So this year more commercial booths and fewer musical stages, participatory activities and the things that used to make the Festival attractive to the local folk music community.

There's only about 10% of the Festival that I find interesting. Most of that has been around the NW corner. So that's where I usually hang out. It's too much of a hassle to make my way through the midway crowds to hear the few other things of interest. But even that is changing as I find less of interest even in the NW corner.

It's probably unrealistic to think that we could have a festival like Folklife was in its early years - most every local folk musician got a stage and it was more like an informal backyard jam. Times change. Maybe we should invent something different to take its place. Any ideas?

Cheers, S. in Seattle
where we seem to have avoided
the rain predicted for today
(although it's probably raining
in Everett. Bob?)