Roots Music Festival set to debut today in Legacy Park

By Ry Clarke - Lethbridge Herald Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on August 20, 2022.

Herald photo by Ry Clarke Local talent Makiisma, seen here performing at another event last mont, will be part of the line up at the Lethbridge Roots Music Festival.

The Lethbridge Folk Club is hosting its first Lethbridge Roots Music Festival at Legacy Regional Park today from noon to 7:30 p.m..

The 73-acre park will host a free day-long event with 10 musical artists including Lethbridge roots musician Ryland Moranz, whose 2020 album “XO, 1945” was a nominee for Contemporary Album of the Year at the 17th Canadian Folk Music Awards in 2022.

Building off the Club’s Folk Festival last year it is looking to expand with this event opening more areas and having multiple stages for performers. The Club is also partnering with the Lethbridge Jazz Society to help bring more to the event.

“Because of the size of the festival and the fact that it’s being held in a public park, we can’t sell tickets. So we got a partner and also applied for grants to see if we could get public funding to help us put this on. We were fortunate that we received support from the City and also from the Province and Federal government. All three are chipping in to make this possible,” said Tom Moffatt, president of the Lethbridge Folk Club.

The festival will look to expand on what it offers to the public, with crafts for kids at the Pavilion building from noon to 3 p.m. followed by three music workshops working on vocal harmony, dobro lessons (an acoustic guitar with a metal resonator built into its body), and songwriting.

The festival will also see a return of a former board member from the Club back in the 1990s, Larry Steinbrenner, performing under the stage name Dr. Lar-Bar, and pays homage to his profession of archaeology and anthropology with folk songs about Charles Darwin.

Locally, the talent of Makiisma will also be performing, having recently preformed at the Geomatic Attic’s Wide Skies Music Festival here in Lethbridge.

The festival will encompass a wide variety of roots-style artists from across Canada and locally, hoping to continue this event into the next year.

“We’re doing a survey at the festival to see if people are responding and whether they think it would be good to do it again next year. One of the other goals we had in putting this on was to show that you could have a fairly large festival similar to things that they do in Calgary, Edmonton and Grande Prairie. I think one of the things we’re trying to demonstrate is that it is possible to have a fair-sized festival here, there’s a lot of different areas in the park that you can set up. Whether it’s us doing it again, at least maybe we will inspire other people to do it again in the future,” said Moffatt.