Interview with Armand Labrecque, the Father of the Montmagny Folk Gala

Armand Labrecque: I started organizing musical events as part of the Expo [the local agricultural exhibition], galas and so on. I guess I’m sort of… I don’t want to sound pretentious, but I’m the father of the galas. I was the first person to start organizing them. Today, everybody puts them on, you know? But I organized the first ones. Now, they’re all the rage, all over the place.

Interviewer: In what year? Was it about two decades ago?

Armand Labrecque: That’s right! Let’s see… I was probably […] in my thirties when I organized my first galas, and I’m 65 now.

Interviewer: What made you decide to do it?

Armand Labrecque: Well, I always had a taste for music and I enjoyed meeting musicians. As musicians go, the best way to meet them is by gathering them together in the same spot. Otherwise, you might not catch them. When I organized my first galas, I started with local people. We would invite people from the surrounding area. But today, that same gala, the one I launched, is still going strong. [Francine] Desjardins mainly takes care of it. But I used to give her a hand, and so on. I had the whole list, you know. I kept in touch with musicians from all over the province. Musicians were willing to travel 600 or 700 miles to play at one of our galas, because people would say that Montmagny galas were the best. Of course, there were other good ones. Maybe even better. But I’m biased! So! People started coming to Montmagny. For them, Montmagny was the best place to hold galas. So, people started coming from all over: Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Rivière-du-Loup, Rimouski, all the way to the New Brunswick border. These people came for our galas, that’s how we built our audience. Today, we put on galas for 1000, even 1200 people!