Tannery Pond Center, located in the southern Adirondack town of North Creek, will host American Rootsenanny on Sunday, January 15, featuring three exciting American Newgrass bands: Ragged Company, Keanan Stark & Orion Stark, and Sugar & The Tree.
Ragged Company is a Saratoga Springs based trio is a viola, and two guitar group with all three artists on vocals performing in a folk, rock and roots style music. Keanan Stark & Orion Kribs are an Adirondack duo have brought their blend of modern yet classically old-timey sounds to many appreciative audiences in the Northeast and beyond.
Keanen Stark plays guitar, harmonica, and banjo and Orion Kribs plays mandolin and guitar. Each a capable lead vocalist, Stark and Kribs swap old-timey folk, blues, bluegrass, and classic americana tunes, and dabble at entertaining endless other influences and flights of fancy. Sugar & The Tree is a Roots, Americana duo featuring the songs of Heather Richards & Marc Clayton. The duo will be joined by a 5-piece band.
Underwritten by the Glenn and Carol Pearsall Adirondack Foundation, “Dedicated to improving the quality of life for year-round residents of the Adirondack Park”.
Tannery Pond Center features a full schedule of arts programming, including exhibits of original art, musical concerts and performances, as well as workshops and children’s programs. TPC is dedicated to enriching lives with quality arts programming and a welcoming community center, the result of dedicated benefactors, Elise and Woody Widlund, who purchased the property, erected the building and donated it to the care of the Town of Johnsburg with an official ribbon cutting and dedication in 2002.
Tickets for Americana Rootsenanny are $15 in advance, $20 Day of Concert, and free for Youth 18 and younger. For advance price tickets, please visit the TPC box office, or call (518) 251-2505, or purchase online thru Eventbrite. Some “Day of Event” tickets are reserved for purchase at the box office.
And don’t miss the Tannery Pond Center Winter Coffee House Series, starting January 29. For more info visit Tannery Pond. Sunday, Jan. 29 | 3 PM Sunday, Feb.| 3 PM Sunday, Feb. | 3 PM Sunday. March | 3PM Sunday March | 3 PM
Tannery Pond Community Center is located at 228 Main Street, North Creek, NY. Previously this winter, Tannery Pond Center hosted The North Country Jazz Project.
The North Country Jazz Project is an 18 piece big band that plays various types of music including jazz, standards, Latin and funk music is a unique way. The group consists of many Glens Falls and southern Adirondack musicians who have extensive musical backgrounds in teaching and performing on many stages throughout the country. Self-described as a “Big Band with a Purpose,” the group is ready to play music for the audience’s enjoyment and to promote the love of all forms of music through their unique renditions and style.
With tunes ranging from holiday favorites to toe-tapping standards and high-energy jazz, you’ll enjoy a memorable evening of top-notch music. The night honors Glenn Pearsall for his generous donation to TPC.
The Ice Theatre of New York is set to hit the ice at the Lake Placid 2023 FISU World University Games Exhibition Gala on Jan. 16 at 2 p.m. at the Olympic Center in Lake Placid.
The Ice Theatre of New York was founded in 1984 by Moira North and exists to create and advance ice dance as (an ensemble) performing art form with its professional ice dance company. ITNY has changed the face of figure skating, creating works that integrate contemporary dance, music, and art that challenge the conventional definitions of figure skating. ITNY was the first ice dance company to receive dance program funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
The ITNY will perform at the Lake Placid 2023 FISU World University Games Exhibition Gala in an unexpected crossover. From Jan 12-22 approximately 1,443 athletes, aged 17-25 from 595 universities across 44 countries will come to Lake Placid, New York for the 2023 World University Games. The Winter World University Games is the largest multi-sport winter event in the world, after the Winter Olympics. The games combine high-level competitive sports with educational and cultural events, in Lake Placid and other areas.
The International Confederation of Students was established in 1919 and it was this organization’s Sports Committee that launched the first World University Games in 1923. The games have continued to attract more and more people as time went on. The highest number of participants was registered at the 2013 Summer Universiade in Kazan, Russia, with 11,759 athletes representing 159 countries.
The Ice Theatre of New York is proud to hit the ice at the event. The competition portion will highlight twelve winter sports, including two ice disciplines: singles and ice dance. Tickets for individual competitions begin at $15, and tickets for the gala start at $25. For more information about the event and to purchase tickets, go here.
If you’re in New York and looking for traditional folk music, you might be surprised to find roots closer to home than you thought. While the genre is often associated with the South, in reality, Upstate New York – particularly the Adirondacks – is home to a vibrant past of traditional music composed of folklore, work songs and rich oral traditions.
Dave Ruch, a Buffalo-based musician, music educator and folk music archivist/historian has been delving deep into the history of traditional music of the Adirondacks for the past 30 years. As he explains, the Adirondacks, with its great wilderness and rural flair provided a perfect breeding ground for the diverse style of music that originated there.
Lumber workers gather, dancing and making music in the Adirondack camps for entertainment | Photo from woods.tauny.org
The Roots of Adirondack Music
Traditional music as it is commonly known is a genre of music specific to a certain region and local people or culture. It is typically anonymous music, passed down orally and serves as an expression of the life of people in that given community. Traditional Adirondack music in particular is further characterized by a few key elements as Ruch explains.
“So much of it goes back to work in the woods, lumbering being one of the main occupations there throughout the 19th century and into the 20th,” Ruch said. “That was a real fertile ground for this music to spread and be used. “
As he continued, very often logging operations would be deep in the woods and the lumber companies would have to build temporary housing units for workers to live in in the forest. By Ruch’s count, anywhere from 30-50 guys crammed into these small living spaces for an entire winter, working 6 days a week. Additionally no booze was usually allowed on the premises.
Workers in the Adirondack lumber camps pose for a picture | Photo from New York Heritage
“Singing and entertaining each other became really the primary form of entertainment for a lot of these guys,” Ruch said. “It was a living tradition as well, so they’d be making up new songs about somebody who died on the log drive or to complain about the boss.”
Adirondack music was also greatly influenced by the influx of Canadians and Irish immigrants who went to work in the iron mines and lumber camps. These influences found their way into the Adirondacks in a variety of unexpected ways.
“I was working on a project several years ago and I ended up finding at least one song that a man up in Wilmington, NY had been singing and he was the only person to ever be found in America that was reported to know and sing that song,” Ruch recalled. “It’s been recorded 20-30 different places in Atlantic Canada but it had only been found once in America and that was in that Northeastern corner of New York State. That song followed the people as they migrated.”
Through the Generations
While Adirondack music might seem like a thing of the past, its oral traditions trickle downward through the subsequent generations of music makers. Ruch said what makes this music special is that unlike other regions of New York, the Adirondacks seems to be the only place where you can still find people today who have a direct link to this old music.
Don Woodcock, pictured with his fiddle in hand | Courtesy of TAUNY Archives/Martha Cooper
Ruch has talked visited and befriended many of these multigenerational musicians who carry on family legacy and traditions. One such example he cited is Don Woodcock, a musician in St. Lawrence who holds the tile of “Grand Champion Fiddler of New York State.” Woodcock’s father played the fiddle for square dances and had learned such songs from older musicians. Decades later this combined knowledge was all passed down to Don. In some cases, Ruch said these songs don’t even have names, Woodcock simply knows them as “The song my dad always started the square dances off with.”
“He didn’t learn out of a book and he didn’t learn it because he wanted to learn about local music, he‘s what you’d call a tradition-bearer,” Ruch said. “He’s a living link to this old music that predates radio and T.V. and goes back to a time where people entertained themselves and their neighbors with this traditional music.”
Change and Loss Over Time
With each song passed down through the generations, the music of the Adirondacks changes as well.
Ruch cited another musician by the name of Ermina Pincombe who took her Grandma’s a cappella version of a song called The Lumberjack’s Alphabet – complete with a lumberjack term for every letter of the alphabet – and set guitar chords to the music, based on her own taste for the country and “hillbilly” music that came into the home via 1930’s radio.
Ermina Pincombe and Dave Ruch smile for the camera | Photo courtesy Dave Ruch
“A hallmark of all traditional music is that because there’s no known author and no one set way to do it, people feel pretty free to change a couple words or sing it to a different melody that’s okay, ” Ruch said. “An aspect of the tradition is that it can completely evolve and usually does over time.”
While Adirondack music continues on, there is an innate risk with the oral tradition. If not enough people carry on the songs, it can be lost forever. Ruch hopes to carry on the legacy of mountain music by sharing these types of songs and stories. As he explained, it’s not just a matter of educating people from across the country, it starts in his own backyard.
“The folk audiences will often say ‘we knew about music from Kentucky and the Ozark mountains but we had no idea there was this music from New York’ and I tell them, ‘well people in New York don’t realize there’s anything either.’”
A Night of Adirondack Music
For those interested in learning more about traditional Adirondack music, Ruch is hosting a show titled, “An Evening of Music and Stories from the Adirondacks and the Erie Canal” on January 18th at the Sportsmen’s Tavern in Buffalo, NY.
Dave Ruch pictured performing traditional Adirondack tunes on the banjo | Photo courtesy Dave Ruch
Ruch will be performing the traditional songs he has learned by talking with musicians in the region and sharing the stories behind the music and its creators. While Ruch’s talks are typically reserved for classrooms, historic societies or libraries, he said the cozy and casual environment of the bar will make for a nice change of pace.
“It’s always nice to bring it out where ordinary people are and you get to do it with a beer in hand,” Ruch said. “People really love the stories and love to learn the background of the music as much as they love the music itself.”
Ruch will be performing at the Sportsmen’s Tavern on 326 Amherst St in Buffalo, NY at 7 pm on Jan. 18.
You can buy tickets for the event here and learn more about the history of Adirondack music on Ruch’s website on traditional arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY) here.
