Ultimate Challenge 365: Community in the crowd

By Julie Daigle
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I lived in North Carolina for several years.  There are lots of things that I like better about Maine, as evidenced by the fact that I am here and no longer there, but there are some things that I really miss about the communities that I lived in down south.

Julie Daigle

One is the presence of music in everyday life.

I cannot remember any get-togethers with others of my age that did not involve someone bringing a guitar or a set of drums or a banjo or a harmonica.  There was nothing special or noteworthy about someone showing up at someone else's house with something musical in tow, and most of the musicians who ended up playing at these gatherings were not members of local bands, they were just people who liked to play music.

My dad tells me that his father, my grandfather, used to play the fiddle in the living room at night in Daigle, and that my grandfather used to go over to a friend's house on Sundays to play with other people in someone else's living room.

That doesn't seem to happen around here any more, or not on a regular basis by many people, but this is the feel that accompanied the performance of Le Vent du Nord at the American Folk Festival in Bangor this past weekend.  Out of many choices at the festival, I chose to see this band partially because I hoped the Quebecois group would play music similar to our traditional Acadian music, since my dad and I had gotten to the festival too late to hear Celtic Colours, a group from the Acadian homeland, Cape Breton Island.

I highly recommend Le Vent du Nord to anyone who wants to check them out on iTunes or on their website.

The exceptional performance Le Vent du Nord gave was due in part to the sheer professionalism of the group and its members, who were energetic, entertaining, funny (at one point, they referred to the United States as being a very small- tiny, really- country just south of Quebec) and musically very proficient.  They took full advantage of the particulars of the small stage on which I saw them, inviting the crowd to get up and dance and to respond to their questions.

The intimate feel of the group's performance was probably due also to the nature of the arena in which they were playing, which was the festival's Two Rivers Stage.  This venue is one of four or five at the festival and is built to face a small natural amphitheater that keeps the audience close to the stage.

It was also, I think, due to the fact that Le Vent du Nord is Quebecois. Switching seamlessly between French and English, the group played their songs in French, but spoke to the assumed predominantly English-speaking crowd in English. No, I don't mean that the lively and intimate atmosphere was due to the fact that Canadians are more fun...but that the group is French.  I'll explain that in a minute.

One of the things that I enjoy about the Folk Festival is the opportunity to meet and to chat with people of all ages, nations, groups, and persuasions, whom you might never cross paths with otherwise.

Squeezing through the packed crowd to try to find a place to sit for the show, my dad and I happened to sit down just in front of a group of very friendly and animated older people.

A conversation between us started up and it turned out to be a very small French world in that part of the audience: a couple of members of the group behind us were Depreys, originally from Quimby, although they live in Orrington, Maine and St. Petersburg, Florida now.  Other members of the group were from Grand Falls, New Brunswick.  Another couple who turned out to have been originally from Winterville Plantation joined our group of northerners later, again apparently by providence, all of us drawn by the foot-stomping, hand-clapping, get-up-and-dance music.

Many of the audience members were also specifically drawn by the opportunity to hear a French performance, however, which was not something that had occurred to me when I made the decision to go see the show.  In fact, one woman (who turned out to be a Daigle cousin we'd never met before who approached us after the show when she overheard that we were from Fort Kent) later remarked matter-of-factly, if somewhat dismissively, that she had also seen Celtic Colours play earlier in the day and had enjoyed it, "but they're English, you know".

There was a sense of community and belonging and acceptance in this French and Francophone audience that I'd never experienced before.  To be a member of a French-speaking heritage is something that I've grown up taking for granted, but since very few members of my generation speak French and since speaking French is not something in which our American culture sees much value, I never realized that it could be a passport to shared interests with a larger group of people.

I walked away from the Folk Festival with a sense that the festival had broadened my world and expanded my horizons (and not just because I ate more than humanly possible at the festival's tasty variety of local, homemade and ethnic cuisine choices), and provided a greater sense of myself as being a real part of an international community.

In stark contrast to this, in a more somber vein, is the following note: the band which played immediately after Le Vent du Nord was called The Other Europeans, and are made up of American and European members who play klezmer and gypsy music.  The American spokesman for the group mentioned in an aside that many Europeans are now afraid to travel to the United States because of the climate of intolerance and violence that is associated with us internationally, and that the American members of the group actually had to reassure the European members prior to booking the gig that they would be safe in Bangor, Maine, and that they would be welcomed here.

There are many great and admirable things about the United States, including a rich and wonderful history of musical variety and innovation. I doubt that our current reputation for arrogant self-righteousness on a global scale and an aggressive, government-supported nationalism is one of the things about which we should be proud, however, if only because we make our world smaller and less interesting because of it.