These artists remember what Northern Lights Festival Boreal was like in the beginning

Over the last 50 years, Northern Lights Festival Boreal (NLFB) has been one of Sudbury's most anticipated music festivals.

The festival, which claims to be one of Canada's longest-running, has featured the likes of Jackie Washington, Stan Rogers, Bruce Cockburn, Steven Page, Natalie McMaster and Buffy Ste. Marie.

And this year, to celebrate its five decades of performances, organizers have brought together familiar faces from the past, including Judy Collins, who headlines the main stage Sunday night.

Robert Paquette, a folk singer who was at the first festival, which was called Northern Lights at the time, said those first years were more characteristic of a "get together" than a full-fledged musical gathering. 

"A whole bunch of people said, 'why don't we try something?', Paquette said. "See if we can get some music happening in Sudbury with [festival founder] Scott Merrifield and everybody else."

He said few people had an "inkling" the festival would grow into a long-running, annual event. 

"It was just friends getting together," he said. "And I remember just having such great fun meeting a whole bunch of different people because when you live in Sudbury, you get to see Sudbury people, and that's everything."

"If you wanted to see somebody else, you had to go outside. We had to drive to Toronto, or drive to Ottawa or to Montreal, and now all of a sudden some things were happening in Sudbury."

One of the advantages to holding the festival in Sudbury, Paquette said, was the appreciation shown by local audiences.

"The public was always there with you, even though the sound quality and the lighting quality was very different in those days," he said.

"I think we used my sound system, which was just two speakers on the side with a small console with eight ins and no outs," he said. 

"So that's changed a lot. But the quality of the music was there." 

Performer Ian Tamblyn, a Canadian folk singer who is scheduled to appear on Sunday, has also performed at several past festivals. He said one of the noticeable differences between NLFB and other festivals is the camraderie shared between performers.

Tamblyn, who hails from Thunder Bay, said there was a particular "esprit des corps" among the northern Ontario musicians in those early days.

"There is just like a Northern Ontario essence," Tamblyn said. "We were singing and proud to be singing about the same sort of things. And to me it was like really, really connective tissue." 

The camaraderie also shows up in the festivals' various open stages, where throughout the weekend performers get together and perform with other musicians, often for the first time.

It creates moments of improvisation, but also a chance for musicians to show their chops in front of their peers.

Ken Whitely, who has also appeared on NLFB stages, said those moments can be challenging for a performer, but also "magic."

"That's always, to me, one of the exciting joys of being at a festival, because unexpected things can happen and really musical magic can happen," Whitely said. 

"So you try and kind of make yourself miracle-prone," he said. "You kind of try and make yourself ready to adjust to those circumstances, you know, have a lot of ideas and songs and things like that ready."