What Happened at Canada’s Mariposa Folk Festival?
This is about the Mariposa Folk Festival held July 4 through 6, 2025 in Orillia, Ontario, and in particular an event which occurred on the closing night, Sunday July 6.
I have long been a fan of this venerable music festival, now in its 65th season. As a teenager who learned to play first-album Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan songs on my guitar, I attended the June 1974 Mariposa on Toronto Island. In 1987, with our toddler son and eight-month-old daughter, we attended the July 1987 Mariposa at Barrie’s Molson Park. (Our daughter is now 38 and has three children of her own). In both cases, I recall the music, the playful atmosphere and the warm community feel.
Overall, the 2025 Mariposa Folk Festival was a good event. Attendees of the sold-out crowd were of all generations, from aging former hippies and flower children (like ourselves) to families with children, and young people of all ages. Alcohol and drug use was restricted, and thanks to a strong environmental focus, the grounds of the well-suited Tudhope Park on the shores of Lake Couchiching were clean and pleasant, even in bare feet. This contributed to an enjoyable, friendly atmosphere, and as the Festival president wrote in her introductory remarks, the aim of the festival was to “bring joy, unity, and a sense of belonging”. Which I felt that it did. Until about 7:20 PM on the final night, at the main Lightfoot stage. That was when Jordan Smart from Kentucky sang a one-sided agitprop song about Palestine and Gaza and the Israel-Hamas war.
He introduced his tune by saying he felt guilty about being a straight white male, and this song was to show that despite this, he was a good person. The song was a diatribe in which all evil is on one side, and all the blameless victims are on the other. The lines were taken straight out of Hamas’ anti-Israel propaganda playbook i.e. the Jewish state is nothing but a white colonial oppressor; fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their 45,000 fighters are never mentioned and seem not to exist; there are only innocent Palestinian civilians. No mention is made of anything Hamas did that might have started the war, as if Israel just decided to go and intentionally kill Palestinian children. He even included the pro-Hamas line of liberating Palestine from the perfidious Jews “From the river to the shore” (He changed “sea” to “shore” for rhyming purposes).
While I don’t expect Mariposa to police the content of every songwriter, (though even cursory research would show his deep bias) consider this hypothetical. What if at 7:20 pm, instead of Jordan Smart singing his one-sided anti-Israel song, a man with a guitar got up and sang a song in which each line was a folk-song rendition of the following:
Heartrending details about the atrocities of October 7, the 1200 killed, the families burned alive; the rape and kidnapping and murder of concertgoers at the Nova music festival; Islamic fundamentalists cynically using civilians and civilian infrastructure as human shields; Hamas firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians; Hamas allies Hezbollah (“Party of God”) and the Houthi Anser Allah (“Supporters of God”) firing hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians; Iran’s Shiite fundamentalist regime, whose official foreign policy is the destruction of Israel, firing ballistic missiles at Israel; the singer calling for Jewish victory “from the river to the shore”, and ending their thank you with “The people of Israel live!”. And introducing this song by saying (as Jordan Smart said), “if I didn’t sing this song, I wouldn’t be a folk singer”, thus having “folk music” endorse a totally one-sided treatment of a very complex and fraught issue.
If THAT had happened, instead of Jordan Smart’s one-sided diatribe, would the host have merely thanked the singer and moved on to the next act?
But of course that is a hypothetical in which a pro-Israel and anti-Islamic fundamentalist song was sung. But in fact, what was sung was a pro-Palestine / anti-Israel song without any nuance.
Tom Power, the excellent veteran host of CBC radio’s music show “Q”, served as Mariposa’s main stage host. Tom was diplomatic and made no editorial comment supporting this song. But neither did he provide any response at all to indicate that perhaps this kind of agitprop song was not appropriate at the main stage of a festival whose stated aim was “to bring joy, unity, and a sense of belonging”.
This did not bring joy unity or a sense of belonging. Certainly not to me as a Canadian Jew, or to my wife, born in Israel. We who have brothers and sisters and cousins and nephews and nieces, all living in Israel and strongly affected by the war, started by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and continued by Hezbollah firing missiles from Lebanon, and Houthis firing missiles from Yemen, and Iran firing ballistic missiles from the east.
Perhaps the host might have said something like this:
“It’s unfortunate that at a festival, where “from the first note to last encore, every moment is crafted to bring joy, unity, and a sense of belonging” a singer took a very one-sided approach to a very complex issue. I’m sure there are different points of view and strongly felt positions on all sides of this complicated dispute. Mariposa as a music festival encourages us to find the commonality, rather than finding ways to be divisive, and set one group against the other.”
Or perhaps the host, trying to restore a bit of balance, might have said:
“Seeing that Mariposa is a music festival of joy and peace, with people camping out overnight, we should recall in solidarity the 3500 music-lovers attending the Nova music festival near Re’im in southern Israel. On the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas and Islamic jihad attacked and 378 innocent Nova Festival goers, all young people, were killed. Dozens of young women were raped. Forty-four attendees were kidnapped from the festival and taken as hostages to tunnels in Gaza. Sixteen of these music festival attendees hostages are STILL being held in Gaza tunnels, 11 of them presumed alive. So let us consider in sadness the terrible toll imposed on innocent civilians on both sides of the conflict stemming from Hamas’ October 7 attack.”
