The 2025 Anchorage Folk Festival wrapped up Sunday night on a high note with people dancing from their seats and in the aisles to the music of this past weekend’s guest performers, Corey Ledet Zydeco, a group that celebrates Louisiana’s Creole culture.
The week before, the festival featured another out-of-state group, A.J. Lee and Blue Summit, an up-and-coming bluegrass band known for their feverish technical wizardry.
Although the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Wendy Williamson Auditorium was filled with music and music lovers for both weekends, the festival is struggling to stay afloat.
The festival’s president, Johnse Ostman, says the time has come for some big changes to the festival, but parting with some of the traditions that have evolved over the festival’s 36 years will be tough to do.
“These festival experiences are sort of intangible,” Ostman said. “We can never go back to them, but these experiences are what have made me a better musician. I don’t know what I would have done without it.”
Ostman says the outside groups are needed to attract and inspire a younger generation of musicians, who are vital to the festival's future.
The headliners typically perform at the festival twice and give an afternoon of workshops, for the best price of all for the audience – absolutely free.
“We keep telling them, yes, there are things that we offer for free,” said Marianne See, a longtime volunteer and board member. “But there are costs to that.”
See says those costs have risen sharply and come on the heels of the pandemic, when the festival’s finances took a big hit.
“And then, coming back from that, that was a slow recovery, and I think we're still in that.” See said. “It's like public TV and public radio. We need members. We need support at whatever level anybody can do.”
Marianne See works backstage every year with another veteran board member, singer-songwriter Lou Nathanson.
“One thing I noticed over those early years was we always had about 200 members,” he said.
Even though the price of the membership remains only $25, the membership list has dwindled down to about 150. Also, sponsorships and donations are down.
Organizers say, going forward, they may have to scale back the festival -- possibly do away with the headliners and downsize to one week, instead of two.
“We’ve always been very egalitarian about this,” See says. “If you said you wanted to play, we tried to give you a set.”
Each set is 15 minutes with a total of 140 slots, which are usually filled months before the festival.
See says they keep a waiting list in case people get sick or can’t come.
“Then we'd pretty much get everybody in by the end of the show, or by the end of the festival,” she said.
In all, the festival features about 500 performers. But if the festival were cut down to one weekend, it would lose about half of those artists.
Would there be room for teenagers like Aurora Kreiner, who at 13 astounded the audience with her mature vocals, or 16-year-old Ezzy Allwright’s bluegrass cello music and his surprisingly deep bass voice?
The festival has reared several generations of musicians, some who made their first appearance on stage in utero.
There are also community groups like the Midnight Sons Chorus, Alaska Sound Celebration, the Anchorage Mandolin Orchestra and the Alaska Button Box Gang – all perennial favorites.
If the festival went down to one week, would there be time for them all? Historically, the festival has had an impressive variety of performers including the mystical Celtic harp sounds of Sarah Cleary; Gary Stedman’s retro mix of blues, rock and folk; and the Umicyo Band, which features the songs of three African sisters.
Fans of the festival say it's good for the people of Anchorage to see their city's rich diversity in the wide spectrum of music styles that are showcased.
Ostman says some might think that the sheer number and variety of performers are the festival’s recipe for success, but he says it goes deeper than that.
“The secret sauce is the community of people that come for the festival — to be a part of the audience for the 15-minute set of the performers,” Ostman said. “And the volunteers that make up the stage crew and sound engineers who come together for that 15-minute set.
Each festival requires about 100 volunteers, who Lou Nathanson says have made folksingers like him shine over the years, before a huge audience that they would never otherwise have a chance to entertain.
Nathanson remembers when he and other early festival organizers first scouted out the Wendy Williamson auditorium.
“I looked in there, and I had signed up already to play, and I looked in, and it was like this real concert hall, and I looked in there and I said, ‘What have I done?’” Nathanson said. “I was so scared.”
That was then. This weekend, he’s releasing his third and probably final album, made with help from other artists he met at the festival and performed with over the years.
One of the songs on the album is called “Folksinger.”
“It's sort of autobiographical. I grew up very awkward,” Nathanson said. “And I identified music early on as a way to actually connect with the world.”
All these years later, Nathanson is still connecting to the world through his music and the Anchorage Folk Festival.
He hopes Anchorage will rally to help the festival get past its financial mid-life crisis, so there can be, well, more folksingers.
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