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Edna Juliana Bradeen
Edna Juliana Bradeen
Edna Juliana Bradeen, born c. 1900, lived in Brownville Maine. She learned many of her songs from her mother, Maud Merrill Fredin, who was one of the oldest children in a family of twelve. According to Mrs. Bradeen, her aunt, Susan Merrill Lewis, brought Fanny Hardy Eckstorm up to Brownville to collect songs and tales from Bradeen’s mother. She recorded several of the songs she learned from her mother for the Northeast Archives in 1984.
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Doris Stackpole
Doris Stackpole
Doris Stackpole was a student at the University of Maine. She collected a number of items from Bridgewater, Maine for a class in spring 1962.
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Helen K. Atchison
Helen K. Atchison
Helen K. Atchison collected oral histories of Aroostook County as part of a project conducted under the auspices of the Cary Library in Houlton, Maine. In June 1971, the Aroostook County libraries received a grant to develop an informal oral history of the county, and over the next year Atchison was one of several interviewers who covered the length and breadth of the largest county east of the Mississippi River. Mrs. Atchison’s interviews, which total more than 100, comprise the vast majority of the Maine Folklife Center’s Aroostook County Oral History Collection.
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Linda Gilbert Davenport
Linda Gilbert Davenport
Linda Gilbert Davenport was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her Master’s Thesis, entitled “Music Among the Contemporary Penobscot Indians,” focused on the musical culture of the contemporary Penobscot Indians of Old Town, Maine. Her research is available at the Maine Folklife Center as Collection MF 084. She received a B.S. from the University of Maine in 1973 and a Master of Music in Musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977.
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Pamela Dean
Pamela Dean
Pamela Dean received her BA and MA in history form the University of Maine and her PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to returning home to Maine in 2000, Dean was the director of the Williams Center for Oral History at Louisiana State University. She was the Maine Folklife Center’s archivist for ten years. She is a long-time member of the Oral History Association and her interests include women’s history and radio documentaries that use oral history materials.
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Steffan Duplessis
Steffan Duplessis
Steffan Duplessis worked at the Franco American Center at the University of Maine in the 1970s and 1980s. While there he conducted many research projects in the Acadian region of Maine.
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Lisa Feldman, Mark LaFond, Mary Beth (Argenteiri) O’Connor, and Greg Boardman
Lisa Feldman, Mark LaFond, Mary Beth O'Connor, and Greg Boardman
Lisa Feldman, Mark LaFond, Mary Beth (Argenteiri) O’Connor, & Greg Boardman conducted a series of interviews regarding country music in Maine as a class project for AY123: Folklore Fieldwork Study. Due to the number of collectors in this group, only brief biographical sketches are possible. Lisa Feldman came to Maine in 1972 as a volunteer at the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, then stayed as a student and is now a Library Assistant at UMA. Mary Beth O’Connor and Mark LaFond were both co-authors of “Argyle Boom,” Northeast Folklore vol. XVII. O’Connor studied Folklore and Oral History at UMaine and is now assistant professor of Writing at Ithaca College. LaFond received a B.A. in Psychology from UMaine and has worked in the printing industry for over twenty years. Greg Boardman (www.bowandstring.com) teaches strings in the Lewiston Public Schools and at Bates College, where he leads a fiddle group and offers private instruction. He also performs as part of many ensembles, playing fiddle and other instruments.
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Hugh French
Hugh French
In 1979-80 Hugh French received a National Endowment for the Humanities “Youth Grant” to curate an exhibit on the history of the Eastport, Maine, waterfront, 1890-1920. Sandy Ives acted as academic sponsor for this project. French subsequently worked with SALT, a documentary program in Portland, Maine, and founded the Tides Institute in Eastport, Maine. This collection includes twenty-eight interviews with thirteen Eastport residents, plus manuscript material collected as part of French’s research. In addition to the general history of Eastport, major topics discussed include the sardine industry and community holiday celebrations. More details on this collection are available here.
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Geraldine Hegeman, Dolores Daigle, and Marilyn Daigle
Geraldine Hegeman, Dolores Daigle, and Marilyn Daigle
Geraldine Hegeman, Dolores Daigle, and Marilyn Daigle were students in one of Edward Ives’ Saturday extension courses in American Folklore taught in Presque Isle during the Fall of 1962. They collected Maliseet stories as a group for the course’s main assignment. The result was 134 pages of transcribed stories and two seven inch reels of tape, a considerable accomplishment for what had otherwise been an elusive set of Native American stories.
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Chris Hodgkins
Chris Hodgkins
Chris Hodgkins was a graduate of the University of Maine. He developed an interest in Mount Desert Island area folklore when he worked for his father’s construction firm remodeling a restaurant in Northeast Harbor. While there he met several local characters and was later able to interview Jake Lunt (a teller of jokes, mostly dirty) and Raymond Mace for a class (FO 179) in the Fall 1968 semester.
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Evelyn Huckins
Evelyn Huckins
Evelyn Huckins is the daughter of Jennie Gray. Mrs. Huckins recorded several songs her mother knew growing up. Mrs. Gray’s mother gave each of her daughters a little notebook of songs as a Christmas present one year, entitled “The Songs My Mother Used to Sing.” “The Cambric Shirt”was not in this book, but Mrs. Huckins recalled that her mother had often sung it to her.
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Pauline Lewis
Pauline Lewis
Pauline Lewis was a student at the University of Maine. She collected “The Schooner E.A. Horton“ as part of one of her courses. This was in the fall of 1963.
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Pauleena MacDougall
Pauleena MacDougall
Pauleena MacDougall is the Director of The Maine Folklife Center. She received her Ph.D. in American History from the University of Maine in 1995 and has worked for the Maine Folklife Center since 1989. She is also faculty associate in Anthropology, where she teaches courses in linguistics and Native American history, and in the Department of History, as well as a Cooperating Research Associate in the Lobster Institute. Since 1979, MacDougall has published numerous papers on Penobscot Indian language, culture and history. She is editor of Northeast Folklore and author of The Penobscot Dance of Resistance: Tradition in the History of a People, published in 2004 by the University of New England Press. She is currently writing a biography of Fannie Hardy Eckstorm.
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Jeffrey "Smokey " McKeen
Jeffrey "Smokey" McKeen
Jeff McKeen grew up in a musical household, singing both at home and in church. He learned to play guitar as a young man, at first playing pop and rock music and later turning towards folk and traditional. In college he learned to play banjo and mandolin, also adding fiddle and accordion to his repertoire later. He co-founded the musical group Old Grey Goose in 1977 and has toured with them around the United States and the world. In addition to being a musician, McKeen has worked as a folklorist for numerous cultural organizations in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes, doing research, producing folk festivals and radio documentaries, and collecting traditional songs and dances. In 2002, he was appointed to the Maine Arts Commission and served a three year term. When he is not engaged in performing or collecting traditional music, he is co-owner and operator of an oyster farm.
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Ann Mooney and Linda Hannigan
Ann Mooney and Linda Hannigan
Ann Mooney and Linda Hannigan were both students at the University of Maine in the late 1960s. They interviewed Dale Potter as part of an assignment for FO 134 (Folksong in America) in the Spring of 1969.
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Angela Nickerson
Angela Nickerson
Angela Nickerson is an administrative assistant for the University of Maine System. She conducted several interviews while completing her Certificate in Maine Studies in the Spring of 2002.
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Sister Saint Jude (Poulin) S.S.J.
Sister Poulin
Sister Saint Jude (Poulin) S.S.J., elected to write a Master’s Essay (Boston College, 1963) on the folksongs of Maine. She consulted the major printed sources and was convinced that a live singing tradition still existed in this state. Starting completely from scratch, she placed a letter in several Maine newspapers, asking who knew old songs. Then in the early part of 1962 she set out on a field trip to see the people who had responded to her letter. Many of the songs she collected appeared in Northeast Folklore, vol. VII, “Folksongs from Maine.” Her research can also be found at the Maine Folklife Center as Collection MF 077.
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Rob Rosenthal
Rob Rosenthal
Rob Rosenthal is am award-winning freelance radio and advertising producer, documentarian, and teacher. He founded the radio program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and has taught there for over ten years. He also teaches audio production at the University of Southern Maine and has taught audio production and storytelling at many workshops. He is also the audio producer for Story Bank Maine.
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Margaret Small
Margaret Small
Margaret Small collected African-American and Native American folk remedies and other miscellaneous beliefs as a project for CP 80, taken at UMaine in the Spring of 1967.
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Laura Finkel Streett
Laura Finkel Streett
Laura Finkel Streett was originally from Troy, New York. She earned a B.A. in History and Anthropology from SUNY-New Paltz in 1991, then an M.A. in History from the University of Maine in 1993, and an M.L.S. (Master’s of Library Science) from Simmons College in 1999. She has worked as an archivist and librarian since 2000 at Smith College and Cornell University, and is currently an archivist at the Vassar College Archives and Special Collections Library.
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Jeff Todd Titon
Jeff Todd Titon
Jeff Todd Titon received the B.A. from Amherst College, and the M.A. (in English) and Ph.D. (in American Studies) from the University of Minnesota, where he studied ethnomusicology and wrote his dissertation on blues music. He has done fieldwork on religious folk music, blues, and old-time fiddling. His teaching began at Tufts University, where he was assistant professor of English, then associate professor of English and music. He has been a visiting professor at Carleton College, Amherst College, Berea College, the University of Maine, and Indiana University. Since 1986 he has been professor of music (ethnomusicology) at Brown. He is the award-winning author or editor of seven books, and also plays guitar, fiddle, and banjo, and restores violins. His full biography can be found at www.brown.edu/Departments/Music/people/facultypage.php?id=10318
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Muriel Watts
Muriel Watts
Muriel Watts collected several woods songs, jokes, and tales from Clarence Berry and others as part of her course work at the University of Maine.
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Frank Worcester
Frank Worcester
Frank Worcester is the son of the singer, Mabel Worcester. He recorded almost twenty songs his mother learned many years earlier, all of which were old songs from the lumber camps.
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Ellen Vincent
Ellen Vincent
Ellen Vincent was the author of Down on the Island, Up on the Main: A Recollected History of South Bristol, Maine, an honorary citizen of the Town of South Bristol, and a founder of South Bristol Historical Society (SBHS). Born in Washington, D.C. in 1949, Ellen grew up in a Maryland suburb outside of Washington, D.C., and graduated from high school in 1967. She received a B.A. in art education from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1971, and a Masters of Fine Arts from George Washington University in 1973. She began her academic career at the Maryland College of Art and Design and in 1989 moved to Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design where she was Professor of Art until illness kept her from the classroom. Ellen was the catalyst for a group of townspeople interested in local history to carry out the idea of a historical society, leading to the formation of SBHS in 1998. She passed away February 24, 2007 from breast cancer. Click here to read more about Ellen Vincent and her legacy in South Bristol.
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Richard Lunt
C. Richard K. Lunt
C. Richard K. Lunt was born in 1940 to a family long resident on Coast of Maine. He graduated from Mount Desert Island High School, then then received a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Northeastern University and the University of Maine, respectively. After spending time in the Peace Corps with his wife, Lunt studied at Indiana University where received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Folklore. He taught for many years at the State University of New York (Potsdam), where he is now a Professor Emeritus. His principal interests lie with the traditional narrators, craftsmen, and maritime folklore of New England, and has published many books on these subjects.
Find out more about the collectors featured in the Maine Song and Story Sampler here. The Sampler contains songs and stories from the Maine Folklife Center's collection from about fifty areas of Maine, creating a representative sample of geographical and cultural songs and traditions.
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