Tag Archives: folk

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Northwest Folklife Festival Starts Friday at Seattle Center

It’s Memorial Day weekend, so that means it’s time for the Northwest Folklife Festival — the 40-something music fest is still free ($10 suggested donation), and expected to draw more 200,000 people to Seattle Center between its opening Friday, May 24, at 11 a.m., and its closing Monday night, May 27th, around 9 or 10 p.m. or whenever the corn liquor runs out. King County Metro will be on weekend and holiday service schedules, but they’re also running special Folklife shuttles. Car-share service car2go is running a drop-off zone 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. each day, on 2nd Ave N. between Roy St. and Mercer St.

(Graphic: KING 5)

The SunBreak is the proud sponsor of Saturday afternoon’s “Hot Pickin’ & Harmonies Bluegrass Showcase,” featuring the talents of Pearly Blue, The Weavils, Pickled Okra, and Badger Pocket. This isn’t an Mumfordian affectation. We like bluegrass! Seth plays the banjo for god’s sake. (Yes, he’s taken, ladies.) So we chose that one. Now excuse us while we go look for the perfect hay straw to stick in our teeth, and a good, arm-cradlin’ jug of ‘shine.

But actually, if you haven’t been to Folklife in a while, or ever, you might be surprised to know the folks aren’t limited to denizens of Appalachian hollows and Celtic fens. There’s Balkan, Middle Eastern, French, Romanian, and Latin music, even a Bollywood dance party. There’s a lot of participatory dancing, and for when you get hungry, a host of food vendors, and beer gardens, plural.

Here, take a look at the BuzzFeed-friendly “28 Great Things to See at Folklife.” And don’t miss this at the Center House Theatre: “Half movie, half handmade folk art, crankies are animated drawings and papercuts on cloth ‘reels,’ hand-cranked for movement, and presented with traditional Gaelic music accompaniment.”

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Seattle Takes Itself Off Michelle Shocked’s Tour

(Screenshot: michelleshocked.com)

“Born-again, sanctified, saved-in-the-blood Christian” and folk singer Michelle Shocked will not be appearing at Seattle’s Meander’s Kitchen on April 26. The cancellation was “due to her homophobic performance in San Francisco,” announced the venue on Facebook, adding : “I’ll post more about this later. But no. Just, no.” 699 people have Liked this so far.

As sfist recounted, the singer “literally shocked audiences on Sunday at Yoshi’s San Francisco when during her second set she launched into a hate-filled speech about gays and gay marriage. ‘I live in fear,’ she said, ‘that the world will be destroyed if gays are allowed to marry.'”

The New York Times adds: “she also told the audience to go on Twitter and report that she had said God hates homosexuals, though it is unclear whether that remark was sardonic.” If the last time you heard Michelle Shocked was sometime in the ’90s, the NYT article will catch you up on her Pentecostal walk-back from more LGBT-friendly times.

Most of the audience at Yoshi’s walked on her, and they were followed by a string of venue cancellations.

Over at folk-rock ground-zero No Depression, former Seattlest editor Kim Ruehl meditates on what it all means:

Whether she’s struggling with mental health issues, whether she’s trying to distance herself from a past she no longer feels proud of, or whether this is just what she’s come to believe, she was clearly struggling with the knowledge that she’d be playing to a predominantly gay crowd in one of the gayest cities in the country, on the eve of a Supreme Court hearing held to decide whether or not her state was right to try to block LGBT people from the right to marry. If I want to have my rights recognized, I must also recognize the rights of others. That’s the fairness game that comes with freedom.

UPDATE: Michelle Shocked has released a statement saying that she was misunderstood:

My view of homosexuality has changed not one iota. I judge not. And my statement equating repeal of Prop 8 with the coming of the End Times was neither literal nor ironic: it was a description of how some folks – not me – feel about gay marriage.

Compare that with audio of the concert in question.