Meaghan Blanchard was twenty-two when she played the 2011 festival. She was already a few years into a career that had started with a debut album and a pile of awards, and she was about to add another one to the shelf.
She played St. Paul's Anglican Church on Saturday, August 20, at 6:30pm. The show was presented by The Guardian. Her trio for the night was Hannah Rollwage on bass and sisters Karyn and Kady Brown on vocals.
The awards
Blanchard grew up in Hunter River, just outside Charlottetown. She released her first album, Changing Things, in 2008. It won Folk Album of the Year at the Music PEI Awards and earned her New Artist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, and Female Vocalist of the Year. She was also nominated for two ECMAs that year, for Folk Album of the Year and Rising Star .
Her second album, Chasin' Lonely Again, came out in 2011. That same year she won the East Coast Music Award for Country Recording of the Year . The festival bio noted that the album had already picked up five Music PEI awards. She was on a run, and the festival caught her right in the middle of it.
The folk and country question
The festival bio asked the obvious question. How does a folk and country singer fit into a jazz and blues festival? The answer was in the room at St. Paul's. A voice like hers does not need a genre label. She can sing a country ballad, a folk song, or a blues number and make all of them feel like they belong to her.
She has cited her grandmother as a big influence, along with Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and a mix of western swing, country gospel, and Americana . You can hear all of that in the way she phrases a line. There is a warmth to it, a storyteller's instinct. She is not in a hurry to get to the chorus. She lets the song breathe.
That night
The church series was always the quiet corner of the festival. Seated shows, a room that made you lean in. Blanchard with a trio, a Saturday evening slot, a crowd that had been at the festival all week. It would have been a different kind of night than the main stage. Softer, closer, the kind of show where you can hear the room settle when she starts to sing.
Since then
Blanchard kept going. She won a second ECMA in 2014 for She's Gonna Fly . She toured Scotland, England, and across Canada. She played the Cambridge Folk Festival and performed for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their Canadian tour . In 2017 she released The Great Escape, a record she described as a deliberate move away from country and toward alt-indie-folk .
She is still writing, still performing, still one of the Island's best. The 2011 festival was one stop on a long road that shows no sign of ending.
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