JD & the Stonemasons

Stonemason bio needed

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.

Paddy Mills

Paddy Mills is a Maine-based folk singer and songwriter whose music carries the salt air of the North Atlantic and the stories of the people who live by it. With a voice both warm and weathered, Paddy’s songs navigate the waters between tradition and modern life — celebrating working folks, coastal communities, and the enduring pull of the sea. Mills has played coffeehouses, concert halls, schooners, ketch’s and festivals across the Northeast, earning a loyal following for his evocative songwriting and unpretentious style. His performances feel like conversations between old friends. His original songs, such as Cribbage in the Corner reflect his deep connection to Maine’s maritime culture and the people who make their living close to nature’s edge.

In 2013 Paddy won the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival Songwriting Contest as well as the Rosegarden Coffeehouse Performing Songwriter Competition. His 2014 album Race to the Bottom reached #6 on the Roots Music Report and #12 on the Folk DJ list; he won the South Florida Folk Festival Singer-Songwriter Competition, The Mid Atlantic Song Contest and the CT  Folk Folk Festival Song Competition that same year. In 2016 Paddy was chosen to play at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival Emerging Artist Showcase.

When he’s not writing or playing songs, Paddy spends as much time as he can with his wife and four kids on the coast of Maine, messing about with wooden boats.

Castle Bay

Since 1986 Castlebay has been weaving together Maine’s nautical and British Isles legacies transporting their audience through time and across the Atlantic. Julia Lane and Fred Gosbee have loved and researched traditional music for most of their lives and blend history, legend and experience into their personable performances. Finely crafted ballads with evocative imagery and beautiful melodies depict Maine characters, history, and life close to the elemental beauty of the sea and shore. Their renditions of traditional and original songs are supported with Celtic harp, 12-string guitar, fiddle & woodwinds.

David Coller & Diane Chodkowski

David has been writing and performing music of one flavor or another since his teens but the music that really made him who he is was the traditional folk and singer-songwriter music of the sixties and seventies and perhaps the extensive collection of show tunes his parents had on vinyl. He writes in a lot of genres: jazzy American-Songbook style songs, new bluegrass tunes, sea-songs, a cowboy tune or two and, of course, straight-up folk, performed on the guitar, banjo, and the occasional odd bit of button accordion. If there is a piano handy, he might just pull out a Scott Joplin rag.

Diane has been singing harmony in various configurations since the 80’s, when she lived in NYC during the Fast Folk singer-songwriter era. She has had the privilege of singing or recording with wonderful musicians, including Hugh Blumenfeld, Richard Shindell, and Peter Yarrow and was a founding member of the acclaimed vocal trio Mad Woman In The Attic. Diane has also been known to sing a chantey or two on an old wooden schooner.

The Sea Dogs

The Sea Dogs are a New Jersey-based band and pirate/privateer re-enactment
 group. They provide musical performances of sea shanties and songs of the sea, and historical re-enactments, encampments, or education. They have traveled along the East Coast from Connecticut to Maryland.