Mariposa Folk Festival: The Sounds, Sights, and Costs of a Fifty-Year Road Trip

In 2010, the Mariposa Folk Festival celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Founded in 1961, it later served as a model for future folk festivals in Canada, such as those in Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Edmonton. In addition to their financial success, many of these "offspring" events are known for promoting the work of domestic musicians as well as bringing a wide variety of international artists and audiences to Canada every summer. As a fifty-plus-year-old event, the MFF has lived through more shifts in industry trends, government policy, administrative personnel, and locale, than other festivals of its kind. Yet despite Mariposa's longevity, most written accounts (Usher and Page-Harpa 1977, Melbourne 2010, Mariposa: Celebrating Canadian Folk Music 2010, Bidini 2011) tend to emphasize its "heyday" years of the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, within their coverage of that time frame, these accounts do not attend to the long-term influence that the period's artistic programming had on the Canadian music scene. My research findings suggest a more nuanced perspective on the MFF's fifty-year history. This perspective encompasses its artistic and administrative developments from 1980 to the present, as well as a more detailed view of the long-term impact of its "heyday" years. This dissertation redresses the lacuna left by existing narratives about the Mariposa Folk Festival. After a detailed retelling of the MFF's musical and administrative history, I examine four facets of the event's significance that have been misunderstood, misrepresented, or simply left out by previous accounts. These are: 1) its artistic legacy (especially pertaining to its programming of Canadian content, 11 workshops/daytime concerts, ethnically-diverse musics, children's music, and a crafts area); 2) its relationship to social shifts of the 1960s and 1970s; 3) its contribution to our understanding of space, place and landscape; and 4) its contribution to our understanding of arts funding and sponsorship in Canada. In doing so I argue that the Mariposa Folk Festival is categorically different than other Canadian folk festivals, occupying a unique historical position in the context of similar events. These four aspects of its significance substantiate this argument.