The Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has recently made available for the first time more than 20,000 historical photographs from America's fishing communities, including those here on the North Carolina coast. It is an extraordinary collection: the photographs from every issue of the National Fisherman, the leading trade journal of the commercial fishing industry.
Coastal Music and Art
Farewell Ferris Wheel
Another documentary film that really excites me is called “Farewell Ferris Wheel.” Written and directed by Jamie Sisley and my sister Elaine’s incredibly talented nephew, Miguel ‘M.i.G.” Martinez, it’s the story of the Mexican workers that legally come to the U.S. for 8 months every year under special temporary visas to work in the traveling carnival and fair industry.
The Swedish Nightingale
Last night I saw a scene on PBS’s drama Victoria in which the Swedish opera star Jenny Lind sang for Queen Victoria. That was an actual event: it happened on April 26, 1846. But of course I thought immediately of the little community called “Jenny Lind” that is located 10 miles west of Kinston, in Lenoir County, N.C. According to legend, Jenny Lind sang there, too.
A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing
A friend sent me a new book called A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland. The author is a black poet, scholar and Air Force veteran named DaMaris B. Hill and her book—her soul stirring and deeply moving book— is part poetry, part history and part memoir.
Songs on a Nags Head Porch
I recently visited with Gerret Warner and Mimi Gredy at a coffee shop in Durham, N.C. I had sought out the couple because I had learned that they were making a documentary film about two legendary collectors of American folk music who visited singers and musicians on the North Carolina coast beginning in the 1930s-- Gerret’s father and mother, Frank and Anne Warner.
Annie Hooper’s Vision: From Hatteras Island to the Smithsonian
I found Annie Hooper’s masterpiece in a warehouse in a small town in eastern North Carolina: thousands of hauntingly beautiful Biblical figures made out of driftwood, seashells, putty and plaster. All of them are part of large, elaborate scenes depicting stories from the Old and New Testaments. I had been hoping to see them for decades, and when I finally found them, they were together for probably the last time.
The Ferry Crossing, 1754
I heard Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major for the first time only a few weeks ago and the strangest thing happened. I immediately thought of her: Catherine Phillips, a Quaker missionary, carrying a friend’s lifeless body across the icy reaches of Albemarle Sound in 1754.
A Shad Camp, Neuse River, ca. 1890– The Men Singing as They Fish
A shad fisherman’s camp on the Lower Neuse River, possibly at or near James City, N.C., circa 1900. Fishermen constructed their huts out of cedar limbs or another supple hardwood and thatched them with saltmarsh cordgrass or black needlerush. Typically they bound them together with yucca fibers. These round huts with conical roofs were a spartan home away from home for shad fishermen and, occasionally, for their families.
The Fishermen’s Cemetery
I love to walk around old graveyards. One of my favorite places to wander among the headstones is near where I grew up. The graveyard is called Oceanview Cemetery, and it’s in the little coastal town of Beaufort, N.C.
Herring Week, Day 8– Singing on a Moonlit Night
Welcome back to Herring Week! This is part 8 of my special series on the history of the great herring and shad fisheries on the Albemarle Sound, once one of the largest fisheries in North America. In today’s post, I’m looking at a photograph from the Capehart family’s Avoca fishery in Bertie County in 1877.
Finding Edna Ferber’s Showboat
I don’t know how the great American novelist, short story writer and playwright Edna Ferber heard about the little river town of Winton, N.C. But I know she did. In a collection of her research notes that I found at Yale’s Beinecke Library when I was in New Haven, Conn. last summer, she scratched the following: Winton, N.C.—The Croatans, relic of the lost Roanoke Island settlement. Tar River. White negroes.
Something Musical in Kinston
One of the things I like best about the Kinston Music Park is the way it doesn’t just honor the great jazz, blues, gospel, bebop, big band, rhythm and blues and hip hop artists that came out of Eastern N.C.—the park also honors the band teachers, choir directors and music educators who made that rich history of African American music possible.
All the Fair Faced Pretty Boys
A memory. I am remembering a day at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, Mass. The Society holds one of the great collections of early American manuscripts and artifacts, everything from John Quincy Adams’ diary to Paul Revere’s pistol. I was there to look at less famous relics, but ones just as exciting to me: letters and diaries written by Union soldiers that served in New Bern, N.C. during the American Civil War.
Journey to Mesic
This is a story that starts with a long and freewheeling road trip —it’s the summer of 1953 and a young folksinger is making a pilgrimage to his father’s home in a little coastal village in Pamlico County, N.C.
The Wilmington Jubilee Singers
I discovered the Wilmington Jubilee Singers while I was exploring old newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA). The BNA is an invaluable on-line resource that is making available (for a small fee) digital copies of the historical newspapers preserved at the British Library in London. The British Library holds the largest collection of British newspapers … Continue reading The Wilmington Jubilee Singers
The Decoy Carvers
The decoy carvers invited me to lunch last week. By the time I got to the Straits, they had finished carving for the day. They had put away their tools and paint brushes, and they had set out a big lunch—roast mullet, fresh tomatoes and cornbread with fig jam, just the kind of meal I like.
Music All Over the Ocean
In 2009 and 2010, an extraordinary community project, called “Raising the Story of Menhaden Fishing,” commemorated the central role that the menhaden industry played here in Carteret County, N.C, for generations. Inspired by the closing of the state's last menhaden factory, Beaufort Fisheries, in 2005, the project involved a series of community forums, school events and documentary projects. Led by cultural anthropologist and local fisheries activist, and my old friend, Barbara Garrity-Blake, the project’s organizers worked hand-in-hand with former menhaden fishermen and factory workers to create a unique community-wide period of reflection on the passing of a way of life.
