We wanted to pass on word of an upcoming video documentation workshop at the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury. “Discovering Community through Video Documentation” is an intensive four-day workshop geared toward educators and will take place July 14-17. Check it out.
I’m delighted to have two energetic interns working with me this summer. Ellen Arnstein is on the verge of completing the BFA program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Signe Porteshawver is entering her junior year at Tufts University. Since late May they have been researching and working on compiling a comprehensive list of ethnic, folk, and agricultural festivals in Massachusetts. In addition to attending and documenting selected festivals, they are also adding their fieldwork findings to the “Celebrations” theme of our website. Below is their first guest blog post:
Every other year, St. Mary’s Assumption Albanian Orthodox Church in Worcester hosts one of the area’s largest Albanian festivals. Over a three-day weekend in mid June, St. Mary’s welcomed many of the areas 15,000 plus Albanian residents, as well as many other visitors from within and beyond the state. As interns for the Folk Arts and Heritage program, we came across the Albanian Festival in our research of Massachusetts’ public celebrations. We had the pleasure of attending this year’s festival as both visitors and fieldworkers, along with over 20,000 other attendees, taking in various aspects of Albanian culture. Along with other festival-goers, we enjoyed homemade traditional Albanian food - including some delicious leek pie and some smoky lamb kebab - while listening to traditional and contemporary Albanian music spun by recent Albanian immigrants, DJ Andrea and DJ JT.
One of the most exciting parts of the day was watching the folklore dance troupe, comprised solely of young congregation members, who choreograph traditional Albanian dances to perform at the festival every other year. The festivities all took place outside of the beautiful St. Mary’s Orthodox Church, whose walls are covered in magnificent icons written by Albanian iconographer Dhmitiri Cika.
We’re excited to be working with Maggie Holtzberg and everyone else at the MCC, and look forward to occasionally sharing our work as guest bloggers on this blog. When we’re not attending festivals around the state, we’re researching and compiling an annotated list of all public celebrations in MA that we can find, working towards a comprehensive festival listing for the state, and to add to the MCC and MOTT’s Worldfest. Please check out our ever-updated Google Calendar - and be sure to let us know what we’re missing!
Massachusetts WorldFest is back, and we want you to participate!
For the second straight year, the MCC and Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism (MOTT) have launched Worldfest, a comprehensive online listing of the rich and diverse array of ethnic and cultural festivals across Massachusetts from June through September. We again plan a summer marketing campaign to drive visitors from across New England to these events.
Worldfest includes festivals large and small, in cities and towns from Boston to the Berkshires, from Cape Ann to Cape Cod. The website includes a search engine that allows visitors to search by region, name of event and/or date.
Worldfest’s only criteria are that participating festivals represent communities or groups of communities within Massachusetts that share a common ethnic or artistic heritage or way of life. Massachusetts is home to a host of such groups, ranging from longstanding communities from Native America and Europe to newcomers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Each of these, and many others, showcase vital cultural traditions through their public fairs and festivals, which deserve recognition and support.
If you would like your festival to be included, please submit this form. These listings are provided at no cost.
For more information, please contact John Alzapiedi at MOTT: john.alzapiedi@state.ma.us or 617-973-8509
The detail is mind boggling. And the engineering, craftsmanship, and design are just what one would expect from maritime historian and ship modeler Erik Ronnberg, Jr. He called a few months ago to invite me up to Rockport to see a model he has been working on for the past two years. The Smithsonian Institution commissioned Ronnberg to design and build a Pacific Coast factory trawler. The piece is an incredible rendering of a working factory trawler, with exacting detail. Though the hull is made of very thin wood, the majority of pieces are cast out of metal. She is modeled after the real ship “Alaska Ocean,” which routinely catches and processes 50-100 tons of Alaska pollock in a single haul. Every fish that comes onto the factory deck is weighed and measured to ensure that the ship doesn’t exceed her quota.
Once the fish are released, they spill out into one of three holding tanks. A conveyer belt brings fish to their ultimate fate, where they end up as packaged and frozen surimi (imitation crab/lobster), rectangular fillets, or highly profitable roe. The majority of the work on the processing deck is automated. Erik has machined parts to represent the many processes that take place on this factory-on-waves: sorting, scaling, skinning, filleting, gutting, deboning, washing, cooking, compacting, freezing, bagging, loading, and storing.
Examining the many fish processing stages, you can see where the infatuation with technology comes from. The model is six feet long (scale: 3/16 in. = 1 foot) and is part of the new exhibit, On the Water: Stories from Maritime America, which opened May 22 at the Smithsonian’s American History Museum. Erik Ronnberg’s hope is that a few kids will see his model of Alaska Ocean and out of that will come the next generation of naval architects.
As folkorists, we are always questioning what constitutes “tradition,” “transmission,” and “context.”
Mary Hart attended the Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts exhibition twice during its run at the National Heritage Museum. Like many visitors, she filled out a comment card – in her case, the one where we asked people to tell us about a folk art tradition we should know about. Mary described her work in the German paper cutting tradition known as Scherenschnitte.
Scherensnitte is a tradition of making decorative documents that flourished within German American farm communities in and around Lancaster, Pennsylvania from the 1750s to the 1890s. People used these cut papers for birth announcements, memorials, love letters, and baptismal certificates. Rather than put them on display, many families stored them between pages of the family Bible.
I was curious about Mary’s paper cutting, but well aware of how she didn’t fit our criteria of traditional artist. Not only did she learn her folk art from a book, she claims no German heritage, and she is what folklorists refer to as a “revivalist,” practicing her art outside of the cultural context in which it was created. After Mary and I exchanged a few emails, I picked up on her frustration of falling in between the worlds of fine craft and folk art, not fully appreciated by either.
Folklorists place great emphasis on the cultural context in which traditions are transmitted. Who one learned from is important. How someone’s work is valued within the community in which the traditional art originated and is practiced is relevant.
So what does a folklorist do with an artist who essentially learned folk art from a book, doesn’t claim any familial or ethnic connection to a tradition, and has a college degree in art? In this case, I drove out to meet with her.
Although Hart has a studio – a small and bright room off the dining room of an open plan contemporary house – she does most of her paper cutting on the dining room table. Before my arrival, Mary had brought out samples of her work, as well as magazines, craft catalogues, and books about paper cutting. She showed me examples of Scherenschnitte, pointing out what attracted her to this German style of paper cutting: the symmetry, the simplicity of the cuttings, and the historical use of recycled papers. Back when paper was not readily available, people reused old letters — not unlike the recycling of cloth in the making of pieced quilts. She also likes the fact that you don’t need specialized equipment to do paper cutting.
Mary creates her own patterns, drawing in pencil. The paper is folded in half. Using an exacto knife, she cuts only the parts that won’t be different once the paper is unfolded. Unique elements are cut only once the paper is unfolded. Her work is traditional in that she uses borders and standard subject matter (farm imagery, trees, flowers, vines). Examples of how she has introduced innovations into the tradition are by adding fruit on the trees, or using a flock of birds.
Like any self respecting artist, Mary would like to be able to sell her work for a fair price and to be appreciated. She also wants to continue being able to teach - she keeps a busy adjunct teaching schedule. Teaching grammar school students is especially gratifying, “I see the visceral pleasure they take in making something with their own hands.”
Mary Hart’s work is beautifully rendered. Is she a folk artist? The folklorist in me must point out that Hart is working in a culturally specific tradition, yet completely outside of the cultural context in which this folk art was created and is practiced. But it is beautiful work, nonetheless.
When work “falls between the cracks” it brings us back to larger questions, such as: How are the traditional arts perpetuated outside of their cultural context? How is tradition reinvented in a transplanted community?
What do you think?
Contact Mary Hart at Jeffrey.Hart@verizon.net
It is a question we hear all the time — what is the difference between a violin and a fiddle? It depends on what style of music someone plays, but basically, they are the same instrument. Chunk Dingle, a country guitar player from Georgia put it this way: “A violin has strings on it; a fiddle has straangs on it.” Classical musicians tend to call their instruments violins, but they sometimes refer to them as fiddles. Players of bluegrass, old-time, and contra dance tunes are more likely to call their instruments fiddles.
The violin pictured here was made by Bob Childs and it is currently on display at the National Heritage Museum, as part of the exhibition “Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts.” This Saturday, from 1:00-3:00 pm, Bob is going to demonstrate various aspects of violin making. You can ask questions, watch Bob measure, sand, chisel, and carve, and then go take a look at the finished product.
If you’ve ever been to the Lowell Folk Festival, the American Folk Festival in Bangor, Maine, or the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the nation’s mall, you might wonder how particular musicians or craft artists get chosen to participate. Folklorist Chris Williams writes of his experience planning a portion of the 2008 Richmond Folk Festival here. It’s a good read. And so are the other essays you can find posted on the Mid Atlantic Forum. The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation initiated this series to further the exchange of information and ideas among folklorists and their peers. Sally Van de Water, who curates the series, served as city folklorist for Boston back in 2003.
We are pleased to post a guest blog by Cliff Murphy, folklorist at the Maryland State Arts Council and co-director of Maryland Traditions. While a graduate student at Brown University, Cliff interned with us. In 2008 he received a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Brown University, where he wrote a history and ethnography of New England Country & Western music.
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On any given weekend night, head out to the Canadian-American Club in Watertown, Massachusetts and you’ll find the unmistakable sound of New England Country & Western music. Honky-tonk steel guitar blends with Acadian twang and the occasional song that alternates verses sung in French and English. The house band - the Country Masters - and the lead vocal of singer Jimmy Spellman will remind you of Nova Scotian country star Hank Snow - or, better yet, Maine’s legendary truck-driving songster Dick Curless. And the community that gathers here - a community predominating in immigrants from maritime Canada or their descendants - never questions the authenticity of its country musicians.
Yet in the popular imagination, Country & Western music is firmly rooted in the American south, an expression of Protestant, white, working-class Southerners. A scan of modern Country radio reveals song after song with a deep southern twang in the vocals - even when it comes from Massachusetts natives like Jo Dee Messina of Holliston.
So what do we make of the fact that Country & Western has been a rich and vibrant form of multicultural working-class expression going all the way back into the 1920s? And, perhaps even more puzzling is how we come to grips with the fact that Massachusetts has been a hotbed of cowboy yodeling for just as long - a place where women like Georgia Mae Harp of Carver, Kenny Roberts of Athol, Vinny Calderone of Everett, and Johnnie White (Jean LeBlanc) of Stoneham have been yodeling their troubles away for the better part of a century?
As a graduate student in ethnomusicology at Brown University in 2003, I had the good fortune of landing an internship with Maggie Holtzberg - folklorist extraordinaire and editor of this blog - who encouraged me to find the answers to these questions, and even accompanied me on fieldwork visits with a few of the abovementioned yodelers. What emerged over the next four years of fieldwork throughout New England was a picture of Country & Western music as a deeply expressive form of multicultural working-class culture.
The highly ornamented, virtuosic yodel of cowboy music (as opposed to the “blue yodel” of Mississippi Brakeman Jimmie Rodgers) can be traced directly to the farms and lumber camps of Maritime Canada and Maine. An intensely personal form of expression, men generally developed their yodel while working alone with animals - driving teams of oxen in the Maine woods, or driving apples to market in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. Read the rest of this entry »
Folklorist Millie Rahn alerted us to two upcoming programs offered by Historic New England (formerly the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) which focus on folk art, material culture and collecting. She writes, “Although the perspectives are different from how folklorists look at this material, the collections are superb and the settings ooze sense of place.” We couldn’t agree more.
The Folk Art Immersion Weekend takes participants on four days of tours and lectures featuring superb collections and top experts. Explore the origins of Folk Art, paintings, hooked rugs, painted furniture, redware, and the many other objects often referred to as “country arts.” This program runs from Thursday, May 14 - Sunday, May 17, 2009.
New England Studies is an intensive week long course running Monday, June 15 - Saturday, June 20, 2009. This annual course on New England architecture, decorative arts, and material culture is conducted by the leading experts in their respective fields. Three scholarships are available to graduate students and mid-career museum professionals.
It’s chilling to listen to - the actual voice of Fountain Hughes, a former slave from Charlottesville, Virginia, whose grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Remarkably, the Library of Congress has a recording of an interview done with Mr. Hughes as part of a WPA project to record oral histories and interviews with African Americans who endured slavery. The American Folklife Center recently broadcast a podcast that brings to this first-person account to life.
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