Catching up with Annabelle

Many years ago, when we spent a year studying in Toronto, we put our kids in a downtown city school called Jesse Ketchum. After the first day, our daughter, who was in Grade 4, said she had met a new friend.

Her name was Annabelle Chvostek. She and our daughter became close friends, and Annabelle began spending long stretches of different summers here on the farm in northern Queens County. They would do things like put on what their posters called a two-girl, one-horse show, and invite people over to see riding events and take turns riding the horse.

They painted scenes on the ceiling of the tree house, made hay forts in the barn, frolicked on Summerville Beach, swam at our cabin and went camping at Blomidon and Kejimkujik. Annabelle's parents, Milan and Isabel also became friends, and visited us here on the farm.

We went up to the Deep Roots folk festival in Wolfville a couple of weekends ago, where one of the main performers was none other than Annabelle Chvostek. In the intervening years, the kids went their separate ways, but when we saw her there were hugs and kisses, just like old times.

Annabelle has just gone solo, after performing with a group called the Wailin' Jennies, who sang at the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival a few years back. The Wailin' Jennies were formed about five years ago in Western Canada, and have since become a sought after Canadian group.

While with the group, Annabelle wrote some great songs, including the title track from the Wailin' Jennies 2006 CD, Firecracker. Others familiar from radio play include the Devil's Paintbrush Road and Swallow, all of which she played in Wolfville.

Wolfville in September turns out to be a great place for a folk music festival. Deep Roots is affiliated with Acadia University, so performances take place in University Hall and in the Atlantic Festival Theatre, as well as in the Al Whittle Theatre, which used to be the old Acadia Theatre. We first caught Annabelle in the Garden Room at the K.C. Irving Environmental Centre, where she was performing with American folk singer Mary Gauthier and the Nova Scotia group Clearing by Noon, which features Rose Vaughan, Catriona Talbot and Sandy Greenberg.

We saw her again at the Wolfville Farm Market, on Saturday morning, where she performed on a covered stage while we strolled about looking at a huge variety of fruit and vegetables and exotic baked goods, eating samosas and drinking sweet apple cider. Her mainstage performance was Saturday night, when she was on a billing with people like Matt Andersen. The seats in University Hall are the same hard wooden ones that existed when I was a student at Acadia, and I think I wrote a political science exam in the same one where I was now listening to the music.

People in Liverpool have had a chance to hear Matt Andersen at the Astor Theatre, an experience that won't soon be forgotten. Andersen is a huge man who had audiences on their feet singing at the tops of their lungs two years running at the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival. He appears at the Pearl Theatre in Lunenburg on Saturday, November 10.

There were many superb acts at Deep Roots, but people who like fiddle and Celtic music should make a point of seeing MacCrimmon's Revenge, whose performances were filmed by CBC television for a feature program later this year, and Vishten, who have become our area's main ambassadors for Acadian music.

But back to Annabelle Chvostek. She had a fabulous time touring North America and Europe with the Wailin' Jennies, but needed to build her solo career, so she left the group. Years ago, when we went to her house in Toronto we found it full of musical instruments. Her father, Milan is a former CBC television producer and director, and her mother, Isabel Warren, a journalist and editor. It was no surprise to us when Annabelle chose to make her living at music.

She says she grew up with the vibrations of her mother's guitar and her dad's mandolin and violin. Everybody sang. She was raised on a steady diet of music parties and choir practices, and had her first professional gig when she was seven, with the Canadian Children's Opera Company.

It was fun to make contact with her again, and we'll be watching for the next time she comes on tour to Nova Scotia.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com