Keeping Traditional Folk Songs Alive
By: ML Ball
In spite of the inevitable frantic preparations, what’s really wonderful about the holidays is the way they awaken the senses. The smell of gingerbread cookies. The sight of whimsical shop windows. The taste of spiced mulled wine. The sound of beloved songs and carols.
Folklorist Derek Piotr, based in Litchfield County, is making it his life’s work to collect and preserve old-style folk songs and traditional music, not just those focused on the holidays but all types from around the globe.
It all began when Piotr (pronounced Peter) started recording his grandmother’s stories about her life in 2008. “She was 89 when I started and she lived to be 99, so I have ten years of stories,” he says. “When she passed, I put them all on an iTunes playlist. Then in 2020, I started researching older folk music and got interested in Lena Turbyfill from western North Carolina, who had been recorded in the 1930s. I visited her last living daughter in Elk Park, who, despite the fact that she was on oxygen, pulled off her oxygen mask and sang for me. And I just went from there.”
Traveling throughout the UK and again to the mountains of North Carolina, Piotr recorded people of all sorts singing traditional folk music. But when he turned his attention to his home state of Connecticut and visited the American Folklore Center at the Library of Congress, he was shocked to find that there were no recordings from Connecticut, save for the Flanders Ballad Collection. “Their filing cabinet went from Colorado to Delaware,” he explains. “Connecticut has basically been ignored by field researchers in terms of recordings of traditional music.”
Starting in 2021, Piotr set out to change that. He visited libraries, churches, Quaker meetings, and square dances, asking anyone who was interested to come forward and let him record them singing old family songs. He now has hundreds of recordings from Litchfield, Fairfield, and New Haven Counties. “My dream would be to have a song from every state,” he says. (He currently has recordings from 21 states, as well as British Columbia, Canada, England, Iceland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Poland, Scotland, and Serbia.) “I’m sure I can get there.”
Today, Piotr has over 700 recordings in his collection, prompting him to found the Derek Piotr Fieldwork Archive in 2022. “I really want people to know that this archive of traditional music exists so that anyone interested in these songs can go to my website and hear them, and contact me to add more songs. I want to preserve this incredible art form of folk songs so that all of us can benefit from them.”
This festive season of singing and celebrating seems the perfect time to sample some of Piotr’s recordings. He suggests three with holiday themes: Countdown to Christmas (fieldwork-archive.com/370.html), Cold and Frosty Morning (fieldwork-archive.com/425.html), and The Mistletoe Bough (fieldwork-archive.com/63.html). If you have songs to share, please contact Piotr at [email protected] or 203-460-0576. To access his archive of recordings, visit fieldwork-archive.com.
