Did You Know? - Music of Childhood
In the latest installment of our Did You Know? series about music in the Vermont Folklife Archive, we feature songs and music for children. Across cultures, we use music with children to soothe, to celebrate, to instruct, or to just have fun. This month, we’ll hear a lullaby from China, songs that a Sudanese family sings to their infant son, and Tibetan music that accompanies children’s games.
Applications now open for 2024-2025 Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program
Vermont Folklife is pleased to announce the 33rd year of its Vermont Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program (VTAAP). With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts through a partnership with the Vermont Arts Council, this program supports the continued vitality of Vermont’s living cultural heritage. Information about the program is available in fourteen languages spoken within the state, including Dari, Pashto, Somali, Nepali, Spanish, and Ukrainian.
Turkey Tales on Air!
For the past year or so we’ve been working with VT Fish & Wildlife and the National Wild Turkey Federation on a project to mark the 50th anniversary of Vermont’s first legal turkey hunting season following the successful reintroduction effort that began in the late 1960s.
We hope you’ll stay tuned on this project, since we are also making an episode of our much neglected but much beloved podcast VT Untapped celebrating this success story of wild turkey preservation, which will be available for listening later this summer.
2024 Young Tradition Festival Highlights
The 19th annual Young Tradition Festival took place May 10-12, 2024, in Burlington. This year’s festival featured extraordinary performances, community outreach, and celebrations of youth involvement in traditional music and dance.
Did You Know? Communities of Song
In this month’s Did You Know? we continue exploring music in the Archive with a feature on "Community of Song." There are so many reasons people come together and sing–whether for celebrations, spiritual purposes, companionship in adversity, or just to express joy. In this blog post, we hear from three groups of people who join together in song: Jamaican apple pickers in Shoreham, pub singers in Brattleboro, and a Burundian women’s chorus in Burlington.
Did You Know? Music in Vermont: Songs of loss and longing
While interviews make up the vast majority of the audio and video recordings in the Archive, the collection includes a great deal of music as well. This month we feature songs of loss and longing, including hearing from Franco-American singers, Carmen Beaudoin Bombardier and Kim Chase
Traditional Arts Spotlight: Scottish Fiddle and Dance
This month Mary dropped by Joanne Garton and Fiona Stowell’s fiddle lesson in Montpelier, VT. A lifelong musician and and Scottish dancer, Joanne is Fiona’s neighbor. The pair have been working together to explore the Scottish music tradition using both fiddles and feet!
Did You Know: Getting Around in Winter, Part III - The Ice Industry
In this month’s Did You Know? we look at the once-thriving business of cutting, harvesting, storing, and selling ice through the experiences of Albert Morelli. As a boy in the 1920s and 1930s, Albert worked with his father, Frank Morelli, who had an ice business based in Rouses Point, NY, serving New York state towns on Lake Champlain as well as towns in Québec. His stories come from a 1994 interview with Vermont Folklife's Greg Sharrow as part of a collection of interviews about life around Lake Champlain.
Touring Group Winter Update
The Touring Group resumed rehearsals in January, welcoming Artist Leaders Pascal Gemme and Véronique Plasse from Quebec for a weekend of music learning and workshops!
“Turkeys and the moon brought us together.” — A very special meet-cute
It’s February 14th, St. Valentine’s Day, a time to celebrate love in all its forms. Here at Vermont Folklife, we often mark this sentimental season by turning our microphones towards friends and neighbors who are in love to ask the simple question, “How did you meet?” This year, we found one in an unexpected place, during an interview for an oral history project centered around the hunting and wildlife management of wild turkeys in Vermont,
Did You Know: Getting Around in Winter, Part II
In this month’s Did You Know we share winter travel stories from Alden Bettis of Waitsfield, Vermont. Alden was born during World War I, and grew up during the Depression. He shares about sledding to school, getting his milk truck out of the ditch using only a piece of rope, and riding an empty gas tank down the slopes at Mad River Glen!
Traditional Arts Spotlight: The Long, Slow Burn of Stone Carving
Mary and Eliza paid a visit to Heather Milne Ritchie’s stone carving studio in Barre, VT where Heather and her apprentice, Becky Lovely of Northfield, VT, wield pneumatic hammers and diamond-blade grinders to bring granite slabs to life.
2023 Year in Review
2023 has been a tremendous year for Vermont Folklife—we’ve fully integrated Young Tradition Vermont’s programming, carried out successful research projects, and shared our work with people across the state through events, exhibits, listening parties, and more. We hope you’ll take a minute to help us celebrate the accomplishments your generosity helped make possible.
Did You Know: Getting Around in Winter
Whether crossing a frozen body of water, or traveling hilly rural roads, Vermonters have had to come up with some particularly ingenious ways to get around in winter. In this month's "Did You Know?", we hear from four people who describe clever–and sometimes humorous–ways they and their friends managed to get from place to place in a world beset by ice and snow.
Touring Group Fall Update!
The 2023-2024 Touring Group had two terrific rehearsals this fall, spending time together learning new tunes, singing in French, and getting to know each other. Artist Leader Pascal Gemme taught a tune, Le Brandy, and a song, De terre en vigne (la voilà la jolie vigne!) and the Youth Artist Leaders have introduced their sets.
Hey Kids, Comics! Childhood Comic Book Cultures in Vermont 1950-1995
Recently, Associate Director and Archivist (and resident comic nerd) Andy Kolovos has been exploring childhood engagement with comic books in Vermont through the memories of cartoonists in their 40s to 70s, who actively purchased comic books here from the 1950s to the early 1990s. Andy presented a short paper about this recent project at this year’s American Folklore Society conference. With the Non-Fiction Comics Festival coming up this weekend, we decided to share Andy’s paper where he (and the people he interviewed) talk about how comics served as a launching pad for their childhood art-making.
Research Update: Turkey Tales
Read about this interview project in collaboration with the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the reintroduction of wild turkeys here in Vermont.
Did You Know? Ticonderoga Part 5: The Ticonderoga in Winter
The VT Folklife Archive is full of amazing first-person accounts of everyday life in Vermont and New England–past and present. In this feature, we share these stories with you.
Well, last month we thought we were concluding our four-part series on the Ticonderoga, but there were just too many good stories about the Ti left untold. So this month with cold weather setting in here in Vermont, we're adding one more set of stories about the Ticonderoga in winter–a time when the work changed to fit the needs of the season.
Traditional Arts Spotlight: Rolyang Lobling Prepares for the Tibet Festival
The 2023-2024 ‘cohort’ of the Vermont Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program includes 18 collaborations between mentor artists and apprentices who are working together to keep traditional cultural expressions vital and relevant to the communities that practice them. In this ongoing series of Field Notes we’ll introduce you to some of this year’s program participants and the traditional art forms they practice. Today meet the students of Rolyang Lobling, a Tibetan music and dance class led by Migmar Tsering.
Did You Know? - Ticonderoga Part 4: Life at Shelburne Museum
This month, we continue with the fourth and final article in our four-part series on the steamship Ticonderoga. In this month's article, we hear recollections from Lynn Bottom–a former captain on the Hudson River Dayline, but with a long history with Lake Champlain–about how the Ti was moved from the lake to its current location on land at the museum. Then we hear from Chip Stulin, the project manager who oversaw the restoration of the Ti in the 1990s. Both are recorded in interviews with VT Folklife founder Jane Beck in the mid 1990's.