Keepers of Tradition

Sharing a tent at this summer’s Lowell Folk Festival, Eric Royer and Robbie Phillips demonstrated their hand made musical instruments as part of the “Crafting Sound” crafts area.

Eric Royer invented the guitar machine in 1994 while living in Arizona, where he found it  difficult to find other musicians to play traditional bluegrass and old-time country music. Eric’s guitar machine features foot-controlled bass and acoustic guitars suspended on a copper pipe frame. Metal can be found in the banjo, resonator guitar (dobro), harmonica, and kazoo. Pedals use mechanical action to cause different effects; capos go up and down, strings are plucked, a golf ball hits the cowbell, and the “Pretty Polly” doll dances.

“Washtub Robbie” Phillips is known for his creation of odd and fanciful musical instruments. The majority of them are mono-chord (single string) instruments called diddley bows. Typically played with a slide, the diddley bow is ideal for improvising.

Robbie got started making instruments years ago when he was dissatisfied with the sound of the washtub bass he was playing and decided to make his own.  He uses recycled materials - pieces of old furniture, blocks of discarded wood, car parts, and left-over paint. The colorful instruments have a unique finish to them. After a base coat of paint, Robbie applies Elmer’s glue over the surface. Before the glue dries, he sprays latex paint, which shrinks upon drying, creating a crackled surface.

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As the Folk Arts and Heritage Program begins its 12^th year at the Massachusetts Cultural Council, we are excited to tell you about some changes. Through a unique partnership with Lowell National Historical Park (LNHP), state folklorist Maggie Holtzberg has been temporarily assigned to the Park to support the development and expansion of traditional arts programming serving the public. We will continue our work in running a vital state folk arts program – doing field research, maintaining an archive, database, and website, and providing grants to individual artists. This new endeavor is an exciting opportunity to explore cross-cultural understanding within in the context of a National Park based on ethnic heritage, occupational folklore, immigration, and industrial history.  

The goal is to engage visitors and more of the region’s immigrant and ethnic populations by offering a robust variety of culturally-relevant public programs at the Park year-round. Though the MCC Folk Arts and Heritage Program has worked with the Lowell Folk Festival for over a decade (providing potential crafts artists and musicians, emceeing on stages, etc.) we will be more actively involved in the planning and presentation of folk arts than ever before. This summer, look for ”Folk Craft and Foodways” in Lucy Larcom Park where we will showcase some of the extra-musical aspects of traditional folk culture.

The plan is to build on the energy of the festival — the high-quality, traditional arts performances that are the hallmark of the Lowell Folk Festival — and offer similar experiences throughout the year. Special exhibits and interactive presentations of craft, foodways, performing, and expressive traditions will be developed based on both previous and new folklife field research within the region’s many diverse communities. There is even the possibility of re-establishing a folklife center at the Park.

 Keep your eye on this blog for further postings from Lowell . . .

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Great weather and great programming! We suggest heading down to New Bedford this weekend for the Working Waterfront Festival. If you haven’t guessed, this year’s theme is surf and turf. In promoting the festival, organizers point out that “Fishermen and farmers share a deep knowledge of, reverence for and dependence upon the natural world. Both groups pass traditional skills and knowledge from one generation to the next, often incorporating new technologies alongside traditional practices. And both communities face many of the same economic, environmental and political challenges.”

In addition to live maritime and ethnic music, there will be an open air market featuring local produce and fresh seafood and cooking demonstrations, occupational demonstrations of fishing and farming skills, tours of fishing boats, author readings, and kid’s activities.

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This Saturday, September 12 marks the 30th Lowell Banjo and Fiddle Contest at Lowell National Historic Park. Whether you are an accomplished musician planning on entering the competition, or you come to experience the music-making as an observer, this annual event promises to be entertaining. In addition to the performing contestants, some great music will undoubtedly take place in informal practice/jam sessions behind the stage and along the perimeter of Boarding House Park. Cash prizes and trophies will be awarded but contestants must follow these rules.

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Photo by Marianne Nika, 2008

This year’s Lowell Folk Festival promises to be a blast. You may already know that this event is one of the best curated folk festivals in the country — and it is free! On the last weekend in July, the whole city of Lowell morphs into one large celebration of top quality traditional music, folk craft, ethnic cuisine, and community spirit.

Among the music and dance traditions you will experience are Irish polkas and slides, Western Swing, Klezmer, Brazilian capoeira, an a capella gospel quartet, Quebecois dance tunes, Zydeco, Puerto Rican jibaro music, Tuvan throat singing, and a New Orleans brass band. Massachusetts performers include Boston Banghra, Grupo Canela, ekonting player Sana Ndiaye, the Eddie Forman Orchestera, and Branches Steel Orchestra. Fourteen Bay state artists will be demonstrating in the heritage crafts area, the majority of which were featured in Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts.

Hope to see you there!

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Festival season is in high gear. Massachusetts abounds with the movements, colors, and sounds of traditional music, dance, and festive celebrations. Cultural pride is on display. Our two interns, Signe Porteshawver and Ellen Arnstein have been attending and documenting festivals throughout the Commonwealth since June. We are processing their fieldwork and adding content to the Celebrations theme of our website. New entries include the Albanian Festival in Worcester, the Lowell African Festival, Saint Peter’s Fiesta in Gloucester, and HONK! We are also mining past fieldwork and adding festivals previously documented to the site. Below are some images attesting to the enormous amount of energy, resources, and artistry people devote to sharing their culture with insiders and outsiders alike.

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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!

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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

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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.

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Successive waves of immigration have always been a source of America’s vitality. Areas with high concentrations of specific ethnic groups often hold rich centers of traditional arts activity. If one were looking into Norwegian American culture, it would make sense to go to the upper Midwest. But I recently discovered a micro-community of people passionate about Norwegian folk dance and music right here in New England. There are regular folk dances where people swirl in elaborate folk costumes. Devotees from Vermont to DC attend summer camps and immerse themselves in springars, gangars, and hallings (traditional dance forms). And surprisingly, many of these individuals were not born into this tradition but rather discovered it as one one might pursue swing dancing, knitting, kayaking, or raising show dogs. A few dancers and fiddlers can claim the cultural heritage passed down to them through their genes, but many devotees of Norwegion folk culture are not of Norwegian heritage.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, work in the fishing industry drew large numbers of Norwegians to the southeastern Massachusetts towns of New Bedford, Fairhaven, and Dartmouth. By the 1930s, New Bedford had a thriving Norwegian community that quickly rose to command the scalloping industry, owning most of the boats and processing plants. Many of these people emigrated from Karmoy, an island off the coast of Bergen. Today, there is a great cultural pride and an enduring sense of national identity among the area’s older generation of Norwegian Americans. However, there seems to be a general concern that the young people aren’t interested in their heritage or in learning traditional skills. Though the Norwegian craft traditions of rosemaling , cutwork embroidery, and knitting can still be found amongst descendants of Norwegian immigrants, the hardanger fiddle tradition - if it ever existed here — has died out. Sadly, many of the old timers passed away without passing on their music.

On a recent vacation, I discovered that, in the home country, Norwegian folk traditions continue to thrive. Maybe it has something to do with the long, dark, cold winters. Or Norway’s geography - the spectacular yet isolating terrain of mountains, valleys and fjords. Whatever it is, folk culture is alive and well in Telemark, Norway. Even in this age of iTunes and Facebook, regional styles of dancing, fiddling, and adornment remain in tact.

Couples dancing to a single fiddler playing a hardanger is a common social activity. And young musicians continue to learn from master players in weekly spelemannslags.

Regional and national competitions called kappleleiks are well attended by dancers, musicians, and singers. Musicians are careful to acknowledge whoever taught them a particular tune. Many of the fiddle tunes have stories associated with them.

Rosemaling (Norwegian rose painting) embellishes wooden surfaces of all kinds — furniture, cabinetry, walls, fiddles.

Rosemaling, in the form of embroidery, adorns clothing as well — even undergarments. Dancers literally wear their cultural pride on their sleeves. The traditional folk costume, known as a bunad, varies from district to district and identifies a dancer’s home region.

The hospitality of Norwegian locals and their generosity in sharing traditions was heartening. Being there reminded me of what led to my becoming a folklorist in the first place.

All photos except first one by Maggie Holtzberg.

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