Photo Gallery: 48th Ann Arbor Folk Fest

“I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more” singer and songwriter, Bob Dylan, once sang at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, in response to the Newport Folk Planning Committee’s imminent and oppressive categorization of an evolutionary music group and community. Today, Folk comes to Ann Arbor in many forms at The Ark’s 48th annual Folk Festival.

Seated in Hill Auditorium Friday night, the crowd melted in their seats with Josh Ritter on stage, following the dynamic and energy-filled performances of Afro Dominicano. Ritter ranged between singing songs like “Feels Like Lighting” that faded into others like “Truth Is a Dimension.” Folk music is an important feature of life, developing as society continues to find new ways to strike a balance between humanity and contributions to a looming economy. With its poetic nature rooted in the human condition, it stands in solidarity with society. At the festival, artists from across the country joined to share their songs, building a space of harmony at Hill Auditorium. Just as important as the musicians, the viewers, listeners and organizers preserved folk at this festival and made it uniquely the 48th. As they impressed their lessons on the University of Michigan campus and the city of Ann Arbor itself, they left behind an everlasting trace of song and story. 

Though the festival featured many artists, The Michigan Daily spoke to five of them at length to understand further the wave of folk that was on its way to Ann Arbor once again. Josh Ritter, The Milk Carton Kids, Ketch Secor, Willi Carlisle and Joy Clark shared their resounding practice, providing everlasting messages that portray an important history of the present through the lens of the folk community. 

Josh Ritter

Ritter is a singer and songwriter from Moscow, Idaho. With a fierce energy on and off the stage, Ritter exudes an essential attitude towards life. 

He describes folk music and creation as an everlasting and changing category. With it, he shares an analogy on Play-Doh. 

“Why do we think that music is a thing that could be commodified? It’s just the thing that you kind of impress on reality. The thing about Play-Doh that’s so wonderful is when it’s fresh and you can press it through the mold that makes the spaghetti. It’s so beautiful, it just feels almost alive, but then three hours later, that same stuff is not formed for that particular thing. There are other things that it’s good for, but I think that’s kind of the way it is with all things that people are good at. You have this weird, soft place that is more malleable to the impression that the world makes upon you. It never meant for me being good in a crisis, but music was the thing that felt like the way for my own soul to get out.”

Left: Singer and songwriter Josh Ritter performs at the 48th-annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival Friday night at Hill Auditorium. Meleck Eldahshoury/DAILY. Buy this photo. Right: Zack Hickman bassist for Josh Ritter plays the cello onstage Friday night. Arushi Sanghi/DAILY. Buy this photo.

Folk song has been described by many as a modern gospel that preaches on how to overcome the challenges of capitalism and corruption in the changing state of the world. 

Ritter describes his writing process to The Daily.

“Writing songs has always been about getting as much as possible into just a few words. When you get down to the atomic structure of a story, when you’re working with 300 words or less, every word has to be like a snowflake with a hub that leads out in these little spokes that could go any direction in terms of their emotions. And so you make this snowball, and it’s filled with about 500 words. But then they’re all spiky, and they all do their own thing, and each one is so on its own.”

The combination of music and writing is unique in its effectiveness in spreading a message, one that transcends time. Ritter did this in his performance and continues to lead his life in such a manner. “All I want to do in my long memory view of everything is light a fire that gives (people) comfort in any tiny way. It isn’t so much ‘folk music,’ but more of a kinship with the people making music that have nothing to do with commerce in a major way.”

With his conducive energy, Josh Ritter leaves Ann Arbor highlighting that “whatever you don’t get out of you will be your ruin.”

Ketch Secor

Emcee of this year’s festival, Secor is the co-founder and current frontman for the band Old Crow Medicine Show. He brought an energy that intertwined the audience, organizers and musicians, which fostered a tight-knit community throughout the two-night festival. Secor prompted the audience into song, singing “Garden Song,” “Talkin’ Bout A Revolution,” “We Shall Overcome” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” He concluded his performances both nights with an impromptu band of festival performers — Jobi Riccio and Joey Ryan. The duo sang a southern classic, “Wagon Wheel.”

Secor shares that a large part of folk music and creation in the world is derived from impressions: from the things we unconsciously view, to the figures we look up to at heart.

“We’re walking jukeboxes, you and me. Everything that we know is what we heard. So anything that we create is borrowed, stolen and maybe a little bit original too. This is the soundtrack of our descent.”

Within the genre of folk one can find many sub-genres, turning genrefication into a meaningless process. Secor doesn’t participate in the process of categorizing his music, believing labels to be trivial when compared to the inexplicable nature of music, though often people put names to it.

Left: Festival emcee Ketch Secor plays a violin as the loose strings of his bow fly around at the 48th-annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival Friday night at Hill Auditorium. Arushi Sanghi/DAILY. Buy this photo; Top right: Secor (right) and Joey Ryan (left) perform “Wagon Wheel.” Meleck Eldahshoury/DAILY. Buy this photo.; Bottom right: Secor hosts the Ann Arbor Folk Festival Friday night. Arushi Sanghi/DAILY. Buy this photo.

In an attempt to put a definition to a folk music revival he says: “Social nature, order, dilemma, the fight for justice. That’s all folk. And anytime that you create a world where dance is your expression of those things of dissent, your expression of longing is expressed through dance. That’s folk music. I feel connected to the folk, the people. The folk music, it’s just resounding. The birds say it, cars’ horns honk it. Cops say it to you before they pull you over. Everybody’s making the chorus that folk music is a response to.”

Secor highlights folk music’s relevance as an evolving movement by saying, “2025 is probably as ripe a time for the seeds of musical revolution to germinate and spread.”

Willi Carlisle

Carlisle is a singer and songwriter from Kansas, though he is based in Arkansas. In what felt like a crash course in frontal-lobe development, Carlisle philosophically presented folk in his twenty-minute set, speaking on the important conditions of individual place in a larger convoluted society. He sang songs like “Tulsa’s Last Magician” and closed his set joining the crowd for a sing-along.

Details of categorization can be easily looked over in the history of music and folk.

“I knew a folklorist that I admire who said that folk culture is self-evident and not self-conscious. I like to stay as rooted as possible by continuing to play music that feels self-evident in its cultural relevance to me, and to communities. … It is a really difficult lens to look at folk music or folk culture from an exclusionary standpoint for the purpose of definition; that doesn’t strike me as very fun.” 

“If music is freeing, it’s because it is related to our suffering, in a meaningful way… I guess I think of folk music as one of the remaining dikes against the rising tides of loneliness.”

Carlisle described his process of consciousness, which takes up most of his time as an artist and contributor to the folk community.

“If you are what you eat and you’re the sum total of what you give your attention to, well then I’ve spent a lot more time trying to cultivate my attention than trying to craft the perfect container for that attention. Because the container exists (in song).”

Carlisle finds there is a balance to strike between creativity and practicality in its influence on folk musicians’ lives and thus what they create.

“How much is enough for a person? Most of us don’t have choices about how one thing should interact with the other. How can anybody have a choice if they’re really just trying to keep the lights on? It’s the people that are trying to keep up with the Joneses that I want to look out for and try to make sure I’m not emulating.”

Joy Clark

Clark is a singer-songwriter from New Orleans. She is currently on tour with Ani DiFranco and stopped by Ann Arbor in the midst of it. She first was introduced to the musical scene through her church growing up and continued to play, from her college dorm to now on the big stage. 

“It’s things that you can’t really say in a conversation, but you can put it in the feeling, because chords are colors. And those colors create words and, well, what do you want to say? The guitar for me, is like, ‘OK, you want to say this thing. Let me give you some vocabulary and chords and melody so you can find the words’.”

In these harsh junctures, the music and lyricism of folk are crucial. Though it is not identifiable in one collective message, these artists, including Joy, find a way to spread their wisdom in words that fit into this era, and will continue to as time moves on.

Left: Singer and songwriter Joy Clark performs at the 48th-annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival Saturday night at Hill Auditorium. Meleck Eldahshoury/DAILY. Buy this photo; Middle: Clark smiles as she looks to the audience and performs on stage. Arushi Sanghi/DAILY. Buy this photo.; Right: Clark performs on stage. Arushi Sanghi/DAILY. Buy this photo.

“We’re under attack, and I think there’s a lot of unease— and rightfully so. I want to be able to bring a hope and an optimism and veracity in protecting the people that we care about in our community. Because when it comes down to it, we’re really all that we have.”

The Milk Carton Kids

The Milk Carton Kids are a singer/songwriter duo from Los Angeles made up of Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan. Having met and intertwined their musical careers in 2010, they came back to Ann Arbor for their first appearance in The Ark’s Folk Festival. Their anarchical sarcasm brought warmth to the crowd as they recognized their place on stage while highlighting the important crew at The Ark. They spoke of an undeniable importance to their first publicist, Emilee Warner, who encouraged them to attend Folk Alliance where they first began to consider themselves a part of the folk community.

Describing their origins, Pattengale starts, “We weren’t really tapped into it, or didn’t really know about it so much when we started, because we were in LA; they called it a singer/songwriter scene.” 

Ryan adds, “Everyone was just trying to get their songs on “Grey’s Anatomy,” which was a new show at the time. We learned that, like all of the planet, music is about community, about meeting people, and that’s how we met.”

Left: Singer and songwriter Kenneth Pattengale strums his guitar at the 48th-annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival Saturday night at Hill Auditorium. Arushi Sanghi/DAILY. Buy this photo; Right: Singer and songwriter Joey Ryan looks to the microphone in between two songs with his hand in his pocket as he holds his guitar. Arushi Sanghi/DAILY. Buy this photo.

On their transition to folk music, Pattengale describes their growth into a larger folk community that unconsciously influenced their music-making process, from receiving their own audiences to noticing what other musicians wrote and the harmonies they played.

“I’m sure that pushed us in the direction that we were going, but it also felt pretty natural, like that’s the way we wanted to go.”

He adds in a description of music and its cultivation, “I don’t think it’s proper to define what (folk music) is in advance and then look at something and see if it fits in. It’s more of a group of people, which includes the people who run The Ark and the Ann Arbor Folk Festival and the fans across the country and the world who say that they like folk music, and then the artists who say that they make folk music. Then you look at that whole ecosystem, that whole community of relationships amongst those people and the music and values that it turns out — it’s all described by the word folk. It can change, it has changed and will change.”

Folk music today encourages an important contrarian mindset towards society at large. Just like folk, being contrarian is an attribute that lasts to question the laws of corruption that fall upon its citizens. Along with these five narrators, the wailing of Waxahatchee, the captivating voice of Jobi Riccio and the profound presence of Bruce Cockburn made this year’s festival, impressing Ann Arbor and its campus. The 48th-annual Folk Festival has carved out an important niche in its time, created by a community of listeners, artists and organizers alike. Together, the history of the present is born, and with it a newfound freedom explored. 

Senior Photo Editor Meleck Eldahshoury and Assistant Photo Editor Arushi Sanghi can be reached at melda@umich.edu and arushii@umich.edu.

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