I’ve talked before about how throughout my young life, I found the spiritual, worshipful “feelings” elusive. I’ve also said that I’ve had far more religious experiences in a smoky club listening to a band or rapper as I have had in a service or a Bible study.

So when the beginning of July rolls around and with it the Winnipeg Folk Festival, I get pretty excited. I get excited knowing that I’ll get a taste of that intangible, ethereal zeitgeist that results when thousands of like-minded people gather in one place in a spirit of celebration. Ostensibly that is what one could/should get in church, but we all know it rarely works out that way.

Today I had probably the best festival day I’ve ever had. I actually hoisted myself out of bed (I was up late shaking booty to the Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone) and arrived in time for the annual gospel workshop. “Workshops” are concerts at the festival where two, three or more artists/bands gather on the same stage, under the umbrella of some theme (some titles are “Old Songs, New Songs,” “Percussion Junction,” “One Fiddle to Rule Them All”). Ideally, the participants of the workshop will join in on harmonies and guitar parts of each others’ songs, sometimes jamming and creating entirely new tunes, or adding a bassline or a beat where otherwise there would be none.

“Working on a Building (Gospel Workshop)” featured American bluesmen the Holmes Brothers, local Mennonite bluegrass quartet House of Doc, and my personal favourite, Austin singer-songwriter/guitarist Ruthie Foster. Ruthie was raised singing and playing in the church in central Texas, and there really aren’t words to describe the magic she is on stage. Her voice is so massive and effortless, she really does merit comparisons to the great ladies of song (those comparisons are tossed around so often. This time I mean it). You listen to her voice and you just believe that everything is going to be OK. She’ll raise the roof even if there isn’t one, like at an outdoor festival when the only roof is the sky and so she’ll just raise that. In the workshop following the gospel one, she shared the stage with Bruce Cockburn and Richard Thompson and completely held her own. That’s how good she is.

She sang a song she wrote inspired by her mother, who, when Ruthie was in college, told her that education was fine but “you’ve got a soul to save.” She sang the song she sang at her grandmother’s funeral, two weeks ago. “It’s alright,” she said, “She’s fine. She’s here today… she’s everywhere.” And then she went on to sing a variation of Amazing Grace, about how God saw past her faults and saw her needs.

It’s stuff like that that can almost make a girl believe.

I mentioned Bruce Cockburn, who is well-known for being a “secular” Christian artist. I ranted and whined last week about Christian music, and Bruce indeed is one of those rare artists who manages to be Christian and also good. He sang “All the Diamonds” today, and… well, it was just really beautiful. Go read the lyrics if you’re not familiar. He also did “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” which was also beautiful.

I’m not sure what my point is here. Maybe to say that I can understand why so many people are so attached to the church, because there are so many qualities of church in a festival like this: the fellowship, the transcendence of music (which I have come to believe is inherent to music itself, in some sort of magical, unknowable way, and not at all unique to Christian musicians, as a former choir director of mine actually claimed), the knowledge that you can go to this one place and be rewarded for your efforts with this amazing feeling.

Or maybe that inspiration can be found in many places. That one woman’s voice can be a salve, just as a few lines of poetry in the Old Testament can be. That dancing in the sun is what we should have been doing all along.

technorati tags: folk, music, bruce+cockburn, ruthie+foster, christianity, religion, church

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 8:05 pm and is filed under church, introspection, rituals, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.