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New performers to entertain at festival this weekend

The Princeton Traditional Music Festival is coming up this weekend and we hope you’ll all be there!
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A host of visitors and residents enjoy the Friday evening Dance at the Princeton Traditional Music Festival in 2012.

As usual the Festival begins on Friday evening with the opening ceremony followed by a country dance on Veterans’ Way beside the Legion. The dance will feature a live band with fiddle, guitar and concertina. Everyone is welcome. There will be a caller to teach the dances so no experience is necessary and people don’t even need to bring a partner. On Saturday and Sunday there will be music from 10 am until 6 pm right in town.

We are fortunate this year to have a wealth of new performers coming to the Festival. The one traveling the furthest is Caitlin Marie Bell, a New York City-based folk singer from Snellville, Georgia, whose music and storytelling are primarily centred around the roots of the American folk tradition. Classically trained and inspired by the blues, Appalachian, country and classical styles on which she was raised, Caitlin writes songs and arrangements that strive to keep the American folk tradition alive.

Another new group this year is Hard Row from Armstrong. The duo consists of Kim and Kaila Sinclair, a father and daughter duo who have been performing together for almost twenty years. With their melodic sound, they sing traditional ballads of love, loss and lament. Kaila’s soaring voice and Kim’s unique guitar styling weave around and through the music they love. With reflection and a sense of humour Hard Row connects their music with the relevance of history and the world today.

No information about the Princeton Traditional Music Festival would be complete without mentioning our exciting, faithful and competent Friday evening dance band. The Psycho Acoustic Ceili Band has been organizing the Friday dances for the past five years and thanks to them, young and old, light-footed and clumsy have enjoyed a community dance on Veterans’ Way

The Friday evening ceili is a friendly dance that can be enjoyed by all. Dance to toe-tapping traditional Irish music played by Annie Brown on fiddle, John Gothard on concertina and Dave Marshall on guitar. The fun-loving Keri-Ann Thor will teach  the dances, making them accessible to all.

These are just a few of the performers appearing at this year’s Festival, and the best thing about it is it’s free

The reason the festival is free is because it’s run entirely by volunteers and the performers are donating their talents.  To make the festival a success the organizers will need lots of volunteers. If you’d like to get involved, please contact them. Even if you have only a couple of hours available your help would be most welcome. Give them a call and they’ll welcome you aboard. To find out more visit the Festival’s webblog at princetontraditional.org or give Jon and Rika a call at 250-295-6010.

See you on the weekend!