FREE | Every Friday: May 29 - 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 and Sarah Ward
At this gathering, musician and historian Steven Engelhart and harpist and music therapist
Sarah Ward 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. Sarah
Ward is the grear great granddaughter of Marjorie Lansing Porter.
Porter’s family roots in the Champlain Valley go back to the 1790s. Her great 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, Mountain Lake PBS , and
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. Her collections are currently preserved and available for
research between special collections at SUNY Plattsburgh and The Adirondack History Museum
in Elizabethtown.