Building new bridges through old-time folk

Yale and New Haven unite to bring back an old folk festival with a new twist

And if the organizers have their druthers, folk music will do just that, this Sat., Sept. 25 at the newly reinvented Eli Whitney Folk Festival.

Old song, new tune

In its original incarnation, the Folk Festival took place every year between 1989 and 1994 as a benefit for the Farmington Canal Rails to Trails Association (Rails to Trails). It brought big names in folk, including Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, and Arlo Guthrie, to the Elm City's Edgerton Park. But when the sponsoring bank went under, the festival ceased to be.

"I thought it was a shame when I heard how it ended," Gordon, a board-member of Rails to Trails said, "It sounded like it was a big event that really brought the community together and that a lot of people went to, and enjoyed, and looked back on very fondly. There's so much interest in folk music now in general, with the resurgence of folk nationally, and particularly in the New Haven area, I thought I'd see if we could do it again."

Gordon decided to put up posters around New Haven, held meetings in the New Haven Public Library, and put together a crew of volunteers from the Yale and New Haven communities to resurrect the festival. They booked Edgerton Park. They started debating over headlining acts. But when Rails to Trails declined to be associated with the group's revival efforts, things became significantly more complicated.

"We began to reformulate the concept of the revival," James Van Pelt, DIV '01, a Festival organizer, said. "It evolved from just organizing a festival, to starting an organization that would promote folk music in New Haven and in Connecticut. We decided the festival would be part of that, and a monthly concert series would also be part of that, and that we would build up to larger and larger projects."

The organization that was formed—the Eli Whitney Folk Revival—has managed to pull off some rather large successes in just over six months. Most notably, they booked not only Dar Williams, a steadiy growing presence in the college-folk community but also Odetta, the '60s folk star dubbed by many the "Queen of Folk Music" who influenced innumerable greats including Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

There's really a bridge between generations," Van Pelt said, "because we've got Odetta, who's one of the oldest folk performers, and we've got Dar Williams, who's one of the youngest."

In addition, they expanded the festival itself, turning the traditionally evening concert into an all-day event. They've booked over ten performances, including a children's concert by the Yale Children's Theater, and performances by the Heaths, local musicians Michael Mills and the Home Made Jam Band, and Tangled Up In Blue, a Yale undergraduate singing group. "The idea is to make it more of a family event," festival coordinator Luke Bronin, SM '01, said. "We want to bring people out there with blankets and frisbees. We're hoping to widen the appeal, widen the audience draw."

"We tried to get different performers who'd appeal to different people," Gordon said. "We want everyone to come out and interact and hear kinds of music they weren't exposed to before."

The organizers have also branched out in terms of funding, managing to snag multiple sponsors in an effort to avoid the dependence on a single institution that had spelled such disaster for the festival in the past. The major sponsor of the festival is still a major bank—Citizens Bank—but over 50 individuals and 20 local businesses have made donations in order to make the concert possible.

We'll walk hand in hand

In addition to building a bridge between generations, festival organizers see themselves as building bridges between Yale and the New Haven community. "The way the concert was set up was really a very grass-roots partnership between Yalies and New Haven residents," Gordon said. "It's a very diverse group of people who've been planning the festival, and we're hoping for a similar interaction at the festival."

"I think this is a really nice example of Yalies and community members working as equals and as collaborators," organizer Jacob Remes, SY '02, said of the project. "As opposed to what we often see in community service activities where Yalies go out and `help New Haven,' this is really New Haven and Yale acting as one."

This bridge extends further than the mere organizaion and attendance of the festival. The festival organizers have chosen the Suzanne Jovin Memorial Fund as one of the local causes to which they will be donating portions of the concert's proceeds. "The Suzanne Jovin Memorial Fund really epitomizes the kind of relationship between Yale and New Haven that we're trying to create," Gordon said. "It supports programs that foster one on one relationships between Yalies and New Haven residents. It's also an effort toward healing the wounds in the Edgerton Park neighborhood. Suzanne was murdered only a few blocks from where the concert will take place. We hope that this will help people both at Yale and in the community remember her and the work she did, and help out causes that she would have supported, and did support."

Proceeds from the festival will also go toward Edgerton Park, and toward promoting folk in the New Haven area through future festivals and a between-festivals monthly concert series.

Festival organizers have also taken up the civil rights cause with which folk music has so long been associated. "We're allied with the Connecticut Freedom Trail that celebrates the historic sites in Connecticut of the Underground Railroad, and celebrates the struggle for freedom," Bronin said.

"With Odetta, this is the first time we've had an African-American headliner," Van Pelt said. "We've made a tremendous effort to get African-American participation. We've run very big ads in inner city newspapers. We've distributed free tickets through the school system, through the black churches and unions. Folk music has been integral to the civil rights struggle from the Civil War on. That's a really elemental tradition in folk music that we're bringing into this. It's really an attempt to build a lot of bridges with this one event."

This land was made for you and me

For the organizers of the Eli Whitney Folk Festival, the music that will be played on Saturday is only one part of an ongoing story.

"Folk is very different from most other popular music with a lot of electric instruments and a lot of production," Bronin said. "It's nice to see a little more personal form of music, to see someone up there with their guitar, singing about both themselves and the world around them. Folk is traditionally created by people who are very conscious of the world around them, who are aware of society and what may be wrong with it and ways to struggle against it."

For the Eli Whitney Folk Festival, the concert on Saturday is a bridge between divided communities, between decades, between problems with society and their solutions. "And," Gordon said, "it's a great alternative to the junk you hear on the radio all the time."

Photos of Odetta and Dar Williams courtesy eliwhitneyfolk.org. Graphic by Matt Wiegle.

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