It all
started with Brian Miller researching an obscure saloon-keeper and singer from
Virginia Minnesota. It ended up being the discovery of a treasure trove of
early audio recordings of folksongs from the Great Lake
region. The discovery is of the 47 songs were recorded in 1924 from singers who
lived and worked in the woods. With the help of financing from the Minnesota
Arts board and over 100 private donors, Brian created “The Minnesota Folksong
Collection" web site that you can visit and listen to the original recordings.
Brian teamed up with Randy Gosa to form “The Lost Forty” duo and will bring
some of that early history to life in Bigfork on Sunday, October 30th, at
2pm. A show for the whole family to enjoy, the Prices are $10 Adults and $5 children.
“The Lost 40” name is borrowed from Itasca County ’s Scientific and
Nature Area (below). "This is a place where some of Minnesota 's largest trees tower over
some of the state's most fragile plants, a virgin forest, that legend has it,
was spared the ax because surveyors mapped it mistakenly as a wetland. Lost
40's geology includes an 11,000-year-old ice age relic known as an esker...
which described as a "glacial, gravelly deposit....It also holds colonies
of delicate Indian Pipe. The plant isn't especially rare but it looks unnatural
— ghost white surrounded by green plants and the brown forest floor. The plant
has no chlorophyll and is fragile.If you were to touch it, it's very wet and
would almost dissolve in your hands..."
Like the preserved forest left intact, “The Lost 40 Project” brings brings back music history intact in the form of the old recordings to the web for everyone to enjoy. To read and hear more about visit “The Minnesota Folksong Collection” www.minnesotafolksongcollection.org Brian Miller’s research of the saloon-keeper led to a 90 year-old newspaper then to the collection of some of the earliest audio recordings of folksongs from the Great Lakes Region. That is a great story in itself. And this concert is a chance to hear the results.
They are
regionally-composed logging songs, railroading songs, deer hunting songs, Great
Lakes shipwreck songs, old Irish ballads and even older English ballads dating
as far back as the 1680s. The Miller
Gosa performance will feature stories
and historical photos mixed with The Lost Forty’s new arrangements of the old
music. Miller hopes that the Bigfork concert will inspire others to learn songs
from the collection.
Brian
Miller and Randy Gosa, “The Lost Forty”, have each toured across the US and
Canada with the country’s top Irish traditional music groups. Both perform on
guitar and bouzouki (a relative of the mandolin that has been adapted into
traditional Irish music in recent decades). For his work with North Woods
music, Miller earned a Folk and Traditional Arts Grant and two Artist
Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Miller was also a
recipient of the 2014 Parsons Fund Award from the American Folklife Center at
the Library of Congress in Washington DC .
The “Lost
Forty Project” earned a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the
support of over 120 donors who gave money to a recent fundraising campaign.
So, for
a good time with some of the earliest North Woods music come and spend part of
Sunday afternoon reliving the history in this part of the country. It promises
to be a special kind of concert for the whole family that relives history and
lets you see into how early settlers of the area lived and worked. Sunday,
October 30th, at 2pm. The Prices are $10 Adults and $5 children.
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