SONGS OF THE ADIRONDACKS and CHAMPLAIN VALLEY with Steven Engelhart and Sarah Ward

At this gathering, musician and historian Steven Engelhart and harpist and music therapist Sarah Ward will sing a variety of songs that were collected across the region in the 1940s and 50s by Marjorie Lansing Porter (1891-1973) and tell the story of how this remarkable woman came to embrace and record the traditional songs sung by dozens of people – farmers, woodsmen, homemakers, and others – all learned through an age-old oral tradition.

Sarah Ward is the grear great granddaughter of Marjorie Lansing Porter. Porter’s family roots in the Champlain Valley go back to the 1790s. Her great grandfather was newspaperman and abolitionist Wendall Lansing, and she was an editor, journalist, author, historian, and co-founder of the Adirondack History Center Museum in Elizabethtown. By the time Porter died in 1973, her collection of folk songs and other interviews, originally recorded on a SoundScriber machine, consisted of 456 recordings and more than 300 songs. One of her most important contributors was Lily Delorme of Saranac who shared more than 100 songs with her.

In 1960 Folkways Records released “Champlain Valley Songs: From the Marjorie L. Porter Collection of North Country Folklore,” sung by Pete Seeger, and which included eighteen songs from the Porter collection. For the next 50 years, interest in her collection waned but in 2013 a collaboration between SUNY Plattsburgh, Mountain Lake PBS, Mountain Lake PBS , and Traditional Arts of Upstate New York (TAUNY) resulted in “Songs to Keep: Treasures of an Adirondack Folk Collector,” an Emmy award-winning documentary, a song book, a series of concerts, and a traveling exhibition. Her collections are currently preserved and available for research between special collections at SUNY Plattsburgh and The Adirondack History Museum in Elizabethtown.