PORT TOWNSEND — A three-day festival this Labor Day weekend will celebrate the musical accomplishments of children while offering adults both entertainment and a way to contribute to a foundation that has provided thousands of children with instruments and lessons.
The Andy Mackie Music Foundation Family Music Festival and Scottish Highland Games will take place at Memorial Field, 550 Washington St., from Saturday through Monday.
The festival will be open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, from noon to 8 p.m. Sunday, and from noon to 4 p.m. Monday. Admission is by donation.
“This is primarily a kid thing,” said Andy Mackie. “We have adults playing also, but they take a back seat to the children.”
That’s with the exception of Monday, when most of the entertainment will be by adult bands, he said.
Mackie himself will perform at about 1 p.m. that day with a group of children in a band called The Highlanders.
About 150 performers will play a variety of music: fiddle, bluegrass, country, blues, jazz folk, Hawaiian dance and Scottish pipes tunes throughout the festival.
The Scottish Highland Games are for children. No registration is necessary. Children from toddlers to teens can just show up and toss plastic pipes, throw hammers and rocks, run races and play other games.
Silent auctions
Nearly $9,000 worth of goods and services will be available for bid at silent auctions Saturday and Sunday, Mackie said.
The biggest ticket item will be a coupon cutting in half the $2,500 cost of the drug treatment program at Safe Harbor.
Also up for bid is a three-hour tour for six people on the schooner Martha and airplane rides, he added.
On Sunday, a 1986 station wagon will be raffled. Proceeds will be split between the Port Hadlock Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Andy Mackie Music Foundation, based in Chimacum.
Make instruments
Members of the public may participate in workshops to build guitars, Mackie Music Sticks or other instruments.
“Even toddlers can build instruments,” Mackie said.
Mackie tells of a girl about 6 years old who spent two days at a festival making a strum stick.
“She spent the whole weekend working on it,” he said. “It really looked nice.”
At the end of the festival, she was pulling on his pants leg as she held the instrument.
“She asked, ‘Could you find a child who can’t afford an instrument and give this to them?'” Mackie remembered.
“I stood there and cried,” he said.
Music, not medicine
Mackie began teaching music “12 years ago in September, when I stopped taking my medication.”
He’d had several heart surgeries, was in and out of the hospital two or three times a week and was spending $750 each month on medicine, he said.
He decided to trade that in for teaching music to children.
“I just said, ‘God, I’m in your hands. I’m buying harmonicas’ — and I haven’t taken one pill since,” he said.
Mackie will be 71 on Sept. 19. “I’m just a kid,” he said.
“I teach music, but it’s a lot more than music,” he explained.
He told of a man in his 20s who stopped Mackie on the street.
“He said, ‘Andy, you were the first person who ever made me believe that I could be somebody.’
“You never know what child you’re really getting through to,” Mackie said.
The festival is sponsored by John L. Scott Real Estate Port Townsend and Jefferson County Parks and Recreation.
Proceeds will help provide musical instruments, lessons and scholarships to Jefferson County children and to Habitat for Humanity to build a home in Jefferson County.
For more information, phone Mackie at 360-316-9556.