Mitch Podolak

Who is Mitch Podolak?

Mitch Podolak is a prominent figure of the Canadian folk music community. He began his career at the Bohemian Embassy Coffee House in Toronto in the early sixties where he rose from bus boy to booking shows. In the late 1960s, Mitch Podolak began a dynamic relationship with CBC Radio as a freelance documentary maker, working into the 1970s for such shows as Five Nights, CBC Tuesday Night, Between Ourselves and This Country In The Morning. Podolak hosted the CBC's "Simply Folk" radio program from 1987 to 1991.

With CBC as a resource base Podolak helped found the Winnipeg Folk Festival in 1974, serving as the artistic director with Ava Kobrinsky and Colin Gorrie. It was an immediate success and in 1978 he and Gorrie with Ernie Fladell, Gary Cristall and Frannie Fitzgibbon founded the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, and within a few years helped the Edmonton and Calgary Folk Festival’s open their doors. The Vancouver festival was a successful transference of the model Mitch Podolak developed in Winnipeg and lead to the pre-eminent growth of the western Canadian folk festivals.