Northern Appalachian Songs of Charles Brink, Indiana County, Pennsylvania, from the Samuel Bayard Collection

Experience a performance of the Northern Appalachian music of Charles Brink, 1862-1950, Indiana County, Pennsylvania, from the unpublished Samuel Bayard Folk Song Collection. With his wide-ranging repertoire, Brink bridges the years between his forbears’ world and our own. Experience a performance of the songs and ballads of rural western Pennsylvania as Penn State folklorist Samuel P. Bayard recorded them from Charles Scott Brink, 1862-1950, a farmer who lived near Smicksburg, Indiana County, an area noted for its oil, gas, and forest resources, and its scenic beauty. Brink’s northern Appalachian repertoire embodied song and ballad traditions from American regions north and south of Pennsylvania, as well as American versions of English, Scottish and Irish folk songs. Although he was in his eighties when Bayard and his assistant, Phil Jack, recorded him, and Brink could no longer play his fiddle, he sang fine examples of Child, broadside, love, and crime ballads, along with comic songs, play party songs, and other pieces, with roots reaching from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Margaret and Beth Folkemer will play and sing selections from Brink’s varied repertoire, and session attendees will be invited to join in singing Brink’s refrains