This is our third summer in Oakville, and one of the great things about living down by the lake is that every June a great festival takes place just at the end of our street. It is little like the circus coming to town, because Coronation Park is transformed overnight from a very pleasant, but quiet, lakefront park into a bustling tent city filled with gymnastics demonstrations, artists, singers, face painting, and much more. We have gone every year with Andrew and Colin and always had a great time.
But one thing we haven't done was attend any of the evening performances. For the past two years we have put our two tired little boys to bed, and then watched as masses of people stream down our street on their way to an open air concert by the lake. This year, we decided to check it out.
We headed down just after dinner on Friday evening and wandered around the booths for a while before settling down on our groundsheet [it poured buckets in the afternoon, but looked OK for the evening] and blanket.
We caught the tail end of a fashion show by aboriginal designers, and listened to a Mohawk with a black leather jacket and electric guitar [ who was quite good ], watched the Jim Sky Dancers [including a highly impressive and entertaining routine involving bull whips and long strips of paper] before Buffy Sainte-Marie hit the stage at about 9 pm.
She performed with two band members, a drummer and a guitarist, while she played keyboards, guitar, the "mouth-bow" and sang. She performed for just over an hour I found it to be a wonderful evening.
I know a few of Buffy's songs, but I have never really paid a lot of attention to her music. I think that has been a mistake. She has been writing great songs for the past 30 years, and she played a good selection in Oakville.
She sang "Universal Soldier"; and while many 1960's protest songs have not aged well this one seems to have matured. She sang; "Indian Cowboy from the Rodeo"; and finished it off with a smashing war chant/screech which would never have made it on the radio, but which turned this cute little C+W hit from the 70's into a pretty neat piece of work.
She sang "Cripple Creek"; unaccompanied, except for her mouth bow. And she sang about little kids who "piddle in the puddle", and eat lima beans from the carpet and made all of us with children grin like.... well.....like kids.
She also sang a good number of songs from her most recent CD [I forget the name], including "Fallen Angels", "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" and the incredible "Starwalker". Her songwriting seems to me to be consistently good and occassionally stunning.
As the sun went down, and the rain stayed away, and the kids stopped squirming, the four of us sat with Buffy in front of the lake at the end of our street, and had a really fun Friday.
This was a golden day.
Post Script:Maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons that I enjoyed Buffy so much is that I remembered seeing a snippet of an interview with her where she said that she used a Macintosh to create electronic artwork. She created the picture at the top of this page. If you are interested in seeing more of her work you can follow this link:
http://130.63.218.180/~bsm/bsmartshow.html
