The pioneers of the Wellington Folk Festival in 1965 had no idea that they were starting a long-term annual tradition, in fact they were rather surprised that people wanted to come back for more the following year, and the year after that. We’ve now reached the 60th festival, and on every 10-year milestone we’ve celebrated those people and all the people since who have dedicated hours and hours to continuing and building the tradition it has become. A huge enabler of that has been the collection, research and writing of Sharyn Staley. Sadly we don’t have Sharyn to do it this year. We’re keen to do her proud by adding the last decade, making Sharyn’s past work more visible, and fleshing it out with some personal memories and thoughts from festival-goers. Hopefully you agree that that’s a worthwhile mission.
Janette Munneke will be out at the festival with a voice recorder – please think about some recollections you’d like to share and come and chat with her during the Festival. To start you thinking, we’d like to know how long you’ve been coming to the festival, what drew you to it initially, and what makes you come back. Do you have any favourite years, performers or events? How has it influenced you or your involvement in music? Any developments over the years you’d like to acknowledge. Any special memories you’d like to share?
To jog your memory, you can view many of the past programmes on the Wellyfest website at this link https://wellingtonfolkfestival.org.nz/past-programmes/ (but beware, you might get lost for a while!). There will also be a slideshow and some poster boards at the Festival.
If writing is more your thing or you’re not coming to the Festival this year, feel free to email your thoughts and reminiscences to this address: wffmemories@gmail.com
We’ll do our best to collate it all into something we can put up on the website (and perhaps into the National Library) for others to share and enjoy.
See you at the Festival!