Don't miss the opportunity to hear Norman Kennedy in concert at the New York Mills Cultural Center at 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 12. This is the night before the 23rd annual Great American Think-Off.
Kennedy is an unaccompanied singer of traditional Scottish songs with a long history of performances around the world, including such venues as Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival. He learned his songs naturally by growing up around some of the great Scottish singers of the last generation. He has a wide repertoire of songs learned directly from them without the facility of tapes and records. He learned them, not because he wanted to be a folk singer, but because even as a boy he was drawn to the music.
In concert, Kennedy draws only from that body of old songs. His concerts have a relaxed informality about them. He comes out on stage, takes a seat and seemingly starts a conversation with the audience. His dry sense of humor and memory of the stories surrounding the songs make his listeners appreciate not only the old songs, but the old ways as well.
"You can tell stories, you can recite them, you can sing them," he said.
Singing and recollecting are all part of the same cloth. With this directness he presents ballads - stories of love won and lost, betrayal, death - in a way that holds everyone's attention.
ADVERTISEMENT
Kennedy shares what is enduring about traditional songs - their authenticity to life, the humorous turns of every-day events, the beauty of old melodies.
"These songs are my roots; they're older and more important than I am," he said.
This unpretentiousness makes Kennedy's music as wonderful to the audience as it is important to him.
Kennedy was Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, into a family with roots in that port city dating to the 13th century. The Kennedy family had been shipbuilders and merchant seamen for generations. While learning songs, stories, and lore from family members and neighbors, Kennedy spent part of his teen years "hanging around" the local handweavers.
During the 1950s, he made annual trips to the Outer Hebrides to learn the local weaving, Gaelic songs, and cultural practices. In 1965, he was invited to perform at the Newport Folk Festival to represent Scotland in a program on the origins of the American ballad tradition. A year later, he returned to the United States to co-found Country Roads, a shop and organization intended to support traditional crafts.
From 1967 to 1972, he served as the master weaver at Colonial Williamsburg. Finally, Kennedy founded the Marshfield School of Weaving in Marshfield, Vermont, in 1976 where he taught until he closed it in 1995. Kennedy travels the country performing the old songs, telling stories, and instructing people in traditional weaving techniques, including the rarely practiced community method of waulking (shrinking) cloth accompanied by group song.
