A night of Celtic and folk music is coming up in support of the Golden Ears United Church in Maple Ridge.
The fundraising event will be raising money to put towards the church’s insurance deductible to fix damages the building received during the flash flood of last October.
Organizer Nigel Tucker explained that the floods did serious damage to the facilities, especially their Sunday school rooms.
“I was in the church a couple of weeks back and I was in last week as well and the Sunday school rooms have been roped off because nobody can go down there,” he said.
The church has to raise $25,000 for their insurance deductible. So far they have raised $19,000.
“What we’re doing is trying to get them a little closer to the $25,00 that they need,” said Tucker adding that the church is special to him because he attended the church when he was in his pre-teens and attended Sunday school in those very same rooms.
Tucker will be performing along with fiddle players Jesse Kazemir and Lucy Thomas.
Kazemir studied fiddle through the North Shore Celtic Ensemble.
“They are one of the best groups I’ve ever seen that teaches Celtic music and more specifically fiddle playing to younger people,” said Tucker.
“I went to one of their concerts a couple of years ago and their junior class, their beginning class, which consists of 8, 9 and 10-year-olds, were playing traditional music that I could only dream about playing when I was their age, that’s how good they are,” he said.
Local musician Caden Knudson be performing along with Lyndsay Wills and the No Frills String Band.
The Silver Chord Choir and the Mission Pipe Band will also be performing.
“The choir has been around since 1970 and the pipe band’s been around since 1962,” explained Tucker.
It’s an honour for us to have two of the oldest musical groups in British Columbia along,” he added.