Vilna celebrated its third annual Cowboy Fest on July 19 and 21, attracting a number of people from all over the province. The event featured music, stories, and cowboy poetry.
The festival took place at the Vilna Cultural Centre and involved a number of performers. There were hot meals served, and a raffle draw for various prizes that went on throughout the event.
“This is a fabulous festival. It’s bigger and better than last year’s,” said John McCormack, a volunteer who helped organize the festival. “Everyone here is happy and having a good time, paying a lot of attention to the performances. The entertainers we got to perform are top quality. Jackson (Mackenzie) did a swell job of putting it on.”
A lot of the performances included a combination of singing, storytelling, and cowboy poetry. There were more seriously reflections and sentiments, there were exciting tales, and a lot of humor involved.
Among those who performed with a combination of poetry, music, and narrative was Ed Brown, an award-winning cowboy poet.
“This isn’t my first Cowboy Fest. There’ve been others in the province, and like many others this one has been really good. I’m very impressed with how it’s turning out,” explained Brown.
“This is very much a community thing, we’re all friends here, and we’ve really come to know each other. When you’ve been doing it together for so long, you get to know one another,” he adds.
Brown often performs “in the heat of the moment,” and tries to play off what other performers are doing.
“We try not to do the same thing over and over, and end up going off in a lot of different directions with our performance, depending on how the audience reacts. With songs it’s pretty inflexible, you sort of stick with it, but with poetry you can improvise and switch it up. I would define what we do as a combination of concerts and stand-up comedy.”
Friday featured the talent the likes of Brown, Windi Scott, Bob Glidden, Kayla Patrick, and Jackson MacKenzie, along with a number of other artists. Saturday featured breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as acts likes Cassidy Zahar, BJ Smith, and many of the performers from the day before. The day concluded with a dance to the Wolfe River Band.
Sunday Featured breakfast and lunch, Cowboy Church, a service with a distinctive cowboy-theme with preaching and poetry, and a Happy Trails Show at the festival’s close.
“It’s a great event with good variety. It’s cool to see a small community join together. Volunteers are such a valuable part of this too – they make all this happen,” said Colette Borgun, a guest attending the festival from Plamondon.
