The Working Waterfront Festival

Anita Best

Anita Best has spent a lifetime exploring, cataloguing and celebrating the rural Newfoundland lifestyle and culture. In the process she has become one of the province's most prominent traditional singers. Born on Merasheen Island in Placentia Bay (since abandoned under the resettlement program), Best has worked as an educator, archivist, folklorist, broadcaster and singer. A particular interest in oral history—songs and stories passed down through generations—lead to her performing career. She has toured extensively as a storyteller and singer, made numerous television and radio appearances and added her voice to several Newfoundland recordings.

She is best known for two albums: The Colour of Amber, a collaboration with Pamela Morgan, was released in 1993. Crosshanded, a collection of twelve songs for solo voice, followed a few years later. In these recordings and in her performances, Best tends to forego the standard Newfoundland repertoire in favor of the lesser known songs and stories collected from around the province.

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Boston Scandinavian Ensemble

The Boston Scandinavian Ensemble formed in 1988. The group is comprised of three musicians: Luana Josvold who sings and plays accordion and flute, fiddler Melanie Milde and guitarist Just Holme. Luana grew up in the Norwegian community of Seattle, WA. She began taking accordion lessons at the age of six. She now lives in Mattapoisett, MA and teaches Norwegian language and literature. Melanie is of German and Danish background, but has learned many traditional tunes from all of the Scandinavian countries and studied with a well-known Hardanger fiddle player in Norway to learn that style. Just Holme grew up in Orsund, Norway. His family was highly musical and in addition to learning traditional Norwegian music he was part of a folkloric dance troupe and is very knowledgeable about Norwegian and other Scandinavian dance traditions. The group plays various types of venues some within the Scandinavian community and many outside of the community. Their repertoire is wide-ranging and changes according to the venue and audience. They are versed in classical Norwegian music as well as traditional dance tunes and holiday songs.

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Moe Bowstern

Moe Bowstern started her waterfront life in 1986 as a miserable 18-year-old greenhorn deckhand aboard the F/V Sunrunner, tendering salmon around Kodiak Island, Alaska. Since then she has commercially fished salmon, halibut, herring, cod, shad, shrimp and tanner crab, mostly around Kodiak, though she has ventured as far west as Togiak Bay in the Bering Sea, as far east as the Hudson River and as far south as Dinner Key Marina, Miami. She arrives at this year's Working Waterfront Festival fresh from a set net site in Viekoda Bay, Kodiak. Moe found that singing in tune with a diesel motor helped her to stay awake during 20-hour days of the Kodiak salmon season. Moe reads annually at the Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon since the first gathering ten years ago, and has performed at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko Nevada and at this year's Sea Music Festival in Mystic, Connecticut. These days she makes her home in Portland, Oregon, where she is hard at work writing her fishing stories into a book. You can find her writing at www.microcosmpublishing.com.

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Jon Campbell

Former commercial fisherman Jon Campbell is a prolific composer with six independent cassette releases to his credit. He is most notorious for his satirical and humorous songs, typical subjects being yachtsmen, tourists, fishermen, Block Island, regional cuisine and other identifiable New England subjects.

A variety of his songs have been performed and recorded by regional groups such as Pendragon, Wickford Express, Short Sisters, Boarding Party, Katzberg-Snyder and one is currently on Tommy Makem's "Live" recording. Jon has been a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Artist-in-Residence since 1982.

In addition to the bouzouki and guitar, he is proficient on the Uilleann Pipes, tin whistle, flute, tenor banjo, and mandolin. Along with Everett Brown, he has been a contributing musician on five releases on the North Star label, most notably New England Christmastide, volumes 1 and 2, and Wind In The Rigging. His self produced Keep on Fishing is a reverent and irreverent look at New England Coastal Life.

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Debra Cowan

From the minute she begins to sing, Debra Cowan grabs her audience and doesn’t let go. Her love and passion for singing and her respect for a well-crafted song is felt by anyone who is in her presence the minute the first notes resound. Her ability to communicate the story within the song is rare. Her rich voice conjures images of stony grey Celtic castles, green and rolling English landscapes, and humorous American urban scenes. Just as the audience is left spellbound after Debra presents a woeful traditional ballad of love gone wrong, she immediately brings laughter with an outrageous comic song. Her love of songs from the British Isles has led her to search out the connections with their North American ancestors Based near Worcester, Massachusetts, Debra tours extensively in the USA and United Kingdom.

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Bridget Fitzgerald

Bridget Fitzgerald is a sean nos (old style) singer in the Irish language. The sean nos style of singing is highly ornamented and generally unaccompanied. The repertoire is old and deep, varying by region in Ireland. It is said to represent the heart and soul Irish-speaking people. sean nos is not as widely practiced in Ireland as it was when Fitzgerald was growing up, because the number of people in Ireland whose first language is Irish has been steadily declining and an older generation of singers is passing away.

Fitzgerald is one of a handful of sean nos singers now living in the United States. She was a founding member of the all-women ensemble Cherish the Ladies and has taught master classes at a number of folk music camps. She also passed her skills on to an apprentice through the Massachusetts Cultural Council's Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program.

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Jackson Gillman

"Stand-Up Chameleon" Jackson Gillman magically transforms himself into a wide array of eccentric characters through his many talents as mime, actor, songsmith and storyteller. As adept with children as he is with adults, his interactive performances are seasoned with skillful dialect, song, dance, mime and sign language. Shining through Jackson's wit and extraordinary versatility is his bemused, warm-hearted honesty. Jackson's humor evolves from finding that which is funny in human beings trying to be human and often tripping over their own being in the attempt.

Jackson has thrice been a featured performer at the National Storytelling in Tennessee, and has performed at festivals and schools throughout the country. Year-round he now brings his unique brand of one-man theater to diverse audiences across the nation. Whether performing on concert stages, at colleges, business functions, festivals, school assemblies or libraries, Jackson Gillman delights his audiences with his inventions while touching them with his personal warmth. In his appearances at the Working Waterfront Festival he will draw upon his fishy repertoire from the sandy beach and the briny deep including traditional ballads from Down East Maine by Ruth Moore and others.

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Frank Gotwals

Frank Gotwals, a musician and lobsterman from Stonington, Maine, has been performing and writing music since childhood. An accomplished guitar player and singer/song writer, he is included on the Maine Touring Artists Roster of the Maine Arts Commission. Over the past six years he has released three recordings of original music, two CDs and a children's book/cassette. His songs have received airplay nationwide and been used in two PBS documentaries. He regularly performs at concerts and school programs throughout New England and as far south as Virginia while continuing to lobster in the summer and fall months.

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Irene & Bob and Their Sound-A-bouts

The Sound-A-bouts made their first public appearance September 18, 1971. Since then, the band has enjoyed numerous successes appearing at many major Polka festivals, numerous Polka weekends and countless club engagements, weddings and anniversaries throughout New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Florida.

The band is co-led by Bob and Irene Jaracz. Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, Bob Jaracz began accordion lessons in 1949. He also plays piano, organ, drums and clarinet. After many years playing with other bands including the Polkateens (an all teenage group he founded), and the Polkarettes, Bob formed the Sound-A-bouts in 1971. Bob's wife Irene who also hails from Lowell Massachusetts began studying the accordion in 1954. Irene also plays tenor saxophone and sings. In 1976, she was named Female Vocalist of the Year by the United States Polka Association. Irene played with numerous Polka bands before co-founding the Sound-A-bouts.

Now in their 35th year, the Sound-A-bouts have produced five albums and continue to entertain audiences throughout New England and beyond.

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The Johnson Girls

Formed in 1997, The Johnson Girls are the leading all-woman maritime song group in the world. Sea chanteys and songs, as the first real "world music", captured their imagination. Just as sailors who were heavily influenced by the songs they heard while traveling the world over, each of the Johnson Girls brings a special style to the ensemble. Their extensive repertoire of both traditional and contemporary material includes sea chanteys and work songs of other traditions, African-American, Canadian, Caribbean, Irish, French, Italian as well as songs from the inland waterways and fisheries. Widely acclaimed for their powerhouse performances of rousing work songs, sensitive renderings of haunting ballads and laments, and hair-raising harmonies, The Johnson Girls dazzle audiences wherever they perform.

They have headlined at Portugal's Festival of Ports in Lisbon; Britain's Sidmouth International Festival, Warwick Folk Festival, and Broadstairs Folk Week; and New England's Mystic Seaport Sea Music Festival. In 2005 they were featured at La Fete Des Chants de Marins in Quebec, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, San Francisco Maritime Museum's Sea Music Festival, and the Strontrace Shanty Festival in the Netherlands.

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Mariachi Estampa de America

Mariachi Estampa de America includes musicians from Mexico, El Salvador and Texas. Versatile players, they are equally at ease with the traditional Mariachi repertoire as with norteno and conjunto music from the Texas borderlands and cumbia, a working class vernacular dance music that originated in Colombia. Norteno music, which grew up along the Texas/Mexico border, prominently features the button accordion and is heavily influenced by the rhythms of polka which were introduced to the region with the arrival of German immigrants in the late 19th century. In the 1950s this music was further influenced by American rock and swing giving, rise to tejano and conjunto styles. In addition to the accordion, the band includes trumpet, guittaron (literally, “large guitar” which is a 6-string acoustic bass) and vihuela (a small guitar-like instrument with 5 strings). They play regularly at restaurants and club as well as weddings, private parties and community festivals throughout New England.

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Jim McGrath

Jim McGrath has been performing for over 30 years. His repertoire includes original songs as well as sea chanteys, Irish and British Isles Ballads and American traditional and contemporary songs which he has performed on ships and in concert halls and saloons in Ireland, Germany and across the Eastern seaboard. In 1972, Jim crewed on the Brigantine Black Pearl where he served as the official “chantey man” as part of Operation Sail, one of the first international sail training events. He also worked briefly on a stern trawler, an experience which he says, “Gave me great respect for the folks who make their living in the commercial fishing business!” Often joined by his band the Reprobates, Jim recently released his second solo CD with Wepecket Island Records. The CD which is entitled Red, Right Returning features North American nautical songs, seven original and six traditional

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New Bedford Sea Chantey Chorus

Hosted and organized by the Schooner Ernestina, this 43-member chorus was created in 2001, and is made up of some of the Ernestina's most vocal volunteers. The repertoire includes a variety of chanteys and songs that reflect the rich maritime heritage of New Bedford, and the region. Sea Chanteys were traditionally sung as work songs on board sailing ships both as a way to pass the time and as a means of helping establish a rhythm for various types of work aboard the ship.

As a sampler of musical traditions connected to New Bedford Harbor and the New England seafarer, their performances feature the chanteys of the Yankee sailor, along with the ballads and ditties of global mariners and coastwise fisherfolk in North America, the Cape Verde Islands, and the British Isles.

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Joanna Reichhold

Joanna Reichhold (alias: Ellamara Jo ) lives in the coastal temperate rainforest and salmon country of the far west-- from Cordova, Alaska to Arcata, California. She has worked 6 seasons out of Cordova as a deckhand on gillnetters, seiners, and tender boats, on the Copper River Delta and Prince William Sound. She considers poetry the toughest, most dangerous job in America.

A singer, poet, storyteller, and jill-of-all-trades, her first book of poems and short stories might just materialize this year. She performs at festivals, seedy bars, and seedier churches; on streetcorners and boats. Joanna can sometimes be caught onstage at the Astoria, Oregon Fisher Poets Gathering, the Cowboy Poet's Gathering, or even at an arctic village high school's gymnasium. She's just some cotton-picker's daughter turned fish-picker, looking for the magic healing soup made out of words.

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The Souls of the Sea Band

The Souls of the Sea Band performs musical tributes to the lives and experiences of the fishermen of the North Atlantic and their families. The original and musically diverse songs are unique interpretations of life around the working harbor, both yesterday and today. The group of nationally acclaimed musicians, singers and songwriters is based in America�s oldest seaport, Gloucester Massachusetts, and perform throughout the Northeast.

Band members are: Allen Estes (lead vocals, guitar, mandolin), Ardys Flavelle (lead vocals), Sal Baglio (guitars, vocals), Steve C. Burke (keyboards), Matt Leavenworth (fiddle, vocals), Seth Pappas (drums), Robb Scott (bass).

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Toby Sullivan

Toby Sullivan, 52, lives in Kodiak, Alaska. He has fished crab, halibut, herring, salmon and various other fishes in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska since 1974. His poems and stories about commercial fishing and the lives of commercial fishing people have appeared in the Anchorage Press, We Alaskans, Alaska Magazine, the zine "Xtra-Tuff", as well as in the anthologies Salt in Our Veins, (1999) Out on the Deep Blue, (2002), and Travelers' Tales Alaska (2003). He won the Anchorage Daily News Grand Prize for Creative Writing in 2002 and has appeared at the Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria Oregon each year since 1998. He was featured in the 2006 documentary, Fisher Poets. Between December 2004 and April 2006, Toby made four trips to Iraq as an embedded journalist and is currently at work on a book about his experiences there. He fishes commercially for salmon each summer on Kodiak Island.

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Ken Sweeney

A familiar presence on the folk scene since the mid seventies as an energetic harmonica and banjo player, singer, and workshop leader, Ken Sweeney took up the English concertina in 1983 and has been sharing his concertina playing techniques (in traditional Irish tunes, and song accompaniment) at such events as The Northeast Squeeze-In, NEFFA, and the Sea Music Festival at Mystic Seaport Museum in his native CT since 1989 (when he also joined the museum's chantey staff). In addition to sharing his musical talents at this year's festival, Ken will be demonstrating the art of fish splitting.

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