"While there is Still Time...": J. Murray Gibbon and the Spectacle of Difference in Three CPR Folk Festivals, 1928-1931

Abstract

Between 1928 and 1931, a series of 16 Folk music and handicraft festivals were staged across Canada under the auspices of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The principal architect of the festivals, John Murray Gibbon, would later popularize the now-ubiquitous and immeasurably influential phrase "Canadian Mosaic" to explain his vision of a united Canada comprised of distinct identities. This article establishes the foundational role played by the category "Folk" in Gibbon's construction of the mosaic metaphor for Canadian cultural identity. It examines the construction of three major festivals and interrogates the very category "Folk" around which they were designed. It establishes connections between the structures of the festivals and the race, class, and gender-based cultural assumptions and ideologies that informed their organizers and participants. Finally, it explores the relationship between Gibbon's emphasis on antimodern Folk identities and an increasingly intricate Canadian cultural matrix under the conditions of modernity.