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An Alaska musical and cultural institution looks back at 30
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| How would you explain the Alaska Folk Festival to someone who's never seen it? Would you start with the scene in Centennial Hall? A mbira player you heard in the armory? Or perhaps three fiddle players from Talkeetna you met on some strange night wandering through the Alaskan Hotel?
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Folk Festival schedule
Schedule of performances, dances, workshops and other events for the 30th Alaska Folk Festival.
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Fifteen minutes, the red light and you
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| Deep in the bowels of the Mendenhall Valley Travelodge, sisters Linda Bogden and Carol Thomas were rehearsing on their dulcimers, and terrified. Here was the evening of their Alaska Folk Festival debut - 15 quick-but-nerve-wracking minutes on the Centennial Hall stage in April of 1999.
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What does it take to get a spot ?
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| It's jokingly called "the secret room" - a magic place where board members vanish for a few hours on the weekend after the Alaska Folk Festival's application deadline to hash together a preliminary schedule.
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Distributing sound through a convention center
For the first 12 years of the folk festival, the sound was run solely by volunteers. In 1987, the board finally hired its first chief sound engineer. He, and the four engineers that followed him, inherited a week-long juggling act in an irregularly shaped center built for conventions, not performance.
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Covering the walls of the National Guard Armory
Ever since the Alaska Folk Festival began holding dances at the National Guard Armory, volunteers and engineers have brainstormed ways to tame the parallel walls, concrete surfaces and cavernous space in the venue.
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The Alaska Folk Festival after hours
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| Juneau's clustered downtown has helped develop the character of the Alaska Folk Festival. And over the years, it's also ensured that when the music stops at Centennial Hall and the armory, it won't be too long until the music starts somewhere else. "It would be very difficult to pull off anything like this in Fairbanks, because the town is too spread out," Fairbanks musician Will Putman said. "Everyone in Juneau sets up camp around downtown, and everything you need is there."
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Musicians share their craft
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| Workshops - now held Saturday and Sunday mornings and afternoons in Centennial Hall, the armory and parts of the Goldbelt Hotel - have been a festival tradition since 1975,
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Fabulous Poster art
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| Through the years, the Alaska Folk Festival has commissioned colorful poster art to help promote the annual event. The posters have incorporated Alaskana with a musical theme to create distinct identity for the festival. Here is a sampling of great festival art.
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Thirty Straight
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| More than one musician has called the Alaska Folk Festival an "egalitarian utopia." So what, then, have Juneau musicians Pat Henry and Bob Banghart really earned as the lone performers to have played in all 30 festivals?
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A feast in a melting pot
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| Zambian native Moye Kashimbi couldn't believe what she was hearing when she began rehearsing with Maya Soleil in Seattle in 1997. Worse, she didn't know when to start singing.
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Hot Club rearranges the gypsy jazz greats
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| The Hot Club of Cowtown - the folk festival's guest artist this year - would like to take a moment to clear up two misconceptions that have dogged the trio since its first shows in Austin, Texas, in 1997.
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True Calling
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| Bill Martin has been one of Portland's most popular square and contra dance callers since the mid-1980s. But he didn't approach a dance floor until more than 20 years into his musical career.
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Stey remembers memorable first festival
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| For Martha (Scott) Stey, her 1991 Alaska Folk Festival debut changed her life. She met her future husband, Jim Stey, and made an important musical connection with Betsy Sims, with whom she later formed the Glacial Erratics.
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A dream comes true for two Juneau fathers
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| On their application to play at this year's Alaska Folk Festival, Juneau's Odin Brudie and Bill Childers wrote that they would like to open someday for their daughters.
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Capturing 360 degrees of family on film
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| Fifteen minutes of the Alaska Folk Festival's Friday nights are always the same. The lights go on, every fiddler in the house is invited on the Centennial Hall stage for the Alaska Fiddlers Convention and Juneau photographer Ron Klein walks out with his 84-year-old, 45-pound Folmer and Schwing No. 10 Cirkut panoramic camera.
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Slightly Askew members bring their homework, fiddles
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| Last year, when Tetrafiddles founder Susie Hallinan didn't think she could muster the energy to bring 25 of her fiddle students from Fairbanks to the 29th Annual Alaska Folk Festival, the kids talked her into making the trip.
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22 years later, the Page brothers return
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| Five-piece bluegrass band Tanana Grass had established a following in Fairbanks by 1978, when it hooked a Friday-Saturday gig at Juneau's old Crystal Saloon during the weekend of the fourth annual Alaska Folk Festival.
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Art Johns brings songs from the range
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| In a cavernous convention center full of revivalists, Tagish cowboy singer Art Johns is as country as they come. That runs deeper than his duds - the old-time hats, shirt, pants and fringe of Hank Williams and Webb Pierce. It goes all the way back to the 108-year-old Beattie House, the wooden, two-story site of the first mounted police barracks in Carcross, Yukon.
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Couple looks forward to 650-mile drive
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| No one pays admission to the Alaska Folk Festival, and no one but the guest artists gets paid to play, so it must be a testament that Fairbanks couple Will Putman and Trudy Heffernan consider it a privilege to load up their car every April and hit the road for a week.
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Grateful for audience connection
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| It's been a six-year learning process. But two years ago, Juneau attorney Beth Leibowitz realized the Grateful Celtics - her Irish dance band - could make an audience whoop.
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Dance band has been Raisin' Holy Hell for many years
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| They've been doing it for years, so they decided their band deserved the proper title to make it official. Playing together for more than 25 years, Raisin' Holy Hell decided several years ago to adopt their name from another hell-raiser.
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Remember When?
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| Paul Roseland, "The Singing Sourdough," folk song collector, Girdwood.
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Remember When?
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| Sally Freund, Palmer, Alaska, and Hector, N.Y., musician and syrup maker, regular attendee since the early 1980s
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Remember When?
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| Bill Hudson, Pagosa Springs, Colo., guitar player and poster designer (10th to 20th festival, and 25th).
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Remember When?
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| Robin Dale Ford, Fairbanks musician, played in first festival in 1977 and has missed one since 1987.
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Remember When?
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| Katie Henry, Lebanon, N.H., on Women With Hair, 1988-1998.
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Remember When?
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| Juneau's Jim Stey, remembering his first folk festival in 1977, when it was held at the Alaska State Museum.
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Remember When?
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| Martha Stey, who lived in Bethel eight years before she visited the festival for the first time in 1991.
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