Catskills Folk Connection: WIOX Tonight, December 8: Archives and Catskills Folk Lyceum

In a special two-hour Catskills Folk radio program at 6 p.m. tonight, Ginny Scheer, folklorist, will present a report on the folklore archiving forum she attended last month and a report about last Sunday's talk by Kathy Shimberg for the Catskills Folk Lyceum, "Traditonal Music and Dance in the Catskills: Delaware and Otsego Counties." While there are no illustrations for the archiving report, the photos and video link for the recordings from the Catskills Folk Lyceum are included below, for you to follow during the second hour of Catskills Folk.

Folklore Archive Forum

The archival forum was organized for New York Folklore Society's series "Critical Folklife Forum" and featured presenters from among New York State's distinguished folklorists. After their presentations it became a wide-ranging exchange with attending New York folklorists as well as several from other locations, totalling about 40. Presenters were Varick Chittenden, founder of Traditional Arts in Upstate New York and SUNY professor in Canton; Simon Bronner, founder of the Pennsylvania Center for Folklore and professor at Penn State Harrisburg; and Elizabeth Tucker, specialist in children's folklore, folklore of the supernatural, and digital folklore, and also a professor at Binghamton U. They spoke about their experiences with archives and archiving, the kinds of archiving challenges they encountered, and the prospect of a national archiving initiative. All said that in their areas (geographical and academic) there was a great need for archive capacity - folklorists keep producing files! - but also for tending existing archives to ensure continued access and even continued existence of archived materials. The conversation ranged widely with each folklorist's experiences with their own materials and with informal collections (made by musicians, artists, and tradition bearers as well as local historians) that are un-archived at present.

I encouraged folklorists waiting for the national initiative to consider the example of grassroots archiving here in Delaware County: the Grant Rogers Project initiated by the Ogden Free Library in partnership with Music on the Delaware in Walton, NY. Neither group could house and make accessible the collection of materials about Grant Rogers, the legendary Delaware County singer, fiddler and square dance caller, so they decided to create an on-line archive of the materials, and then went on to collect more material about Rogers, his musical activities and his musical cohorts. I recommend you visit the on-line archive www.grantrogers.org.

The bottleneck for most folklore arechiving seems to be digitization, which is now expected for archiving. But digitization is the most time-consuming (and therefore expensive) aspect of archiving. And there is little funding, as far as we know, for digitization. New York Folklore Society has taken on the task of applying to foundations and other funders for a state-wide digitization project. In the meantime all we have is our scanners and a Walkman-sized cassette player that will store a digital file of the cassette tape on a flash drive. Digitization allows greater access to materials and reduces the wear and tear on the original recordings and paper. But even so, there needs to be a repository for the physical originals. Perhaps the next funding drive will focus on support for the construction of archive rooms and buildings - as are underway at the Historical Society of Middletown and Delaware County Historical Association.

Catskills Folk Lyceum: Kathy Shimberg, speaker, "Traditional music and Dance in the Catskills: Delaware and Otsego Counties."

On Sunday, December 6, Kathy Shimberg gave an on-line talk for the Catskills Folk Lyceum based on her extensive experience with traditional music, traditional musicians, traditional dances and dance figures, and traditional dance calls in our area. Before gaining a master's degree from the Cooperstown Graduate Program in 1980 Kathy and her husband/musician partner, Joel Shimberg, began learning from traditional dance musicians and callers, and afterward began a project that would feature traditional dance callers and the older tunes that were Kathy's and Joel's specialty. They hoped to bring together the local community's veteran callers and dancers with enthusiastic dancers from the colleges and community; so Joel and Kathy joined others in founding the Oneonta Contra and Square Dance that lasted for 11 years. Joel played fiddle and Kathy played rhythm and harmony on the piano, and - lacking local callers - called and taught the dances. The dance might have lasted longer, but finding suitable space became impossible. The Oneonta dance ended, but another sprung up in Cooperstown - the Otsego Dance Society - which holds monthly dances - primarily contra dances - to this very day.

Below are photos that were shown during Kathy's talk. If you listen to WIOX (91.3 FM or on your ocmputer at www.wioxradio.org) you will hear the tunes and calls that Kathy described while you are viewing the photos. Three of the recordings are videos, with links available here in much longer form. Where they would be in the sequence of illustrations you will find links to the YouTube site. On the air, I may play only a fraction of each piece, if time is getting short.

Catskills Folk Lyceum: Traditional Music and Dance in the Catskills: Delaware and Otsego Counties.