FREE | Every Friday: June 19 - August 28 | 5 PM - 6 PM
Join us throughout the residency season for our free public series of short and informal artist talks, readings, and presentations. We’ll learn about works-in-progress from our artists and scholars-in-residence with informative and inspiring presentations in all disciplines. This is a wonderful way to kick off your weekend! Bring a friend, all are welcome.
Location: Main Campus. Look for Craigardan Event sign at the end of Main Campus driveway (two “doors” west of the farm store, towards Keene). Google Maps Link
Steven Engelhart | Songs of the Adirondacks and Champlain Valley
Steven Engelhart. At this talk, musician and historian Steven Engelhart will sing a variety of songs that were collected across the region in the 1940s and 50s by Marjorie Lansing Porter (1891-1973) and tell the story of how this remarkable woman came to embrace and record the traditional songs sung by dozens of people – farmers, woodsmen, homemakers, and others – all learned through an age-old oral tradition. Wrote Porter, “songs sung in European countries several hundred years ago are still sung here today.”
Porter’s family roots in the Champlain Valley go back to the 1790s. Her grandfather was newspaperman and abolitionist Wendall Lansing, and she was an editor, journalist, author, historian, and co-founder of the Adirondack History Center Museum in Elizabethtown. By the time Porter died in 1973, her collection of folk songs and other interviews, originally recorded on a SoundScriber machine, consisted of 456 recordings and more than 300 songs. One of her most important contributors was Lily Delorme of Saranac, who shared more than 100 songs with her.
In 1960, Folkways Records released “Champlain Valley Songs: From the Marjorie L. Porter Collection of North Country Folklore,” sung by Pete Seeger, and which included eighteen songs from the Porter collection. For the next 50 years, interest in her collection waned but in 2013 a collaboration between SUNY Plattsburgh, Mountain Lake PBS, the North Country’s public television station and Canton-based Traditional Arts of Upstate New York (TAUNY) resulted in “Songs to Keep: Treasures of an Adirondack Folk Collector,” an Emmy award-winning documentary, a song book, a series of concerts, and a traveling exhibition.