How one Catholic school created a folk festival
When Canongate Catholic High School was founded in 2013 in the mountains of North Carolina, the Stillwater Hobos had just finished recording their full-length album, My Love, She’s in America, nearby at the famed Echo Mountain studio, whose portfolio boasts such songwriting luminaries as the Avett Brothers, Iron & Wine, Justin Townes Earle, Band of Horses, Mandolin Orange (now Watchhouse), and Turnpike Troubadours. The short-lived band that revolutionized the Catholic musical imagination with a vision marked by folk songs left a permanent mark on the school, as one of their members joined as a teacher in Canongate’s first years, teaching literature and Latin and, yes, the songbook of tradition. In between classes, on feast days, and in moments of pause from study, the air would fill with music. Students learned ballads born long ago in Ireland and Scotland, “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “Loch Lomond” and “Tell Me Ma”; the American continent also was present in more recent traditional artists like Stan Rogers and Old Crow Medicine Show, teaching the love of seafaring in “The Mary Ellen Carter” and the power of a poor Texas plowman’s prayer in “Take ‘Em Away,” even as the days of such professions were long gone. Stillwater Hobos songs entered the repertoire, of course; “Saint Therese” became an anthem, punctuating the days typified by engagement with literature and algebra and biology and chemistry and fine arts.
Canongate’s pedagogy originates in the thought of John Senior, whose approach to education, illustrated most brilliantly in the Integrated Humanities Program that he directed during the 1970s at the University of Kansas, seeks a full and unmediated relationship with the real. Direct experience of creation, play, poetry, music, dancing, and story equip the human person for discovering and understanding the sacramental essence of the world, that the goodness of matter, perceived by the senses, points to Goodness himself, encountered and received by the soul. Senior’s student, Father Francis Bethel, a monk of Clear Creek Abbey, describes it thus: “Delighting in reality, wondering at its mysteries, with a healthy imagination, a memory full of stories, songs, poems, experiences, one would be ready for life and eventually for more elevated, abstract studies.”
This primal and primary human need for immersion in the stuff of being applies practically to the classroom. Senior fought fiercely for the Great Books, but he just as fiercely fought for what he called the “Thousand Good Books” to cultivate the seeds that flower in reading the Western canon: “The seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, romances, adventures—the thousand good books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest. . . . It is the seedbed of intelligence and will, the ground for all studies in the arts and sciences, including theology, without which they are inhumane and destructive.” At Canongate in its early years, this perspective took form in memorizing Aesop’s Fables, discerning the nonsense verses of Edward Lear, and reading aloud the best of Father Brown. Only within that context did engagement with touchstone Western ideas commence, as the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic and the law of noncontradiction presented in Aristotle’s Metaphysics made their way into seminars.
Music, however, had more permanent and singular import for Senior. He maintained that “civilization is the work of music” and that music is “a specific sign of the civilized species,” taking seriously Shakespeare’s dictum that music is the food of love and insisting that if Christian love should be the foundation of civilization, then evidence of that foundation is the music that forms culture: “Love only grows; it cannot be manufactured or forced; and it grows on the sweet sounds of music.” Indeed, at Canongate, it was the music that came to rest in the hearts of students the most. When alumni were polled two years ago, they were asked to rank aspects of their education that they considered to be most memorable and most worth preserving. The highest-ranking answer universally was making and sharing music together. Not the experience of a teacher, not the unique excursions, but the regular, ordinary act of filling the hours between classes with songs, and not just any songs but the traditional folk songs, songs of the local region, and the songs of ancient nations.
Such an environment naturally cultivates a disposition toward creating art for oneself, in addition to receiving the art of tradition. In the words of one alumnus who is making the final preparations for ordination to the priesthood, students at Canongate aim “not just at being the type of people that consume other things but to create our own things.” Students have been regularly inspired to seek art, not only as something to behold but something to achieve and refine with their own hands. Original paintings, poems, and songs figure frequently in the classroom and the study room. The student-led, faculty-supported creative impulse has resulted, among other things, in a music album that students and faculty recorded and released in 2019, and five years later, it produced a music festival, the Kingfisher Folk Fest, in the same city where the Stillwater Hobos first came to prominence, a city hopelessly in love with music new and old.
The core of Kingfisher Folk Fest lies in the origins of Canongate: folk music, particular to the region, that hearkens to the preceding generations. Pursuing folk music, in the form of jam sessions and called dances and ballads, draws Catholics into communion first by embracing and sharing in this music among themselves, within their contemporary experience, and then discovering a palpable bond with those outside the Church through the same medium. In one and the same act, Catholics create culture and non-Catholics are drawn into the beauty of the Mystical Body of Christ. This intra- and extra-ecclesial fellowship produces a wellspring of culture, from which Catholic artists can draw solace and inspiration to hone their skill and create new Catholic art succored by a community reared in ordinary beauty. Kingfisher draws inspiration especially from the Appaloosa Festival in Virginia, founded by the distinguished Catholic band Scythian, that fosters budding folk artists and Catholic communities in a single event.
The festival’s name derives from a poem that is central to the school’s vision. Students learn, cherish, and treasure Gerard Manley Hopkins’ opus “As kingfishers catch fire,” a triumphant poem of wonder at Christ-ridden reality. In every song that Canongate students and faculty play together, they affirm and celebrate that “Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” This custom of poetic and musical festivity spills out into the land and into the Church through the Kingfisher Folk Fest.
Intentionally, Kingfisher is properly called a folk, rather than music, festival. Folk music indeed drives the event, but just as much does the festival aim at the people, the folk, that plan it, attend it, and perform at it, enriching not just the art but the people and personhood that buttress it.
Tradition-inspired artistry, the fount of Canongate’s charism, was manifest abundantly in Kingfisher’s first year in 2024 when the Hillbilly Thomists, a band of Dominican friars that includes original members of the Stillwater Hobos, headlined the festival with American folk songs and new spiritual songs animated by old ones. All the disparate threads spun throughout the years weaved together in a single moment, when the friars performed “Saint Therese,” uniting the Stillwater Hobos of the past, Canongate of the present, and Catholic culture of the future.
Kingfisher’s character carries on faithfully into its second year in 2025, gaining recognition, support, and more artists as its reach expands to the national level. Joe Pug, who has played the largest stages in the country and holds unparalleled acclaim as a songwriter, headlines the festival, bringing his searching and aching musical heart, renewed by his recent conversion to Catholicism, to one of the only American Catholic music festivals. Indeed, Pug’s songs have whispered of God from the beginning, in “hymns” that are not devotional but nevertheless set on testing “the timber of my heart” and insisting that “the more I seek the more I’m sought.” Now converted to Christ, Pug has experienced something of that rest that Augustine claimed our restless hearts were made for, and sings with a glimpse of how that yearning is satisfied: “Far above this broken city / There’s a beauty that remains / What is lost won’t be forgotten / What is good will never change.” Pug offers the rare instance of an artist who has probed the Catholic imagination from both within and without.
The complete lineup of artists at the Kingfisher Folk Fest is comprised of songwriters stirred with such imaginations, holding an eye both to their craft and to truly excellent Catholic art. Ther imminent encounter this summer prompts a distinct opportunity for Catholic songwriters to further establish a community of their own, rooted in relationship, love of holiness, and pursuit of musical mastery. Some of our musicians will be especially poised for it, having contributed to Dappled Things in the past and pursued the Catholic MFA at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. It is needless to say that a confluence of movements in the burgeoning Catholic arts revival will descend upon the North Carolina mountains this August.
Two principle aims ultimately distinguish the Kingfisher Folk Fest: first, to develop a positive Catholic culture within the local community, by means of an event that promises to continually bear fruit in the faithful and strengthen the baptized bonds between them with a love of traditional music and art, and second, for this culture to spill out into the world outside the Church, offering a winsome place for those who do not know Christ to discover the beauty of holiness by recognizing the holiness of beauty. The prayer of Kingfisher’s organizers, now and, God willing, in future years, mirrors that of Pug’s own petition in “Treasury of Prayers”: “that they work to build cathedrals they won’t live to pray inside of.”
Tickets are available now at kingfisherfest.com.
Andrew Tolkmith works as an editor at Word on Fire Publishing. His writing has appeared in New Polity, Evangelization & Culture, and The Word on Fire Bible.
