This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
This week is the Alaska Folk Festival, an annual music festival in Juneau that started in 1975.
Folk Fest is completely free to attend, thanks to the work of dozens and dozens of volunteers. With about 125 acts cycling through the mainstage in 15-minute intervals, the success of the festival relies heavily on the swiftness of the volunteer stage crew.
And that’s organized by Alaska Folk Festival board members like longtime stage crew volunteer Hiram Henry.
You can hear live broadcasts of main stage performances every night this week on KRNN 102.7 and 103.1 FM and ktoo.org/folkfest.
Listen:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiram Henry: We have probably 130, 140 volunteers for a given festival. Forty-five of those are stage crew people. It’s a lot of herding cats, but they’re all, like, friendly cats that are glad to be there.
I’m Hiram Henry, and part of the Folk Festival board. There’s nine of us. As a kid, I grew up kind of on stage with my dad and my sister, and that was a fun thing to do. Probably, I’d say 12 years ago, I started getting pretty involved in the stage crew and then maybe nine years ago, started on the board.
I really like stage crew. I’m still learning how to be a musician, but that stage crew was something I could do, even if I wasn’t a confident performer.
It was fun to be part of the action — in the trenches of what’s going on.
What does the stage crew do? As soon as the current act ends, the stage crew jumps into action. They move the microphone, set them, take down old equipment and set up new equipment for the next act, which, again, could be two people singing a duet. It could be a big ensemble, it could be anything. It’s different each time.
It goes fast before you know it, five hours has flown by. It’s also one of the best seats in the house, because you’re right by the stage, you get to see this rather intimate and very personal view of the performers on stage doing their thing.
And the music’s fabulous. I mean, the jamming and songs you didn’t know before, and you walk away with a new favorite song just because somebody showed it to you, that’s pretty awesome to learn. I learned more in one week at Folk Fest about music than I do the rest of the year I feel.
People build confidence when they just jump into things. At least for the stage crew, we have veterans that have done it, you know, for the past 10 years, and we have people who have never done it, and they have the guts to just step up and say, ‘I think I could try that,’ and they really have a good time. And without it, this festival wouldn’t happen without all the volunteers.
It’s so cool for me to see people realize that they’re part of making it happen.
