PLAIN FOLK

by Les Pearson
From Dylan to Dunn, Folk Reflects Our Social Conscience!

There was a subdued response to Maria Dunn’s evening concert last Friday. The harmonies were great. The musicianship, special. Maria’s lyrics, poignant and witty.

In the afternoon, over 250 polite and attentive students from McCoy and Crescent Heights High Schools watched Maria and her troupe perform the Troublemakers multi-media show. Their response, too, was restrained.

This is not the usual reaction to concert series performers and it made me wonder. What was different about this show? What were people thinking when left the theatre?

I might have dropped the whole issue if I not for the same reserved approbation at the Rwanda Concert in Brooks last Sunday.

The lead singer for the talented quartet spoke glowingly about the community’s hospitality, about the hope Brooks restores in him, and about genocide, starvation, and a plague of HIV AIDS.

Brooks has its share of racial tension. But here was an outsider singing a hymn to this community and to the hope it inspired in him. Compared to Rwanda, compared to Uganda, Sudan or Somalia, maybe Brooks is heaven.

After all, the children danced. And we joined them. The applause was sincere, but muted. What was the audience thinking? For some, maybe thoughts of home…or horrors.

Only last year, in the thick of the meatpackers strike, Maria Dunn invaded Brooks. And, yes, she performed her Troublemakers concert to their series crowd.

For those who don’t know her, Maria Dunn is Alberta’s singing historian. Troublemakers is based on the tenet that every group that has fought for—and gained!—human rights and social justice has been labelled “troublemaker.” And unions figure big in her show. What was the response then? Those who attended say it was “thoughtful.”

I have a hunch, only a hunch, that the Rwandans and Maria Dunn share folk greatness because they sing the hard things. They force us to think and learn!

I had never heard of Slim Evans, a Drumheller union representative who refused to ship coal miners’ dues to the USA while striking families starved. He distributed the money back to miners and was sent to Prince Albert Pen for three years on fraud charges. But 8,000 and more signatures on a petition had his sentence reduced to months. What inspired troublemakers!

Then there were those Black Texan farmers who came North to escape the Jim Crow laws and buy cheap homesteads. A motion in Alberta’s Legislature tried to ban them from buying land. They came anyway. Amber Valley and Maria’s songs survive!

The Suffragettes, First Nations, the interned Japanese…all troublemakers in their time.

Folk music has its hilarity and spirit. (If you doubt this, try a Cousin Harley and the Piglets concert!) Thankfully, it is also the music of plain folk and their social issues.

It makes me wonder. Last year in Brooks was that obscure inspired figure at Maria’s concert actually Lyle Oberg? And who was listening this year in Medicine Hat?