Across the Gastineau Channel from downtown Juneau, Annie Bartholomew and her Old Time Babe Band are playing a jubilant string-band tune at a house party, as part of the 50th annual Alaska Folk Festival. Their version of the traditional folk song “Big Sciote” is an homage to the one popularized by the Panhandle Crabgrass Revival Band, a folk supergroup from the 2000s (formed in the Southeast Alaska fishing community). Out the picture window behind the band, snowcapped Mount Juneau and Mount Roberts are visible through a steady early-spring drizzle. Inside the living room, a couple dozen people have shed their ubiquitous Juneau attire—Xtratuf or Blundstone boots and raincoats or wool shirt jackets—by the front door. They cluster on couches and chairs or mill around the hallway and kitchen, listening together.
The weeklong festival—held every April in Alaska’s capital—is singular for its quirky, homegrown feel and dedication to community and inclusion. Hosted by members of the tight-knit, professionally skilled Juneau folk music scene, the AFF revolves around main-stage programming in Centennial Hall, which holds close to 1,000 people. Sets are 15 minutes and broadcast by local radio station KRNN; there are no auditions (just an application); and throughout the festival, beginners and stars play back-to-back. No one gets paid except the guest artist (Grammy winner Rhiannon Giddens this year). And the entire event is free to attend.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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“It’s really beautiful that no one gets paid to play on the main stage. It’s also complex, because I believe the artist should be paid, but it does allow for this broad evening of the playing field, because no one is coming for the money,” says Juneau musician Taylor Vidic. “It is purely for the joy. And there’s power in that.”
Vidic, who has been performing in and producing events in Juneau and around Alaska for a decade, honed her stagecraft as a tour guide at the Red Onion Saloon, a former gold rush brothel in Skagway, about 100 miles north. She has a grand, gutsy voice capable of filling either a symphony hall or a jazz club with ease. During her main-stage set, Vidic sings a jazzed-up version of “Nature Boy” (written by Eden Ahbez and made famous by Nat King Cole), a medley of songs about friends, and her own bittersweet but triumphant “Falling Out of Love” (which she’s recording for her debut album).
Community connection is so important to the festival’s founders that when they incorporated as a nonprofit, they codified the free admission into the paperwork. “We thought about it and realized that in order to protect something, you have to be able to shield it from being taken over by individuals that want to profit from it,” says Bob Banghart, a festival cofounder. “[Keeping the event free] creates a sense of ownership, and that sense of ownership passes down generationally, and that ownership means there’s a feeling of belonging; if you’re belonging to something, you defend it.”
MUSIC FOR CONNECTION
Juneau squeezes onto slivers of land along the base of Alaska’s massive Boundary Ranges, which rise some 3,000 vertical feet, and the vast Gastineau Channel, one of the city’s main avenues of access and egress. During this year’s festival, sheaths of gray clouds drift low above downtown’s cluster of squat buildings, sometimes lifting to reveal horizontal lines of fresh snow capping the mountains. It’s an improbable place for a settlement, let alone a thriving folk music scene (or, for that matter, the state capital), but for Juneau residents, tenacity is a rejoinder to the setting—they’ve chosen to be here—and both determination and landscape nourish the music.
Juneau and the rest of Alaska are removed from the music industry both physically and metaphysically. The challenges and expense of travel, particularly from Juneau, which is cut off from the road system and accessible only by boat or plane, make touring difficult both inside and outside the state. Recording infrastructure is minimal, and as anywhere, earning a living as a musician is no small feat. Yet the seasonal pace to life and work here renders day jobs more compatible with playing and performing than in many places. Local musicians often make music because it’s good for the soul, swapping in and out of one another’s bands generously, for the joy of it, and at an extraordinarily high level, says AFF board member Bartholomew.
Bartholomew sits on the folk festival board along with Juneau folk scene mainstays Andrew Heist and Josh Fortenberry (with whom Bartholomew and Vidic also created the Muskeg Collective, a band of five songwriters). The group share bills, gripes, and resources in service of one another and making it easier to create music here.
When Juneau musicians record albums, it’s often with the assistance of Alaska’s robust arts funding. For instance, Bartholomew released her debut LP, 2023’s Sisters of White Chapel, about the women of the Klondike gold rush, after securing a prestigious $7,500 Rasmuson grant and state arts funding. In part because of her participation in one of Vidic’s tours in Skagway, Bartholomew became enamored of the seldom-told stories of women at the turn of the 20th century. She found kinship with the scrappy, enterprising gals—many of whom were sex workers—who escaped the era’s restrictive gender roles for a few years of bodily and monetary autonomy in the lawless demimonde of Dawson City, across the Canadian border in the Yukon Territory. Bartholomew sets the scene in album opener “White Chapel Woman”:
I’m gonna lie, gonna cheat, gonna steal
I’m gonna fake all the things I can’t feel
And when I meet my savior, honey, I will kneel
And work this room ’til I get a better deal
White Chapel woman, dance hall girl
I’ll be your sweetheart if you give me a whirl
But ain’t no man gonna buy off me
For a life as a wife to misery
Indeed, the patina of Alaska’s gold rush history remains visible in downtown Juneau. Outside the main stage’s orbit, the festival unfolds through a slew of raucous, late-night bar shows at such places as the Crystal Saloon, the gold rush–era Red Dog Saloon, and the Alaskan Hotel (a former brothel).
The music, which is mostly old-time and bluegrass, is designed for connection. “It’s all really understandable structures that strangers can play together,” says Erin Heist, who’s in a bluegrass duo with her husband, Andrew. “It’s built to create community and have a conversation with somebody you’ve never met.”
The festival also welcomes whimsy and weirdness, evident in its many themed parties. There’s the Canadian Tuxedo Party (thrown by Bartholomew) and the Bourbon Brunch. There’s Erin Heist and the Little Smokies’ Corndog Extravaganza, featuring exquisitely over-the-top corn dogs named for classic country stars—the Waylon, with corn crema, parmesan, and hot Cheetos; the Loretta, with whipped cream cheese, bacon, and hot honey. And there’s the Saturday-night sparkle party at the Crystal Saloon, headlined by Raisin’ Holy Hell, the outsize string band fronted by old-timers from the festival’s inception, who, rumor has it, once performed with an open grab bag of psychedelic mushrooms onstage.
“If it was all polished and perfect, where would the fun be? What would be the risk? Where would the drama be?” Bartholomew says. “Folk music has to start somewhere. You can’t expect everybody to be polished. You have to support them on their journey and trust that when you’re cheering them on this time, you’re cheering on the band that’s going to shock you in 3 years, or 5 years, or 20 years.”
MUSIC FOR COMMUNITY
On the festival’s last official day, artists gather for the Bourbon Brunch awards ceremony, whose theme is cosmic truck stop and diner. Attendees interpret the theme liberally: pink and blond wigs, frilly aprons, jumpsuits, sparkly antennae, cowboy hats, green plastic glasses in the shape of alien heads, chefs’ hats, rainbow feather boas, silver go-go boots, one pink-stuffed-dog hat, and a set of octopus-tentacle finger puppets. The trophies—elaborate two-tier hats that resemble fanciful cakes crossed with dioramas, constructed from thrift store knickknacks—are custom-made for recipients by a group of women collectively known as the Ketchikan Girls, one of whom, upon spying my conspicuous lack of themed apparel, supplies me with a handmade
bacon-and-eggs pin.
AFF cofounder Banghart compares the whole spectacle to Dadaism, the absurdist art movement that emerged in response to the oppression of the First World War. “I like thinking that what we’re doing is not an established precedent that we created, that we are in line with human effort since the beginning of time, and we just do it our way. By marrying it to something like Dada, it shows that we’re not unique,” he says. “We always have the obligation of making a statement as artists and musicians, and that has always been, and will continue to be, the vanguard of human existence. Science is good, but art is better.”
In a ruthlessly commodified world, it’s easy to forget that music—particularly folk music, in all its beautiful, fluid forms—is a language spoken within communities yearning for connection. People sing to celebrate and mourn, protest and pray, at work and in joy. That evening, on the main stage in Centennial Hall, Rhiannon Giddens closes her set by leading a sing-along of a slave spiritual turned union and civil rights anthem, “I Shall Not Be Moved.” “People have been fighting for stuff for a long time,” she says by way of introduction. Standing barefoot on the stage, Giddens gently strums her replica 1858 long-neck fretless banjo, and her voice seems to soar over the audience, their words reaching up to join hers.
On my way to freedom, I shall not be moved
On my way to freedom, I shall not be moved
Like a tree planted by the water
I shall not be moved •
Meredith Lawrence is a New York–based writer and photographer. She started her career in local news in Oregon and Washington and is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School's Arts&Culture MA program. Her work has appeared in High Country News, Texas Monthly, and Vox.
