Members of the Winnipeg neo-folk group The Duhks, left to right: Jordan McConnell, Leonard Podolak, Sarah Dugas, Tania Elizabeth and Scott Senior. (Laura Crosta/Sugar Hill Records)
According to Leonard Podolak, leader of the Grammy-nominated Canadian roots band The Duhks, Winnipeggers “stand on the prairie, with their ears wide open to music.” He should know. The 31-year-old son of Winnipeg Folk Festival co-founder Mitch Podolak, Leonard spent much of his youth in Birds Hill Provincial Park, where this summer — as in every summer since 1974 — close to 40,000 people will gather to hear a variety of folk and world music.
This year’s festival, which runs July 5 to 8, features an eclectic lineup, including the African Guitar Summit, Randy Newman, Los Lobos, Todd Snider and The Duhks. This won’t be Podolak’s festival debut, however. “At four, when I was really into the TV show The Incredible Hulk, I once walked on stage and went from Bill Bixby’s Bruce Banner to Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk, uttering the word, ‘metamorphosis.’ That was my act then,” he laughs.
Podolak was recently in his hometown, in a talkative mood and full of opinions and stories about Winnipeg, its famous folk festival and The Duhks, a genre-busting band that has become a headline act on the American folk circuit with a sound that has been described as “progressive soul grass” and “Beyoncé meets the Grateful Dead.” The banjo player was also more than happy to explain how his band came to fiddle around with Led Zeppelin in a YouTube video that surfaced earlier this year.
Q: What was it like growing up with the Winnipeg Folk Festival?
A: I was born the year after the first festival. Folk music and the festival to me was life. I had to give up my bed at home to visiting musicians come festival time. Stan Rogers and Tony Bird, guys like that. Every summer, I was in a park listening to people I knew play.
Q: Did you see any acts over the years that influenced your musical direction?
A: Hundreds. One show stands out, though. My dad tried to teach me the banjo when I was six. Didn’t happen. Then, I guess I was 12, I met Billy Bragg, who was really cool. He took me under his wing one festival. One night he says, “C’mon, we’re going to see my friends, Oysterband.” And we walk into this party and there was this wild Celtic group playing with a kick-ass rhythm section. Afterwards, it was like, “Dad, let’s have another banjo lesson.”
Q: Teenagers normally react against their parents’ music. Any Red River musical rebellions in your house?
A: When I was 13, I played keyboards in a Guns N’ Roses cover band. My parents frowned, but they rented me keyboards and drums and gave me the third floor to practice in. We lived in the Wolseley area, what was then called the granola belt — lots of hippies. Nobody seemed to mind, although a couple of months in, my dad took the drums back. He just shook his head and was like, “Sorry, you’re not a drummer.”
Q: Winnipeg groups once mimicked British rock bands. Famously, The Guess Who’s name came about when a promoter put “Guess Who?” on the cover of their first hit, Shakin’ All Over, encouraging speculation that the group was a mystery British band. Today, we think of Winnipeg music as largely acoustic and folk-based. What happened?
A: The Winnipeg Folk Festival. Rock ’n’ roll was big and Festival Express, the train that came through with Janis Joplin in 1970, made an impact. At the same time, music festivals were scary things. People died at the Altamont festival. So a rock festival was: no way. Now a folk festival: Hmmm, that could work. And it did. As kids, we took it all in. I can remember Ruth Moody [of The Wailin’ Jennies] and I wandering through the park listening to Celtic, French-Canadian and old-time bands.
(Sugar Hill Records)
Q: Winnipeg is ethnically diverse, with an entrenched French community, in St. Boniface, as well as Jewish and Ukrainian communities. Does the city’s make-up help explain why it produced a world festival?
A: Absolutely. I went to French immersion, L'École Sacré-Coeur, with kids of every colour and dialect. And the French arts community is very active here, does a great job.
Q: I notice that you include a French song on every album.
A: We love French-Canadian folk music. I was kind of upset we couldn’t get one on [our last album] Migrations, even though we got a zydeco song on. Then I realized, Hey, I wrote a French lyric for the song and I’m Canadian.
Q: The opening song on Migrations is Ol’ Cook Pot, a song about making a great stew out of various ingredients — an apt metaphor for The Duhks’s music.
A: The stuff we love: Celtic music, French-Canadian folk songs, Afro-Cuban rhythms, it all comes out in what we play. Folk music is in a constant state of migration. I play a banjo, which started out as a gourd with two strings on it from Africa. What we think of as traditional folk music is fiddle music from the British Isles mixed with African rhythms.
Q: There’s a great YouTube performance of The Duhks playing Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love with Zep’s bass player, John Paul Jones, at Merlefest in North Carolina. What happened there?
A: Jones is a producer for Uncle Earl, great friends of ours. We’d met him a couple of times. And at Merlefest, a bluegrass mecca we really love, we had a lot of responsibilities this year. We were headlining and hosts of the midnight jam and new-generation jam, so we rehearsed new stuff. One song was a Dewey Balfa Cajun tune that went into Whole Lotta Love. You know Led Zeppelin played a folk music, blues music. We love mixing folk music up. Tear down all the walls, I say. So we played it at the festival. We didn’t know John Paul Jones was there. But I saw him afterwards and went, “Dude,” and gave him a big hug — didn’t know what else to do. Later, we played the song together. It was fantastic.
Q: Jessee Havee, the lead singer on the last couple of albums, wears a duck tattoo on her chest emblazoned with the word “family.” At Merlefest, however, it was a new singer, Sarah Dugas, who sang Whole Lotta Love. Are we to assume that Jessee is no longer in the family?
A: Music, being in a band, is a hard lifestyle. There is our music, which Jessee loves, if I can speak for her. I mean we love her, too. Tania [Elizabeth, the Duhks’s fiddler] saw her yesterday. But then there is touring: playing late, driving all night, eating crappy food. You can go months without feeling your feet are ever on the ground. Jessee didn’t want to continue doing that.
Q: Where did you find Sarah Dugas?
A: I’ve known her since she was 14. I played with her older brother, Christian, in the band Scruj MacDuhk. She’s great. I’ll know today if she’s joining for good. We love her.
Q: There is a school of thought that says artists can’t go home again. Any apprehension about The Duhks playing the Winnipeg Folk Festival?
A: Absolutely not. We have unfinished business in Canada. We’re way bigger in the United States. We sure never wanted that. To be in Winnipeg again, on that stage, under that sky, is my idea of heaven. It’s summer.… We’re dying to show people what we can do.
The Winnipeg Folk Festival runs July 5-8.
Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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