Merch for the 2024 Festival is Now Available Here!
Check back soon for more information about our 2024 Festival, and mark your calendars for September 28-29, 2024!
Interested in helping the festival run by volunteering this year? Sign up here and we’ll get in contact with you!
2024 Headline Performers
Judy Cook
Judy brings a powerful voice, a great-unaccompanied style and a deep respect for tradition to her performances of a huge repertoire of (mostly) American songs and ballads. Judy’s singing is marked by a command of narrative that pulls the audience in to really understand what the song is about. Her style and presentation are “a credit to the sources”.
Judy lifts the spirit and entertains us with programs drawn from her vast and varied repertoire of traditional songs and ballads from the English speaking world – American songs from North Carolina’s Outer Banks to the Southern Appalachian Mountains; from the Ozarks up to New Hampshire, Maine and eastern Canada; and across the Atlantic to songs from England and Scotland. These she presents along with her personal memories and research in a straight-forward unaccompanied style. Judy’s command of narrative style and deep respect for traditions have earned admiration on both sides of the Atlantic.
You can’t help but have a wonderful time.
Photo by Dennis Cook.
The Vox Hunters and Flannery Brown
Armand Aromin and Benedict Gagliardi (The Vox Hunters) and Flannery Brown are musical symbionts that sprouted from a mutual loam. Soon after, they began to hum in sympathy, eventually buzz in synchrony, and now whomp with full-lunged abandon. Like a lively fungus on the branches of tradition, they nourish themselves on its ancient heartwood and burgeoning boughs-to-be. They are the Pope’s frown, a wagon of porcupines, that cup of tea next to the worm bin. They sing for you and each other. As for the birds? Especially so.
The Gawler Sisters
The Gawlers Sisters are a fun-loving, folk-singing, fiddle-playing trio based in their native Maine.
On banjo, fiddle and cello, Molly, Edith, and Elsie bring beautiful songs, tunes, and stories from their roots in the heart of Maine. The Gawler’s unique arrangements are especially engaging and often go along with anecdotes of historical or humorous content, delivered in the stoic but friendly style of true New Englanders. Their extensive collection of rollicking tunes in the Scots-Irish, Franco-American and Scandinavian traditions is complemented by angelic three-part-harmony, gutsy worksongs, original songs, and amusing odes to everyday life. This music is part of their heritage as the three sisters were taught to play and sing by their Mom (Ellen Gawler, fiddler and singer) and Dad (John Gawler, banjo player and songster.) With their infectious spirit and sparkling musicianship, the Gawlers have earned a beloved place in the delighted hearts of varied audiences across the Northeast. The folk music itself brings a sense of community and grassroots connection that is welcoming and from the heart.
Jeff Warner
Jeff Warner sings traditional American and English folk songs. His banjo tunes, 18th-century hymns and New England sailor songs are rich in history and a sense of place. He has performed at festivals, folk clubs and schools throughout America and the UK, and has toured nationally for the Smithsonian Institution. He is a Folklorist and Community Scholar for the New Hampshire Council on the Arts and a former State Arts Council Fellow. His songs and stories bring us the latest news from the distant past.
Also Appearing
April Grant
April writes poems, songs, and short stories, and sings traditional and original songs. Her work has been referred to as “riveting” and “playful yet sinister.” She has sung and told stories in person at venues across New England, including the Connecticut Sea Music Festival (2022), the Blue Hill Maritime Festival (2024), the New England Folk Festival (multiple years) and the Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival (2004), and via the internet to international audiences during the pandemic. Her interests include traditional and trad-adjacent songs, history, and local legends (if you have cool stories about where you live, she’d love to hear them). Please see https://aprilcatherinegrant.com/ for song lyrics and upcoming shows.
The Shank Painters
The Shank Painters are a pirate-themed folk music band based in Portland, Maine. The band’s repertoire consists of Shanties – a variety of mostly nautical classic folk songs with catchy sing-along refrains, beloved by children and rowdy drunks alike. These works are treasures of history, preserving the travails and spirit from centuries of seafaring culture.
Formed in the Summer of 2016 between high school friends, Shank Painters began as humble street performers, and have since performed at festivals, parties, venues, and bars all over the Northeast. Bringing together voices, accordion, fiddle, banjo, guitar, and percussion, the Shank Painters bring the past alive with their mixture of playful, rollicking, heartbreaking, and hilarious songs.
Bennett Konesni
Bennett Konesni owns and runs Duckback Farm in Belfast, Maine, focusing on garlic production for seed and table, culinary herbs, and teas. In addition to farming he is an internationally-touring musician, focusing on northern fiddle and dance music as well as worksongs for field and forest, which he uses regularly on his own farm and teaches at workshops.
Bennett was raised in Maine and was naturally drawn into the strong communities of old-time music, art, and farming in the area. At thirteen he shipped as a deckhand aboard local schooners, spending five summers sailing Penobscot Bay and learning the traditional work songs of the tall ships as he raised sails and hauled anchors. Later, at Middlebury College, Bennett co-founded the student farm and spent six months studying Zulu farming songs in South Africa. He was awarded a Thomas J Watson fellowship to spend a postgraduate year in Tanzania, Ghana, Mongolia, Vietnam, Switzerland, and Holland studying worksongs of sea, field and steppe.
Bennett has given a Ted talk about his work, and speaks, teaches, and performs throughout North America and Europe as an individual and as parts of several bands.
Lynn Noel
Lynn Noel performs solo, duo, trio, quartet, and with ensembles from colonial and Celtic to mummers and music hall. She offers three solo program series in women’s history, maritime, and seasonal ritual, including the award-winning living history programs of NorthWest Company fur trader Lisette’s Journey and Gudrid the Wanderer, first Viking woman in the New World. Festival appearances over the years include the Connecticut Sea Music Festival, Philadelphia Folk School, NEFFA Live Online, Folk Music Society of New York, Old Songs Festival, national museums in the US and Canada, and touring performances in Atlantic Canada, the Great Lakes, California, the UK, and Estonia/Russia. Lynn has released eight albums on Bandcamp, four available on CD.
Lynn is an independent scholar and professional heritage interpreter with deep background in maritime history and women’s exploration of North America. Her academic career includes honors in geography and women’s studies at Dartmouth College, a Master of Science in human-environment geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a research fellowship at Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies, and adjunct faculty at Keene State-UNH.
Lynn’s book VOYAGES: Canada’s Heritage Rivers was named Conservation Publication of the Year by the Natural Resources Council of America. Her first album, Crosscurrents, now reissued as Gulf of Saint Lawrence, received the Tree of Learning Award for excellence in environmental education from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Her outreach and public education work with the Canadian Heritage Rivers System (CHRS) resulted in the inaugural CHRS leadership award, presented at the first CHRS conference for which she served as program co-chair.
Lynn is a well-known and respected organizer and session leader on both sides of the Atlantic, offering monthly sessions and digital houseconcerts through her international online folk club The Mermaid’s Tavern. Lynn is a CDSS Local Hero, and currently Board member and Festival Program Chair of the New England Folk Festival Association (NEFFA). She makes her home outside Boston with her husband Phillip, two cats, a dog, and an axolotl.
Maritime Skills Demonstrations By
The Dirty Blue Shirts
The Dirty Blue Shirts is an experiential history collective of living historians, scholars, and artists who know that uncovering history is dirty work. Its members worked together on the front lines of Mystic Seaport Museum for nearly 20 years in the Chantey and Roleplaying Programs and on the Special Demonstration Squad, where their blue shirts got the dirtiest. Now, they bring customized, museum-quality programming to historic sites throughout New England, offering presentations and workshops on environmental history, blacksmithing, fiber arts, woodworking, historical dress, original and traditional music, immigrant history, theater, and, of course, maritime culture and history.