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Welcome back, Home! London music festival returns with 'great' lineup

A lineup loaded with local and Canadian talent will entertain at the 47th annual Home County Music and Arts Festival.

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A lineup loaded with local and Canadian talent will entertain at the 47th annual Home County Music and Arts Festival.

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After two years sidelined by the pandemic, one of Canada’s longest-running music festivals returns to Victoria Park July 15-17 with Sarnia native Emm Gryner headlining on the main stage Saturday, Quebec folk innovators Mélisande topping Friday’s opening night bill and Juno-winning folk star William Prince headlining Sunday’s closing night.

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Other main-stage artists include Londoners Chad Price, Aaron Allen, Katherine Fischer and Ken Yates. Paul Mills, Saidat and Serena Haggarty will be among local acts performing on several other festival stages.

“I think it’s a great lineup, especially coming out of the pandemic and, because we haven’t been operating for two years, budgets are tighter, so we couldn’t bring in a lot of the bigger acts,” said festival manager Darren Addison, who took over after Tim Fraser stepped down a few weeks ago to focus on family.

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“I think Tim has done just a great job.”

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Addison, who managed the festival for five years before Fraser’s arrival in 2018, is on a short-term contract. A new manager will be hired this fall.

Home County 47 also will see more than 100 juried artisans selling their products at the park, along with a wide variety of food vendors offering culinary delights from around the world.

Addison said closing headliner Prince, a Juno winner and Winnipeg native, “is an awesome, amazing singer-songwriter – a big man with a gentle soul.”

Gryner, a three-time Juno nominee, may be the best-known of the headliners, having toured with David Bowie and worked with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, arranging and performing piano on his cover of Bowie’s Space Oddity, which spawned a video featuring Hadfield playing on the International Space Station that’s considered the first video shot in space.

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Gryner, a founding member of folk trio Trent Severn (now on hiatus), has recorded several solo albums, including last year’s Just For You, a jazz set for her father. Also in 2021, she put out a book, The Healing Power of Singing: Raise Your Voice, Change Your Life (What Touring with David Bowie, Single Parenting and Ditching the Music Business Taught Me in 25 Easy Steps).

“Everybody loves Emm,” said Addison. “She’s such a musical chameleon in terms of the types of music she can present from folk, to pop, rock, jazz . . . incredible talent.”

Opening headliner Mélisande is less known, but just as interesting, putting a contemporary spin on traditional Québécois folk music by mixing traditional tunes with electro-pop music. They won a Canadian Folk Music Award in 2014 and received two more nominations in 2017.

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“I think this band is going to be exciting to see and certainly a little different with their ‘folktronica’ sound,” said Addison, noting how the festival has pushed genre boundaries in recent years to include more contemporary artists.

“That’s a good thing because now, the people who were coming here in the ’70s are returning with their children and their grandchildren and we have to keep up with the times.”

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Home County Folk Festival was launched in 1974, the name “Home” a nod to the local counties of Huron, Oxford, Middlesex and Essex.

jbelanger@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/JoeBatLFPress


IF YOU GO

What: Home County 47, the 47th Home County Music & Arts Festival.

When: July 15-17.

Where: Victoria Park, downtown London.

Admission: Free, though donations are strongly recommended. Visit homecounty.ca for more information

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