Keepers of Tradition

At first glance, this year’s two fellowships in the traditional arts seem a study in contrasts. One represents an age-old Yankee craft; the other, an ancient West African musical tradition.  Yet wooden boat builder Harold A. Burnham and Malian balaphon player Balla Kouyaté share something in common. Each individual is carrying on a traditional art form passed on through his own family lineage. Harold A. Burnham’s boat building ancestors arrived in Essex, Massachusetts nearly 400 years ago. Balla Kouyaté, who came to the United States just a decade ago, was born into a musical family whose artistic lineage dates back 800 years. And their traditions are stronger for it.

In addition to performing in concert halls and clubs, Balla is ever present playing at weddings, baptisms, and other domestic ceremonies within the West African immigrant communities of Boston, New York City, and beyond. As for Harold Burnham, he has essentially revived a once dormant shipbuilding technique, and in doing so, has reconnected a town to its own shipbuilding heritage. More than a revivalist serving a small market of weathy buyers who romanticize the past, he is an innovative craftsman working fully within the local wooden boatbuilding tradition.

The MCC has also granted finalist awards in the traditional arts to the following individuals:

Sunanda Sahay specializes in a style of folk painting originating in the Madhubani region of North India.

Sophia Bilides is a master performer of Smyneika, a heartfelt and highly ornamented singing style of Greek Asia Minor heritage.

Ivelisse Pabon de Landron makes traditional Puerto Rican black dolls as a way of honoring her ancestors — Puerto Rican women of African descent and their contribution to cultural history.

Sridevi Ajai Thirumalai is an acclaimed Bharathanatyam dancer and founder of the Natyamani School of Dance.

The next deadline for Artist Fellowships in the Traditional Arts will be Fall 2011.

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It seems like just yesterday that our Boston streets were continually disrupted by the Big Dig. Back in 2000, construction on roadways, tunnels, and bridges was in full swing. Tunnelworkers, crane operators, pile drivers, ironworkers, carpenters, and electricians labored to replace an ugly and dangerous elevated highway and replace it with a 10-lane underground expressway. Now that the tunnels are tiled and the traffic is flowing, we thought it was a good idea to remember these laborers’ contribution.

Listen here as we venture down the “Glory Hole “and speak with Sand Hogs Steve Shepardson and Dominic Mazzeo. (This 10-minute radio segment originally aired on WUMB in 2001.)

Though their numbers were small, women had a consistent presence on the Big Dig. Sally Addison joined the Piledrivers Union in 1993 and worked on the Big Dig until it was completed in 2006. When asked how her grandchildren would be able to appreciate her role in the Big Dig, Sally said, “You can see what I’ve done.” We can see what she, and thousands of other Big Dig tradespeople, have done. Let’s not take their contributions for granted.

All photos by Maggie Holtzberg

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Mastering the intricacies of an industrial craft or perfecting the nuances of an ancient music tradition is best taught one-on-one. For those lucky enough to gain the attention of a master, subtle skills are acquired and cultural knowledge is preserved. This week’s Boston Globe shines a light on several master/apprentice pairs who are currently being funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program. 

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Change ringing — it’s a music tradition that mathematicians feel an unusual pull toward. Back in 2001, WBUR’s Robin Young talked with Maggie about Boston’s English change ringing for “Here and Now.”

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For the bagel connoisseur, there is nothing like the crunchy outside and the dense, slightly moist, texture of a freshly baked bagel. But they are becoming harder and harder to find. What passes for a bagel in most food establishments is basically a roll with a hole in the middle. Big difference. To find out why, I ventured behind the counter of my local bagel shop.

Rosenfeld’s Bagels first opened in 1972. At the time, there were many more small, individually owned bakeries in the Boston area. “It was before all the chains,” recalls owner/bagel baker Mike Lombardo, who started working at Rosenfeld’s twenty-one years ago. He has been there ever since.

Rosenfeld’s is small. There is hardly any room for the customer to stand in line to buy bagels or pick up a quart of cream cheese. Unlike chain eateries, there is no room to sit and eat. Newton has a large Jewish population and Rosenfeld’s does a brisk business. “Friday is a more religious crowd,” Mike tells me. “The Kosher people come here all the time but because of the Sabbath you have people buying challahs. It’s a very community oriented place.”

Though he himself is not Jewish, Mike and his wife Jennifer run a kosher bagel shop, with oversight by an orthodox rabbi. The bagels do not come in contact with any meat or dairy products. On Fridays, a blue tarp is draped over areas separating the bagel making area from any utensils, mixing bowls involved in making cream cheese.

A place must really be set up to do bagels, which are a specialty item. “I learned how do make bagels from somebody who learned how to do it from people who learned how to do it in Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.” Here at Rosenfeld’s, the bagels are made the way they traditionally have been made for centuries: Bagel dough is boiled before being baked. No shortening is used (traditionally, bagels are made without any shortening). The only ingredients are high-gluten flour, water, salt, malt syrup, and yeast. Once the bagels are formed, they must “rest” for 24 hours. This allows them to rise slowly in a refrigerated environment.

A critical step is boiling the bagels before baking them.

The last step is baking the bagels in the oven. This being a kosher place, the oven has been lit by an orthodox rabbi.

“The beauty of bagels as a bakery item is once they are baked, they’re done.” No laborious icing or decoration need be done.

Mike makes the distinction that athough the entire process of producing bagels is simple, it is not easy to do. “There are ample opportunities to screw things up at every step.”

So, next time you order a bagel at Dunkin Donuts or grab a bag of frozen bagels at the grocery store, keep in mind that they are mass-produced offsite, shortening has been added to the dough because it is so heavily machined, and they haven’t taken that obligatory dunk in boiling water before being baked. Ignorance is bliss. Once you’ve tasted a real bagel, there’s no going back.

All photos by Maggie Holtzberg. Rosenfeld’s Bagels is located at 1280 Centre Street, Newton Centre, MA. 617-527-8080

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Addressing the American Folklore Society at the 1988 Centennial Meetings, Bess Lomax Hawes told a story about doing fieldwork, the sine qua non of the folklore profession. When she was teaching years ago, a student of hers had done an excellent term paper based on some folk curing beliefs which he had collected from an old lady in his neighborhood. By semester’s end he complained, “You taught me all about how to collect, Mrs. Hawes. What you didn’t teach me was how to stop collecting. That old lady lives on my block and every night when I come home, she runs out on the porch and says, ‘Hey boy, I just remembered another one!’  I keep trying to explain to her that my project is all finished, but she just won’t stop, and I’m starting to go up the alley when I go home just so I won’t run into her.”

“My dear young man,” Bess responded,  “welcome to the grown-up world. It’s a place where real actions have real results, where real people have real feelings as well as real information. And it’s a place where old ladies actually think that people who say they are interested in what they know really are interested, and issues like course requirements and semesters and quarters are really irrelevant. You’ve gotten your A. Now you start to pay back.” (excerpt taken from Public Folkore, edited by Robert Baron and Nicholas R. Spitzer, 1992, page 68.)

Bess Lomax Hawes, a folklorist of national renown, died last Friday. Today’s Boston Globe pays tribute to her and the little piece of local folklore she left behind. During the 1940s, while raising her family in Cambridge, Bess sang with local folk groups and tried her hand at songwriting. Today’s Boston Globe story focuses on “Charlie and the MTA,” a song Bess co-wrote with her friend Jacqueline Steiner. The political ditty poked fun at the Massachusetts Transit Authority’s complicated fare system and went on to become a hit.

In addition to a career as a performer and teacher, Bess Lomax Hawes was a remarkably effective arts administrator. Rocco Landesman, current Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, reminds us that, during her 16-year tenure as Director of the NEA’s Folk & Traditional Arts Program, Hawes inspired her colleagues to re-imagine how a federal agency might serve often overlooked artists and communities across the nation. Hawes was largely responsible for creating this country’s version of the Japanese Living National Treasures program. The first National Heritage Fellowships were awarded in 1982 and they continue to be the country’s highest honor awarded to individual artists working in the traditional arts.

Finding, documenting, presenting, and honoring traditional artists is work that is carried out at the grassroots level. Bess was the driving force behind establishing the network of public folklorists we have in the United States today. My colleague Jeff Titon recalls the United States map Bess kept in her office: “Whenever a folklorist got a job in one of those states, a colored push pin went into the location. She used to point to the map with great pride as the number of pins, and states, and public folklorists, increased. It was as if this gentle lady was mapping an occupying army moving into positions around the country.”

Indeed it was Bess who took Jeff aside in the early 1980s and began asking him why there wasn’t a position for a state folklorist in Massachusetts. Jeff writes, “It wasn’t long before Jane Beck [founder of the  Vermont Folklife Center] and I were lobbying at the state arts council, telling them that the NEA would fund a position for a state folk arts coordinator for three years, and that when the arts council saw how valuable it would be to have one, they would surely pick up the funding from then on. . . That is how the position that Maggie Holtzberg now holds with the Massachusetts Cultural Council originated. The pattern had been established before Massachusetts, and it was repeated in state after state.”

Many public folklorists, like myself, who were lucky enough to enter the field in the 1980s, were mentored by Bess.  We looked to her for advice and wisdom. This is why, during the past few days, my email box has been overflowing with “Bess stories” – moving memories of this pioneering, principled, formidable, feisty, fun-spirited woman. We are often reminded of her in our daily work and will miss her presence in the world profoundly.

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Guest blog from folklorist Millie Rahn:

Old friends Betsy Siggins, Bob Dylan, and Maria Muldaur backstage at the Wang Theatre, Boston, Nov. 15, 2009. Betsy is the founder of the New England Folk Music Archives and was a mainstay of the Club 47 in the '60s. Photo courtesy of Siggins Collection, New England Folk Music Archives.

The New England Folk Music Archives, based in Cambridge, was launched earlier this year with collections that reach well back into the last century.  Some of the Archives’ strongest collections have to do with the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s in and around Cambridge and Boston.  But the roots of the music  scene, then and now, reach well back into the 19^th century and came out of a long, local tradition of interest

in folk music, folksong collecting, and cultural revivals.

Club 47, considered the epicenter of the revival, started as a jazz venue and coffeehouse in 1958, but soon joined the folk music boom. Club 47 launched regional performers such as Joan Baez, the Charles River Valley Boys, Eric von Schmidt, Tom Rush, and the Kweskin Jug Band, who mined many early recordings and song collections. Others like Jackie Washington and Taj Mahal drew on their families’ Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and African-American traditions.  Club 47 also introduced audiences to earlier generations of southern roots artists from the 1920s and 1930s such as Maybelle Carter, Mississippi John Hurt, Bill Monroe, and Muddy Waters.

During the month of November, the New England Folk Music Archives has partnered with the Harvard Square Business Association and its members to exhibit photographs and memorabilia from the collections in store windows and restaurants around the Square.

This Sunday, November 22 at 7 p.m. the Brattle Theatre will have a rare screening of Festival!, one of the essential documentaries of the early Newport folk festivals, with a reception with filmmaker Murray Lerner afterwards.

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About two years ago, we visited the training center of Sheet Metal Workers Union Local #17 in Dorchester. It was there that I met with retired sheet metal workers who were constructing a tin man for our exhibition, Keepers of Tradition.  Though we had only asked for one figure, we were surprised to learn that they chose to make three, eager to demonstrate their ability in working with three different types of metal: 16-ounce copper, glavanized steel, and stainless steel.

William Walsch, Dan Hardy, Richard “Dick” Clarke, and Glenn Walker - all retired sheet metal workers - would spend more than 50 hours each fabricating the tin men. The making of tin men was once taught in apprenticeship classes. The skills required in making a tin man include all those necessary to become a journeyman: layout, scribing, cutting, folding, rolling, bending, riveting, soldering, and filing metal.

Figurative sculptures known as tin men were made by metalsmiths long before the tin woodman in the Wizard of Oz appeared onscreen. Metalsmithing is an ancient trade. For centuries, tin men have been used as trade signs advertising a metalsmith’s shop or wares.

These life size sculptures, emblematic of trade skill, were on display in the opening section of our exhibition. Once the show closed in June of this year, the tin men found a permanent home in the training center of Local Union #17.

I missed them. And, truth be told, I wanted one.

Having gotten to know some of the retired sheet metal workers, I learned that making decorative objects serves as an outlet for creativity and affirmation of membership in a highly skilled trade. In fact, when we visited the training center, in addition to the tin men, the men had brought in half a dozen creations for our consideration: baskets, lighthouses, boxes, and a clipper ship.

So, with the blessing of the training center coordinator, I contacted Richard “Dick” Clarke to see if I could commission a tin man of my very own. Two months later, I drove to his home in Stoneham where I was delighted to see the finished product.

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MCC artist fellow Kieran Jordan and tap dancer Julia Boynton have opened a new dance studio for percussive dance in Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is encouraging to see this new generation of dance instructors working with such enthusiasm. Best of luck to you.

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Colleague and fellow folklorist Millie Rahn brings us this guest blog:

Steve Cole was introduced to cranberry growing through his great uncle, who spent a lifetime in agriculture in southeastern Massachusetts. There, Steve writes, he learned about the local crop “via an irrigation system that needed installation.” He adds, “For some, the cranberry has provided a comfortable living for five generations; for others, only enough money to make it through each winter. When something so dominates the lives of people, it is worth knowing about.”

Steve and his wife, photographer Lindy Gifford, are the authors of The Cranberry: Hard Work and Holiday Sauce, just published by Tilbury House Publishers in Maine. Steve and Lindy did much of their research in the early 1980s, while living in Wareham, near where Steve grew up. The book is based on interviews with cranberry growers in Plymouth County and Cape Cod, as well as extensive historical research. It is illustrated with contemporary and historical photographs and documents drawn, in many cases, from archival collections throughout Massachusetts.

Steve and Lindy recently held a launch party and book signing at the Ansel Gurney House in Marion, and also appeared in the book tent at the Working Waterfront Festival in New Bedford, which this year featured discussion of issues shared by fishermen and farmers.

Photo (l to r): Cranberry grower Wilho Harju, author Stephen Cole, Lillian Harju, and author Lindy Gifford at the book launch in Marion in late September. Wilho and Lillian Harju were among those interviewed about Finnish people’s contributions to cranberry growing. Photo by Phoebe Cole.

The authors will be signing their book throughout the fall, including the following dates and locations:

Saturday, October 10, 11 am

Cranberry Harvest Celebration at A.D. Makepeace Co. headquarters

Tihonet Village, Wareham

Saturday afternoon, November 7

Titcomb Books on Route 6A in East Sandwich

Sunday, November 8, Noon-2 pm

Where the Sidewalk Ends Bookstore on Main Street in Chatham.

More dates will follow at Plimoth Plantation, and in Boston and Concord.

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