It takes a whole village of volunteers to run the American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront — about 600 of them each year, organizers say. From setting up the performance stages and staffing the information booths to welcoming the artists and selling their CDs, volunteers are essential to the sprawling event’s success.
According to the festival’s executive director, Heather McCarthy, many of her most reliable, most valuable volunteers are what she calls “life-experienced” — mature enough to manage responsibility, self-confident enough to work with the public and with a strong sense of humor to shake off minor wrinkles in the fabric of the annual event.
“As a group, our older volunteers bring an incredible amount of experience to the table,” McCarthy said during an interview in the festival offices, located at the Bangor campus of the University of Maine at Augusta. “They have the outlook and the presence of mind to make judgement calls, reach appropriate decisions on their own and generally represent the festival to the public.”
The festival started in 2002 as the National Folk Festival, a traveling festival produced by the National Council for the Traditional Arts.
Now in its 10th year as the locally produced American Folk Festival, it attracts an estimated 50,000 music lovers to Bangor on the last weekend of August, wrapping up summer with a colorful celebration of music, food and dance from around the country and around the world. The festival is funded through public and private donations, grants from local and national foundations and corporate support. The Bangor Daily News is a media sponsor of the event.
This year’s festival features music from many countries, including Azerbaijan, India and Colombia. Closer to home, attendees can enjoy the more familiar strains of gospel, western swing, Appalachian bluegrass, traditional Acadian fiddle music and Creole zydeco.
It’s the energetic mix of music, people and food that keeps 54-year-old volunteer Tim Ward coming back year after year. The Glenburn resident has volunteered since 2003, the second year of the National Folk Festival’s stay in Bangor. Ward, who often brings along his 28-year-old autistic son, Cameron, works in the high-visibility “bucket brigade,” the chatty, outgoing team whose members circulate in the crowd, encouraging festival-goers to drop a few dollars into their bright orange plastic buckets. All donations support the festival.
“I like providing support to the event and the community,” Ward said. “We see some of the same people year after year, and we get exposed to really great music and food. I love it.”
Ward, who works as an information specialist for Eastern Maine Health Systems, said the bucket brigade volunteers enjoy their rapid-fire interactions with festival goers and the opportunity to move from place to place, soaking up a variety of performances across the riverfront site. “People love doing [the bucket brigade] because they don’t get stuck in any one place all day,” he said.
The swirling three-day festival itself needs the most support and attracts the most volunteers. But during the off-season and especially during the early summer lead-up to the event a few dedicated volunteers also are needed in the festival offices.
“We’ve been busy sending out newsletters and getting information to our vendors and sponsors,” said Al Bushway, 69, a retired University of Maine, Orono, professor who lives in Veazie and volunteers year-round, along with his wife, Esther, who is 68. The Bushways take on a number of behind-the-scenes tasks, including assembling boxes full of supplies customized for different areas of the festival.
But during the festival, the Bushways spend long days staffing the volunteer registration tent, making sure each of the hundreds of volunteers of all ages and levels of experience get an official festival T-shirt and know where to report for duty.
“We like working with all the people this festival brings together,” Al Bushway said. “There is a real community of volunteers who show up to work with us every year.” Bushway noted that all volunteers are invited to attend a boisterous party the Saturday night of the festival, after the crowds go home. The party, hosted at a local hotel, typically features performers from the event and plenty of age-appropriate celebratory beverages.
“But we’ve never been,” he said with a rueful chuckle. “We’re always all tired out by then.”
Plenty of volunteers still are needed for this year’s American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront, which will be held Aug. 28, 29 and 30. For more information, please contact the festival offices at americanfolkfestival.com or by phone at 992-2630.
