 We're just so glad that it worked out and our musicians are here with us. I want to make a few mentions before I introduce the bands. I want to thank Montpelier Alive for the equipment lending. I work for Montpelier Alive. This event is partially funded by Montpelier Alive. And I also want to thank the Parks and Recs and Recreation and Alec Ellsworth for having us here and at the tuning fork stage. He had a wonderful concert series. He and his team called the Parka Palooza this summer. So maybe some of you have come to that. We're just really grateful for what they've created here for us and all the other wonderful events that happen throughout the summer. I also want to thank Le Bon Crippe for coming here and vending. It's nice to have that element a part of this festival day. And of course Dana Robinson who has agreed to do sound for us today. So let's hear it for all of those wonderful supporters. And a huge shout out to all of our volunteers. We had about 10 volunteers working throughout the day to make this happen. I definitely couldn't have done this without them. So I hope now they can take a break and sit and enjoy the music with you. So let's thank our volunteers with another round of applause. I really, really care about those volunteers. I am first introducing tonight Jake Blunt who is joining us from Providence, Rhode Island. I heard about Jake through the threads of the old time community. He is an up and coming but beyond that rising star amongst banjo players in the nation and soon the world I am sure. He has been discovered by apparently I just heard Rolling Stone magazine. Is this correct Jake? Yes. He has an album coming out on Smithsonian Folkways in September that he'll tell you more about. He has another album called Spider Tales that he is going to be selling here. And he's been on tour a lot. Newport Folk Festival recently. Is that right too? Yes. I did some reading. Jake is a wonderful banjo fiddle guitar player and singer. So he's going first and that will be followed by Nadine Landry and Sammy Lind of Foghorn String Band who has come to the Spice On Snow Festival a couple of times in the past in a couple of different iterations, different bands. We've really enjoyed them so much. We invited them back as a duo and they live in Quebec only about 10 hours away but we're really happy that they came to join us too and they're going to be playing old time Cajun and Quebecois music for you. So let's hear it for our musicians today and welcome them to Montpelier, Vermont. Thank you all for coming out. Enthusiasm. My name is Jake. I am from Providence, Rhode Island. This is my second time playing up here in Montpelier. I love it here. It's so pretty. I played at Zen Barn last fall. And that was a hoot. And I was really bummed that this didn't work out in the winter so I'm glad that we finally made it here. Triumph, despite the circumstances. Just a little bit curious to take instruments back to the place they come from and see how they respond to the climate shift. Which is less dramatic now that I live in Rhode Island but I've spent most of my life in Washington, DC which is different and not desirably so at this time of year. I have to say. I'm enjoying the cool evenings. And if you are maybe newer to old-time music you may not be aware that oftentimes this music involves different tunings according to the key or sometimes just the individual song. It doesn't usually involve electric guitars but you know you got to make things work in the tradition. So I have to retune everything in front of a lot of people. As Katie mentioned I have a new record coming out this fall. It's coming out September 23rd on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings as part of their African American Legacy series. It's called The New Faith and came out of me reading a lot of Afrofuturist sci-fi and thinking about what climate change will do to this music that we play and the places that we play it. And this is one of the songs that I recorded for that. It's called City Called Heaven and I learned it from Fanny Lou Hamer. I only learned stuff from dead people for the most part. This world would try to make heaven my home Sometimes and sister Because I am trying to get in Sometimes all buts all stick on some dark It's been so fun to spend the day with y'all learning some banjo music hanging out. This is a beautiful park. I wish more cities had parks like this in the middle of them. It's a pretty cool thing to just drive from a city block into a large forest. We don't have that in Providence. Maybe we will. The fun secret of the old time show is that typically I play two versions of Grey Eagle in two versions of Roustabout in every set because there are so many to pick from. We have had two Roustabouts. We're not going to get into Grey Eagles today. So you should come to the next show to hear the next Grey Eagle or buy my CD, which includes it and many of the songs which you have for tonight. It's called Spider Tales. I have CDs and I have vinyl and I would love to not have them anymore. Come see me after the show. The music I play comes from black and indigenous people. That's my family's heritage. It's what I like to dig up in this music. And this next piece is part of that. It's a wild tune. It doesn't sound a lot like what we expect fiddle tunes to sound like. Probably because it's a very old Cherokee tune. Well, we're going to hunt the buffalo. I've been a spring tank on my pedalboard. This next one is a song from Cutie Leadbeller, better known as Leadbelly. There's a very cool band in Providence where I live called the Vox Hunters who sings some very awesome old songs. Yeah, one Vox Hunters fan. It is very hard to get them out of Rhode Island. So they're not well known, but within the traditional songs community, they're very well regarded. And I've had the great pleasure of working on them, working on a project with them that's on the history of black maritime music. We got a grant from Club Passim in Boston to dig further into this and make a little recording project. And we're still making baby steps toward the recording stage, but we have started taking the stuff out and performing it, which is fun. And this is a sea shanty I learned while actually living and working on a sailboat. It's called Holloway Joe. And it makes a great sing along if anybody feels like singing. So I will sing one line and then there's an answering line. Wait, I'm not going to quiz you. You got it. Thanks for coming, everybody. Take a moment again to once again thank our volunteers for this summer spice celebration and also the board of directors for the Summit School of Traditional Music and Culture which is presenting this event today. So let's hear it for those guys. I just want to mention that you're really in for a treat with Sammy, Linda, Nadine, Landry. As I said, they drove 10 hours from Northern Quebec, I believe, to join us today. And we're just really honored to have them. They've been touring with Foghorn String Band. They have another band called Cajun Country Revival. You should check out. And now, as we can see, they're doing some duo material. We're so glad to have them here. They're ready to hit the stage. They're going to do a little bit of a sound check. So once again, we have Le Bon Crepe. You can get some food, stick around. We're going to have Nadine and Sammy up next. Thanks again for coming. And for Jake again, that was a great show. Thank you for the wee bit. Hardly any. Hello. No, we don't want feedback. We don't want feedback, right? Unless it's constructive. Well, once Sammy's done talking, he'll come up and we'll play some tunes. In the meantime, I'm just going to ask this question. Have you ever been to Quebec? Have you ever been to the Gas Bay Coast? A few of you. That's pretty east. It's further north, but not considered north. Quebec goes up so far up. But we're as far east as we can get, pretty much. And my hometown of Pointe à la Croix. If you ever come, we'll have the kettle on. You can stop by. Nice Cajun song on fiddle and triangle called Mont Vieux Wagon. My old wagon. When I was young, I used to go in my old wagon to go pick up my bell. And it was on a Saturday night, and life was great. Basically. Oh, yeah. And still married for 40 years. That's the song it's about. And I see that there's a big dance floor in the front. So don't be shy. Grab your waltzing or a two-step partner. Play a nice little fiddle tune from the great state of Missouri and walk around the kitchen until the cook comes home. Cajun music on the banjo. I don't see any Cajun police here tonight, so... I'm gonna risk it. This one is a nice one that originated in France and went to probably Acadie, where I'm living right now, and then headed down to Louisiana at some point. And it started as a nice conversation between a man and a woman where he says to her, I'm gonna give you a golden ring if you'll marry me. And she's like, man, is that all you got? I'm gonna say no. And I'm gonna give you a brand new car and my portrait if you'll marry me. How about this, the key to all my silver and my gold? And once again, she just does not light up until he says I'll give you my love and my heart and all the love that's in it. Sammy and I are gonna celebrate the wedding anniversary tomorrow. Pretty awesome that I married someone who plays both banjo and accordion, right? Nice for me, anyway. Thanks, everybody. There's a little banjo tune from Kentucky called the Ball. So much, or as much as we'd like. These days, they came a point where there's quite a few fiddlers. My grandma was, and she taught all her kids to play piano and guitar to back up her fiddle tunes. And growing up, we always had music parties, which was really nice. And I just kind of assumed that everybody had music gatherings in their family. And one time, maybe in fifth grade or something, my friend was all bummed out and I was like, what's going on? I was like, oh, if a family meeting, family, well, you can call it a party. Because there was no such thing, right? And he's like, well, they're just like so boring and they only talk about politics. I was like, wait, they're not like playing music and raging tunes and dancing and singing. He's like, no. So then I realized I was pretty privileged to have grown up in a musical family. But we'll play a tune called Castongue that comes a little further east and north of us from Iduafishaw and then into a nice Newfoundland tune that we've learned lately called the Red Island tune. Thank you so much. You play all those? Are they all going to come back with you? Are you going to leave some down there? Like, no, no. They're all coming back with us. Crazy. We're not going to forget any. It's happened before, but we're really going to try hard not to forget any. So since we brought them all, we played them all. We're just going to play the party in the box here, the accordion. Playing the Cajun music and it seems like since I'm a Cajun that would have been kind of the reason why I got into it. It wouldn't make sense anyways, but when I was 19, I went to visit my aunt who lived in the Yukon territory and I thought I'd visit her for a couple of weeks, but I ended up staying 17 years up north and I went very many frequent trips to Alaska and discovered this gang of crazy people that did not speak one word of French, but yet they sang all this Cajun music so beautifully and I was like, what? Why am I not doing that stuff? I love it. And I understand what they're saying. And it's different from my French, but still close enough I can understand and just appreciate all the beautiful imagery that's in it. This one's called Jean Glamois which is like juggle of me, juggle. Yeah. So it's like, think of me once a day even though you've left me. And Dan saw us to follow up a two-step with the waltz. So we're going to do one here called the waltz of no return. Proud to say that I'm well, we'll know in six to eight weeks if it's really official but most likely will be in the Guinness world book of record Guinness something, something order of those three words for the most amount of people that tapped their foot to a fiddle tune like Quebecois style sitting down while the tune played all together. There was 361 of us that did it all at the same time. It's cool to be part of that event. It was like, we did it for six minutes and 38 seconds and there was a jumbotron with like the timer going up and it seemed like we had done it for at least 30 seconds and I look up and it said eight. And I don't know what type of time unit they had there but when we finished because the officials had like a little timer around their neck and it said six minutes, 38 seconds but it was like one minute and 42 at the counter. So I don't know if they were trying to play a joke because we were supposed to do it for at least five minutes but their five minutes is like half an hour so I think that was super weird. But yeah, we did it and it was it was really funny to be part of that. And then I was like in Julliet just north of Montreal and I sat down and the girl next to me we just kind of chit-chat before it started because it took a long time to sit 300 people because it all had to be like recorded officially and I said oh, I came all the way from the Gaspe goes for this she's like are you kidding me? I was just there a couple weeks ago I was like oh, really where'd you go? And then she was telling me like northern New Brunswick and all those towns and there's a town called Cafequette and I was like oh, you went there like did you go for the festival because they have a pretty big Acadian festival she's like no, but we were in Camelton and we saw this duo it was great and she was like yeah, that's it I was like, that's me she's like you're kidding me I was funny so I was like I got it down my sister-in-law enough talking well, I'm from Minnesota originally and I was really lucky to a pretty musical family but it was my oldest got me going on the kind of music I still love started off with the Minneapolis rock and roll bands you know, Husker and Replacements and all that kind of good stuff but of course Bob Dylan but probably one of the biggest influence I was like, yeah, he rules he's still going and I got to see him you know, at least three times a year from time I was 12 to when I left home and I was 18 but it was a big dream of ours a big dream of mine last time Faughan String Band played Minneapolis we got Spider to open up the show and it was just unbelievable he's still going he might have retired from playing music but he's still walking around and being the youth ball that he was oh yeah the Fiddler from Texas just named Eck Robert I would have lost a lot of sleep over that. It's because there'll be a test later, so. One that I got from Spyder. It's a real common fiddle tune and common song in the old-time music tradition. It's called the Roven Gambler from the great country of Norway. Listened to a lot of music at home, especially the last couple of years. Gotten into all kinds of crazy stuff. Not crazy stuff, but beautiful music from other places. And here's a waltz called Vettelback, which means like a mountain bird. Both my grandparents actively playing. It was really cute. The fiddle always gonna hang on the wall. And she picked it up and handed it to my grandpa. Did not play any music at all, but somehow tuned the fiddle and handed it back to my grandma. I got the advantage. Well, and it never sounded bad. Like grandpa was magic that way. Believed in fairies and stopped people from bleeding when they had injuries and stopped colleagues and horses. So we'd get lots of phone call. I called him a bunch, like carving pumpkins, like grandpa, my roommate just cut herself, carving pumpkins. He's like, he did this thing where he was not allowed to say anything. He's not allowed to share what it was. He was allowed to say the secret to one person of different gender than him. And then she or he, you know, would be able to say it just once to someone of different gender. And my grandma also knew that trick, but we always thought of grandpa. And one day I was like, so curious, and I wanted to have that gift so bad. And I said, well, what do you know if you say the same thing? They're like, no, we never talked about it. I was like, well, where is it now? And they're like, well, grandpa gave it to the local nurse, the village nurse, and grandma gave it to the oldest son and it kind of got lost. And I'm just like, no. But anyways, tuning fiddle was another of his magic powers. That was nothing for him. Oh, and the funny part about his horses, too, if let's say grandpa's neighbor, his horse had colics, and then he would call my grandpa. And grandpa on the phone had to be like, what color is it? Even though he saw it every single day of his life. And he'd be like, what color is your horse? Still gray. All right, go tomorrow morning, your horse will be fine. And sure enough, they go to the stable. Horse was just perfect health. From Mississippi there, called Don't Get. Summer's nice, winter's nice. It's all good. And also thanks to Tracy for like, getting our food and everything. That was really nice. And also to Chris and Jenny for inviting us in their homes. Really nice to see you all folks. And thanks to all of you for supporting life music. We still have fun, but we're having way more fun that you're here. Here's an old Carter family song, a gospel song. We're gonna finish up here with an old classic and we're gonna invite a new friend. Well, we became reacquainted today after six years of hanging out, or hanging out six years ago. Jake Lund. It never stopped us from smiling.