FolkMADS sponsors Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos contra dances, concerts, camps, and other special events. "Contra" dances include contras, squares, mixers, and couple dances. Unless noted on the calendar, admission is $7 for members, $8 for nonmembers. Students with ID receive half price admission and children up to 12 years of age are free. You need not come with a partner. Free instruction for beginners half an hour before the dance starts. Dances are smoke-free and alcohol-free. Children and teens are encouraged to participate if supervised by an adult.

Albuquerque Dances: 1st and 3rd Saturday contra dances, 7:30-10.30 p.m. Second Sunday Dance (English and Contra), 7:00-9:30 p.m. Heights Community Center, 823 Buena Vista SE (south of Lead/Coal).

Santa Fe Dances: 2nd and 4th Saturday contra dances and some 5th Saturday English Country dances, 7:30-10:30 p.m. Odd Fellows Hall, 1125 Cerrillos Road (south of Cordova Drive on the western side of Cerrillos).

Taos Dances: 3rd Saturdays, call for details, 776-1580.

ABQ Megaband: Albuquerque Megaband practice is held the Tuesday before the 3rd Saturday dance, at various locations. All acoustic musicians are welcome. Visit the Megaband page for more info and to add your email address to the listserv, or contact Bruce Thomson, 268-6003, or Jane. We are again looking for a "permanent" home. Check the current calendar for this month's location.

Santa Fe Jam Sessions: Santa Fe Community Band holds practice at the ODD Fellows Hall on ODD (1^st and 3^rd) Wednesdays at 7 p.m. (contact Gary Papenhagen, 242-1104). Slow jam on the 2nd Thursday at 7 p.m. at Katherine Bueler & Gary Schiffmiller's house (995-1125). Beginning and experienced musicians all welcome.

Quick Links

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Call for Contributions

We’re calling for newsletter content to ensure a well-rounded representation of our community. We know great talent lies within our own reach, amongst all of you! We are in need of contributions like articles or cartoons, and the individuals willing to create and submit those great things. Send everything to Marisa (click name for email address) or phone 505-205-8476. The deadline for newsletter publication is the 15th day of the month prior to issue. For example, the deadline for the November-December newsletter will be October 15th.

From the Board…

Member Info
Have you been receiving the FolkMADS updates through your email? If NOT, please verify that your membership information is up-to-date! It’s easy! Just send an email to our Membership Volunteer, Rob. No email? No problem! Just give Rob a call at 243-2225. If you’ve updated your email, phone, address, etc., you can let Rob know and that will ensure that you receive information from
FolkMADS in a timely fashion!

E-Newsletter Update
FolkMADS has recently started using emails for notifications of dances, events, newsletter availability, and last-minute issues such as dance location changes. As you may know, this came in very handy recently when we suddenly had to change the location of the Albuquerque dances due to construction at the Heights Community Center.  We will limit emails only to these types of notifications.

To make it easier for our volunteers who take care of this, we will be moving this notification process to Yahoo Groups.  Your email address will be added to the FolkMADS group on Yahoo and, with one click, we can send an email to everyone on the list.  Because of anti-spam bulk-emailing limitations used by many service providers, the current process requires sending an email to a portion of the membership list at a time, waiting an hour, and then sending to the next subset of the list, and repeating that process two more times!

FolkMADS respects your privacy and will take the following steps to ensure that you do not receive unwanted emails:

When we add your email address to the FolkMADS Group, you will receive an email message notifying you that you have been added.  You do not have to do anything unless you want to unsubscribe from the group.  To unsubscribe, just reply to that email.

If you have any questions or concerns about this, please contact me or anyone else on the Board.  FYI, I have used Yahoo Groups for a mailing list with another organization with no problems so I am confident that it will work well.
Deb Brunt
Secretary, FolkMADS
505-256-5381

In Search of Hosts
We are working to establish a list of the wonderful volunteers who are willing to host any out-of-towners coming in for the local dances. Deb Campbell has volunteered to put this information together and be contact for the guests coming into town. However, we need to know who’s willing to take-in weary travelers.

If you have extra space and are willing to be a host, please send the following specifications to Deb at or 243-2225.

www.folkmads.org/housing.html
        

[Taken from the first issue of FOLKwords, a FolkMADS publication, Winter 1993.]

FOLKroots, by Dean Brodkey

For members curious about DAYS of OLD and from whence we came, the following live interviews were taped during this fall [of 1993]. Mimi and Scott remember when and how. Here are their stories, somewhat edited. The interviewer was me, DB. (Original tapes can be listened to in our Archives.)

I moved here in 1978. I had been dancing the previous twelve years in Boston and Vermont and New Hampshire, so when David (Margolin) and I moved down here we had a long history of music and dance. We moved out here in the summer of ’78 and there wasn’t much going on at all. We met Pam McKeever at the Banjo and Fiddle Contests, and she loved David’s fiddling and the three of us became good friends. I guess I decided that I should learn to call if there was to be no dancing out here that I was used to, which was so wonderful, and I was just going to do it myself.

(Tell me about Pam. I’ve heard so much about her.)
Pam was about five-six, short, very blonde hair, nice slightly tanned skin, BEAUTIFUL smile, just incredibly big, beautiful smile, blue eyes – a really attractive person, and just so lively and warm and excited. She got one of the first traveling microphones because she loved to dance so much. She had her little earphones and looked like a telephone operator. I hated the thing. I had to see the dancers and see what I was doing. I’d dance around up on the stage; that’s where I’d get my dancing. She would put on her earphones and just dance all over the floor and call. You’d wonder where it was coming from… But she was just incredible. She, more than anybody, kept this thing going and started it. Well, it was the three of us. It took all three of us to really do it.

(Pam wasn’t calling when you first got here?)
Pam wasn’t calling – not the community dances that we know of. She had an exhibition team that went around, and Doc (Litchman) occasionally did some dances, but there was no live music community dance that people came to on a regular basis. There was a class, I think, at UNM that Doc taught through Continuing Education, but even that was all records and Pam’s music was all records. She had an extensive record collection that she used. So, there just wasn’t anything like we were used to at all. Pam hadn’t really been back East to sample that kind of music and dance, and of course we told her all about it. And I guess the three of us decided that we would try to start something here.

So David put a band together – “The Chili Tones.” He put an ad in the paper for old-time musicians, and Bruce Thomson, who now plays for The Adobe Brothers answered the ad. He played guitar at the time. When we went to the Banjo and Fiddle Contest that year, we met Jim Hughes, and Jim and David and Bruce formed the string band The Chili Tones.

David and I got married that Christmas, and for our honeymoon we went to Berea, Kentucky, and I took a week-long course in calling. Most of the calling was Southern running squares. That’s what I started with. So that January, five months after we first moved here, we had our first dance Saturday night, and I remember the date because it was my birthday, January 27th, 1979.

So Pam called half the dance – she probably called a little bit more than I did – but pretty soon we did basically half and half…

Pam just loved contra corners and Chorus Jig. It’s written to a particular tune, and the bands would joke around with that tune. They would act like chickens in the midst of it, and call it Chorus Chickens and make chicken noises.

In the meantime, in the summers, Pam started going to Pinewoods and we kept going back to Pinewoods. At this time, it wasn’t a society or anything. It was just me and Pam and David.

(Tell me about Pinewoods. What was it like back East?)
The people here just have no idea! Every night of the week would be a dance either in Boston proper or in the outskirts. Tony Parkes would have two Fridays a month, and Ted Sannella would have two Saturdays. Then on Thursday of every week there was just a basic contra and squares. They would rotate bands and callers. There would be three hundred people, and they would have a hall big enough for them. Two hundred and fifty of them were excellent dancers. And all ages: we’re talking eight and nine-year-olds in there dancing and seventy-year-olds who had been going there thirty or forty years, and it was just phenomenal. It’s easier to call a big dance if you’ve got a lot of good dancers because the dances take off with energy.

It was real work here for the first few years, because we would have to infuse the dancers with energy because there wouldn’t be enough of them for a dance to be energized themselves. So when you have three hundred people that dance once a week – it was so wonderful! It’s where David and I courted and met each other and fell in love. I think it’s really a place where a lot of people get together.

(So, what happened then in Albuquerque?)
Now I forget when it was that Pam moved away. Pam and I had had a kind of parting of the ways at one time, and so I did one dance a month and she did the other one, and that was in ’82 or ’83. We were still friends, but we didn’t do dances so much together. There was really enough to have two different dances. I dropped out for a while and she took over my dances when I had Hannah.

There was a lot of intermingling among the group with relationships, and if relationships didn’t work out, then people kind of went separate ways.

Now the story starts coming in with Scott, and how the musicians started to form their organization… It felt so great to have an organization take it over. It wasn’t going to rest on me any more, and it wasn’t going to rest on people with their vagaries of relationships. If some of us started hating each other, the dances wouldn’t fold. I wasn’t really a part of that (initial organization.)

I think it’s wonderful that there’s so many new callers and good bands, and callers are making up dances. Merri Rudd makes up great dances. She did one last week that we danced in Santa Fe, and as soon as I danced it, I said “This was written by a woman.” It’s more fun for women than it is for men… I think if she stays with it, she’s going to be just fantastic.

If you think now of where we’re at – we’ve got two regular dances in Albuquerque and two regular dances in Santa Fe, all of which have great attendance. It’s taken, though, since ’79, fourteen years I’m talking. This January [1994] will be the fifteenth year anniversary of this.

Look for Part II, the Scott Mathis interview, in the November-December newsletter!

Champlain Valley born-and-raised, Pete and Karen Sutherland are twenty-five year-plus veterans of the New England and national folk scenes. They are known for their wide knowledge of traditional music and music-making styles, their songwriting talents and their joy of performing for and with listening and dancing audiences of every description. At schools, libraries, dances, festivals and celebrations and in their commitment to rooting out the best of the old and injecting their own sensibilities as well, the Sutherlands represent the living folk tradition links in the endless chain of people making music that breathes and dances in their own rhythm, that tells their own stories.

Raised on a diet of Broadway show tunes, operatic arias and British invasion melodies, Pete Sutherland discovered both traditional music and songwriting in college and like Huck Finn "lit out for the territories"  A warm-voiced singer and multi-instrumentalist known equally for his potent originals and intense recreations and ago old ballads and fiddle tunes, his performances "cover the map" and . . . . "shine with a pure spirit, which infuses every bit of his music and cannot fail to move all who hear him".   The American Festival of Fiddle Tunes

Karen Sutherland enjoys one of the most diverse careers in the North Country. She is well known both as a folk singer, with her husband, Pete Sutherland, and as a singer of the classics. Her long time interests in both these areas has brought her throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe in concert and study tours. She began her studies in singing at Indiana University, and completed them at the University of Vermont, where she also holds a degree in early childhood development. In addition to her very active performing career in the folk world, she has researched, collected, transcribed, and performed folk songs native to several rural communities in North America. She has performed with many groups in the U.S. and abroad, including the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, Champlain Valley Oratorio Society and the Pitten International Music Festival in Austria. Miss Sutherland has been called a singer of "extraordinary range and power."

Fiddle Workshop with Pete,  2-4pm in Santa Fe

Singing Workshop with Karen,  2-4pm in Santa Fe
Each workshop: $20 members/$30 nonmembers

Contra Dance, 7:30pm in Santa Fe with Doc Litchman calling. See calendar for details.

GRUPO MUY MUY will perform in Old Town Plaza on Friday, September 12, at 7 pm. Don’t miss this one-of-a-kind concert, as this unique group reunites for the first time in 15 years. It promises to be fun, fresh, and hey, even inspirational! Grupo Muy Muy was formed in Oakland, California in 1988. They performed throughout the Bay Area for Central American solidarity events and rallies, opening for such luminaries as Rigoberta Menchú, Bonnie Raitt and Kris Kristofferson. They play an eclectic mix of Latin American and North American music, from nueva canción and nueva trova to old-fashioned folkie numbers. Join musicians Francisco Herrera, Ruth Warner Carrillo, Charles Marston and Dair Obenshain for a FREE family concert! For more information, call Dair at 505-934-2419 or e-mail dair_oATyahooDOTcom.