Including a collaboration with a town resident, which I thought of as an optional bonus feature when I started out, has become a vital component of each program for me. We haven’t had a concert without one since the early days of the project.
I’ve also developed the habit of programming pieces relevant to key features of a town or key dates in its history. For instance, in Fairlee, I played Mendelssohn’s G minor “Venetian Gondola Song” because it spoke to the image of pleasure boats on Lake Morey painted on the Town Hall’s historic stage curtain. I also played Ernie Burnett’s “Steamboat Rag”, not so much because of the pleasure boating, but because the lake’s namesake, local resident Samuel Morey, built the first operating steamboat here* (yes, before Fulton’s Folly) and sailed it on the Connecticut River. And I played a variety of pieces from 1913 and 1914, the years the Town Hall was built and dedicated.
Such programming connects each concert to its town. But the most meaningful localization, maybe, and for me the most fun, are the resident collaborations. A couple of times it’s been with someone who lives nearby but works in the host town, and now and then a native son or daughter currently living elsewhere. But I’ve been strict that the connection has to be to the very town, not just the general vicinity.
In Fairlee, we had a couple of false starts in identifying a collaborator. But with less than two weeks to go, Deecie Denison (who also donated the Town Hall’s historic 1898 Chickering grand) connected me with a talented young songwriter, Robert McNelly, a high school senior who joined me on vocals and guitar for a couple of his own songs. I had already resigned myself to foregoing the collaboration part of the program, and I was delighted when Robert came through and kept us from breaking the streak.
Then at the start of the concert, Kristin Post, the local emcee, introduced him as Robert McNelly, from Corinth.
Not even an adjoining town, but one over.
Of course I was still glad to play with him, and his songs were excellent, and he was a hit. Still, I thought to myself, rats, we didn’t quite check that box, oh well.
Then I had the perhaps even more neurotic thought “but I don’t have to put that in the write-up, and no one else has to know...”**
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*Actually I think Morey lived across the river in Orford NH at the time, but he later settled in Fairlee. And anyway the Connecticut runs between the towns so the boat voyage was just as much in Fairlee.***
**And you know what? I may have copped to it all here, in the blog, but I still might not put it in the “official” concert write-up. Instead I’ll probably finesse it: instead of saying “Fairlee” or “resident” in reference to Robert, I can use a non-specific term like “local”.
***But even that’s not so clear. The NH/VT border was long in dispute, and wasn’t settled until a 1933 US Supreme Court decision, which placed the border at the low-water mark of the Vermont side. In other words, virtually all of the river lies in New Hampshire (since 1933 anyway). Here’s a Seven Days article on the topic.
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