A blog sponsored by the Michigan State University Museum's Michigan Traditional Arts Program, a partnership with the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Sharing news and information about the Great Lakes Folk Festival, Quilt Index, the MSU Museum's traditional arts activities, Great Lakes traditional artists and arts resources, and much more. Development of content for this blog supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Ciesa Design Great Lakes Folk Festival Poster Takes Home the Gold

The Mid-Michigan Creative Alliance awards were held on February 13, 2014. Long-time Great Lakes Folk Festival poster designers, Ceisa Design, took home 7 awards, including a Gold award for the 2013 Great Lakes Folk Festival poster. We sure loved this design, didn't you?
Ceisa's 2013 GLFF poster design

Monday, February 17, 2014

Classic Performances from the 1989 Festival of Michigan Folklife: Howard Armstrong and Ted Bogan

African American String Band Musicians Howard Armstrong (1909-2003) and Ted Bogan (1910-1990)

The one-and-only Howard Armstrong made several memorable appearances at folklife festivals produced by the Michigan State University Museum, beginning with the 1988 Festival of Michigan Folklife and ending in 2002 with its successor, the Great Lakes Folk Festival. None were more memorable than when he performed with his long-time friend, guitarist and South Carolina native, Ted Bogan. Armstrong and Bogan first met during the early 1930s in Armstrong’s home state of Tennessee. With fellow musician Carl Martin, they joined the Great Migration, ending up in Chicago where they worked as street musicians, made recordings, and―according to Howard—played for Al Capone! During this time, they made several trips into Michigan to play at juke joints and restaurants. Armstrong did not settle in Michigan until after World War II, when he took an assembly line job in Detroit’s auto industry in order to support his family. He retired from Chrysler in 1971. The following year, with interest in older forms of African American music on the rise, Armstrong reunited with his old friends Bogan and Martin, touring as the “last of the black string bands.” They played throughout the U.S. and internationally until Martin’s death in 1979. Bogan and Armstrong continued as a duo until Bogan’s death in 1990. Among the many awards and recognitions Armstrong received during his long and colorful life were a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1990) and a Michigan Heritage Award from the Michigan State University Museum (1989).

The following video excerpts come from the 1989 Festival of Michigan Folklife and were filmed by Gary McCuaig. The first shows Howard Armstrong singing an old hymn learned from his mother, “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” while accompanying himself on fiddle. The performance captures Howard’s inimitable stage personality and the conflict between church and fiddle (what his mother called the “devil’s box”). The second excerpt features Bogan and Armstrong playing a blues medley, with the two men trading solos.



Thursday, February 13, 2014

Pete Seeger, In Memoriam

On January 24th, 2014, acclaimed folk singer, activist, and inspiration Pete Seeger passed away. Our colleagues at Smithsonian Folkways have produced a wonderful piece paying tribute to his life and memory. Please read it here.

"To my old brown earth
And to my old blue sky
I'll now give these last few molecules of "I."
And you who sing,
And you who stand nearby,
I do charge you not to cry.
Guard well our human chain,
Watch well you keep it strong,
As long as sun will shine.
And this our home,
Keep pure and sweet and green,
For now I'm yours
And you are also mine."
-Pete Seeger, 1958, "To My Old Brown Earth"

Pete Seeger performs at a Valentine's Day party in 1944.
Photo by Joseph Horne, public domain
Pete Seeger performs on the Nation Mall at the 2009 inauguration.
Photo by Donna Lou Morgan, public domain

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Meet Andy Birko, Bandura Maker from Rochester Hills, Michigan

Andy Birko plays a bandura of his own design, November 12, 2013.
Photo by Laurie Kay Sommers
To meet Andy Birko is to be immersed in the world of the bandura, a fretless, plucked stringed instrument that is the national instrument of the Ukraine and an important identity symbol for Ukrainian Americans. On a blustery April day in 2013, I traveled to Sterling Heights in Metro Detroit to attend the spring concert of the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus (UBC), part of fieldwork funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. There I met Andy, currently the UBC concertmaster and the third generation of his family to participate in the ensemble. 

The Ukranian Bandurist Chorus in performance at the Sterling Heights 
Performing Arts Center, April 20, 2013. Birko is sixth from the right, in the front row.
Photo by Laurie Kay Sommers
The Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus is a unique Ukrainian American ensemble that traces its roots to a group founded in the Ukraine in 1918. It is both an all-male chorus that is accompanied by instrumentalists (bandurists) and an orchestra of bandurists (all male) that sing while playing. The UBC is distinctive in that it maintains the Kharkiv or Poltavka style of bandura playing, in which the player holds the instrument parallel to his body and uses both hands to play the full range of the instrument.

UBC bandurists in rehearsal. From left, Walter Babiky (Toronto Ontario),
Yuri Petlura (Hamilton, Ontario), and Andy Birko (Rochester Hills, Michigan).
Andy is playing a Kharkiv-style instrument by the late Detroit maker, Yurij Pryjmak.
Photo by Laurie Kay Sommers, April 20, 2013.
The UBC moved to Detroit in 1949, drawn to the city by plentiful auto industry jobs. With assistance from the International Institute and the Federation of American Ukrainians of Michigan, the ensemble held its first North American concert on October 2, 1949 at Detroit’s Masonic Auditorium. The performance launched a grand tour of major US and Canadian cities. Although the UBC now has membership drawn from across North America, Detroit remains its official home. 

Flyer from the UBC's first North American concert after emigration.
From the UBC archives, courtesy of Wolodya Murha.
The emigration of the UBC transformed Detroit into a center for bandura makers who then trained the next generation. Andy plays a bandura built by the late Detroit maker and bandurist, Yurij Pryjmak. The Honcharenko brothers (Alex and Petro) were also important Detroit bandura makers, who, prior to 1949, had been prominent luthiers and bandura makers in the Ukraine. The Detroit instrument making tradition continues today with Andy Birko (born 1970), who was mentored briefly by Alex Honcharenko, but who draws more on his engineering background, online luthier forums, and trial and error than on tips and techniques gleaned from the older generation. 

Birko in his workshop, comparing a hand-carved scroll and one
he produced on this CNC machine, November 12, 2013.
Photo by Laurie Kay Sommers.
Andy Birko is one of just two North American bandura makers. The other is Canadian Bill Vetzal, another Honcharenko protégée. As a player, Andy understands the distinctive characteristics of the instrument. As a maker, he uses that knowledge to design instruments with improved sound production. He builds banduras that combine traditional handwork with innovative modeling in CAD (computer assisted design) that is then produced with a CNC machine. The result is a unique combination of old and new. 

Hear Andy Birko describe the characteristic features of the bandura and what he hopes to accomplish with his own bandura designs. 


Visit Andy Birko’s workshop and hear him discuss his approach to bandura making. 

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Michigan Folksong Legacy: Alan Lomax’s 1938 Folksong Collecting Trip

“Michigan proved to be the most richly varied region for folk music that I had ever visited, combining as it did the lusty tradition of the Northern woods singer with an infinitely varied pattern of immigrant European, Indian, and even Appalachian and Southern Negro music.” Alan Lomax, 1939

 In 1938, a young folk music collector named Alan Lomax—destined to become one of the legendary folklorists of the twentieth century—came from Washington, DC to record Michigan’s folk music traditions for the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress. Michigan was experiencing a golden age of folk song collecting, as local folklorists mined the trove of ballads remembered by aging lumberjacks and Great Lakes sailors. Lomax was eager to record these uniquely American song traditions. He also was the first collector to document a broad spectrum of Michigan’s ethnic folk music. In just ten weeks Lomax recorded more than 120 performers from Detroit to the western Upper Peninsula. 


Alan Lomax demonstrates Presto disc recorder at the
 Library of Congress, ca. 1940, a machine similar to the 
one used in MichiganFrom Alan Lomax Miscellaneous 
Photographs, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. 
Courtesy of Alan Lomax Estate.

 During 2013-2014, the Michigan State University Museum is coordinating public programming to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Lomax’s seminal Michigan journey. This includes the traveling exhibition “Michigan Folksong Legacy: Grand Discoveries from the Great Depression,” and a multimedia performance event “Folksongs from Michigan-i-o” (“Michigan-i-o” is the name of a lumberjack ballad). Major funding has been provided by the Michigan Humanities Council and the Great Lakes Traditions Endowment at Michigan State University Museum, with additional support from the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress; the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin; and the Association for Cultural Equity. For more information, see the Michigan Folksong Legacy home page.


 This still image from Lomax’s color movie footage shows Pajo Tomic 
singing a Serbian epic accompanied by gusle, Detroit, 1938.

 Lomax began his Michigan odyssey in Detroit—then an industrial metropolis of 1.6 million—but spent most of his time in small towns and rural areas. Lomax recorded an astonishing variety of vocal and instrumental styles, among them sailor and lumberjack ballads, African American blues, Hungarian czardas, Serbian epics, Polish wedding marches, Irish reels, French Canadian songs, and Finnish waltzes. He recorded in taverns, hotels, net sheds, ethnic clubs, back yards, and family homes, cutting 12-inch discs or shooting silent color movie film on the spot. The recordings captured traditions handed down orally from generation to generation, sung and played for homegrown entertainment.

Listen to harmonica player Hjelmar Forster of Calumet play the Finnish waltz “Kulkurin Valssi/Vagabond Waltz,” recorded by Alan Lomax, 1938.

 Listen to Beaver Island fiddler Patrick Bonner play the Irish reel “Up and Down the Broom,” recorded by Alan Lomax, 1938.


Patrick Bonner, pictured here in the 1950s, was a former lake 
sailor and long-time Beaver Island fiddler who recorded tunes, 
poems, and songs for Lomax in 1938. 
Courtesy of Beaver Island Historical Society.
 Lomax was especially interested in what remained of Michigan’s lumberjack culture. Between supper and bedtime, lumber camp bunkhouses or shanties once resounded with homegrown entertainment: stories, songs, stag dances, card games, and music played on instruments like concertina, fiddle, dulcimer, and bones. To locate singers, Lomax collaborated with Michigan folklorist Earl Clifton Beck at Central Michigan College of Education (now Central Michigan University), whose life’s work was collecting songs and lore of the “shanty boys.” For Beck, these songs were “commentaries on a rapidly disappearing mode of life.” 


Lumberjack cook shack, Antrim County, 1880s. Lumberjacks were the 
source of a rich occupational ballad tradition. 
Courtesy of Michigan State University Museum.


For the most part, lumberjack songs have vanished along with the great virgin forests of Michigan’s past. Native Minnesotan Brian Miller is one of the few contemporary singers to research and perform songs of the lumberjacks. Miller took part in the multimedia program “Folksongs of Michigan-i-o,” held as part of the Lomax Michigan Legacy project at Central Michigan University’s Clarke Historical Library, October 22, 2013.

 Listen to Brian Miller perform “Once More A-Lumbering Go,” a lumberjack ballad learned from Lomax’s 1938 field recording of lumberjack Carl Lathrop (St. Louis, Michigan).