July 6, 2025

MARIPOSA WAS AWASH IN FOLK-INSPIRED MUSIC AS ITS MUSICAL GENRE MORPHS EVER MORE TOWARD MAINSTREAM

ORILLIA — The band played on and the wet bars served beer.

Torrential late afternoon rains that sent thousands racing for cover leaving others sheltering in any place at Mariposa yesterday may have drenched festival goers, but it didn’t deter final numbers by main stage artist Basia Bulat and ‘Tweener’ Rick St. Clair.

Long enough for techies to stretch out a few more minutes to set up the Lighfoot Stage for Juno-winning crooner Holly Cole. Her dark, sultry, soggy set bursting out as clouds opened up and the sun burst like the blazing ball of flame of the Mariposa logo.

**Jazz singer Holly Cole could have sung ‘Stormy Weather,” but she still thanked the Mariposa crowd for waiting out the inclement weather to weclome her to the Lightfoot Stage. PHOTOS Mark Clairmont**

Aside from that 60-minute spit spell, Saturday’s second of three days of festival music was hot then humid.

Mariposa fans are used to temporarily interrupting summer storms, with many coming prepared to weather out as much as lightning would allow over its 65 years now.

Off the main stage the treed Tudhope Park peninsula was awash in very warm and some welcoming intimate stages to hear artists hailing and wailing from above and below the 49^th.

It’s at the Barnfield, Boho, Ruth, Sunshine and a couple other flat wooden soap boxes where folk fans still at the heart of Mariposa continue to sit on grass or lawn chairs.

And where Jane Siberry performed at the Estelle Klein Stage.

Eschewing the larger Lightfoot Stage, it was perfect platform for the popular Canadian singer who wrote “It Can’t Rain All the Time.”

A true folk artist, she showed why her live performances are known for their emotional depth.

An admitted “Tom boy” growing up in Toronto, her song “When I Was A Boy” was performed the same year she collaborated with Cole on a live concert of Christmas music broadcast on CBC Radio Christmas Day 1993 before being released in 1994 as the album “Count Your Blessings.”

Opening without introduction playing “Mimi on the Beach (1984),” she asked her adoring audience spread before her “Where were you when you first heard that?”

She referred to the song about a teen and that at 16 it about “cigarettes in the shopping mall. And I just didn’t like these things called young girls. They were pretty pathetic. You could push them around and they just follow. They didn’t stick up for themselves. And I so I took it upon myself to try and push them trying to get their spine to calcify to gain strength.

“One day I was working on this little bit of a thing. I really loved this girl and I was worried. And all of a sudden, when I pushed her over she fell. And she didn’t get up again.

“And the next thing you know I’m out on a surf board in the water listening to voices yammer at me about standing up. Looking at the horizon. ‘I know how to do all these things.’ So I’ve had time to think about it all. …

“But the hardest thing I’ve ever done is to have compassion for those who are more weak. And I’m still working on it.

“It’s strange that it happened on a local beach one day. One girl paddled out to sea and the other ….”

It’s always been looking out for and helping others, she said, that’s a constant in her life and in a career culminating “this week by finishing mixing (her latest album), which was huge after four years of working on it bit by bit.

“This song, ‘To See Spirit,’ is about starting to “move as fast, as fiercely, as strong as we can away from so many things that separates us.

“So I’d have to say patriotism falls in that category. I really don’t like seeing those signs that say ‘God Bless America, God bless blah, blah, blah. It’s really got to be God bless us all. And those who we don’t even know about yet.”

Her sensible sentiments — expressed without music or lyrics — received fulsome applause and whistling cheers.

**Popular Canadian folk singer and songwriter Jane Siberry was a clear favourite for many her Mariposa fans with her most folk-like sounds and poetic lyrics.**

Politics was a natural theme throughout the weekend at the smaller stages where important lyrics meant to be heard actually could be. (Unfortunately at a few of the larger little ones they were gated with line-ups restricting access and making it difficult to breach the gap to and listen without leering over and through fences.)

But if you walked around and found those intimate tent and tree canopied covers a with just floor boards and couple mics that’s where the magic happened.

Take Jordan Smart, a Kentucky-based folk singer full of “simple honesty.”

At the Ruth Stage — behind the main stage — he welcomed more than a dozen pf the participants to sit with him on its tiny stage hugging him in a horseshoe as he sang un-plugged.

A favourite line from a sing-along had them robustly repeat a refrain: “When Musk goes to Mars, Trump goes to the moon.”

He said that line goes over big down south — in parts.

**Jordan Smart brought participants onto his Ruth Stage to share some poignant timely political references that had his audiences gleefully singing along.**

It was much the same throughout the weekend, which wraps up tonight with the Lightfoot stage headliners beginning rain or shine at 5 p.m.: Bob Snider, followed by Ron Sexsmith, Blackie & the Rodeo Kings, then Serena Ryder, Julian Taylor and Martha Wainwright sharing the stage and finally the Melbourne Ska Orchestra starting at about 10 p.m.