From The Mountains to the Sea: The Frank and Anne Warner Collection
Presented by Jeff and Gerret Warner
Gerret and Jeff Warner grew up in a great musical family, and have spent their lives as film-makers and musicians. ?From the Mountains to the Sea,? is their multimedia program they have crafted and perform to presents the voices of the traditional singers, photographs of the tradition bearers and their land, and the insights gained by their parents as they traveled rural America in search of songs from 1938 to 1966. It is full of the warmth of the Warners and the country wit of their new friends.
Alan Lomax said, "This is a ballad hunters' adventure story?rich in the stories of how the songs were found and where the singers were...if it hadn't been...for song-hunters like the Warners..., we would certainly have lost the best of our past and the tales and tunes and lore that made life worth living back yonder.?
Frank Warner was born in Selma Alabama in 1903 and grew up in Durham, North Carolina. From the beginning, folk song was all around him, from the black kids he played with as a child, to the ballads he heard from Professor Frank C. Brown at Duke University. Frank moved to New York City, where he married Anne Locher in 1935. Living in Greenwich Village, they found themselves in a literary community that valued the working man and the American story. Steven Vincent Benet, Marianne Moore, Clifton Fadiman, and many others?were drawn to Frank's music, his southern friendliness, his knowledge of folk song. Through this literary community, the Warners learned of John Galusha, singing logger from the Adirondacks, of Lena Bourne Fish, preserver of old songs and local history from Jaffrey, New Hampshire and met Maurice Matteson, fresh from his song collecting trip to Watauga County, North Carolina. The Warners were captured by the backwoods beauty of the lap-dulcimer Matteson showed them. They wrote to Nathan Hicks, asking him to make one for them, and in the summer of 1938, drove the old highways to Beech Mountain to get it. Thus began the adventure: collecting songs and friends along the rural Eastern Seaboard for forty years, singing and speaking to countless audiences about their finds and writing a celebrated book about their journey and the intriguing singers carrying generations of tradition in their voices, representing the Carolinas to the Adirondacks; from the Mountains to the Sea.
As Alan Lomax said of the Warner's book, Traditional American Folk Songs, ?It is a document that can stand for all time as a communication about a particular culture.... The result is a collection of rarities and beauties that spans the whole of the Anglo-American repertoire.?
Free to members, but reservations are recommended! Members may reserve seats until Friday, March 16.
Reservations: glen.echo@erols.com (preferred) or 301.717.4641.
Non-members $20 at the door
Gerret and Jeff Warner perform with their father, Frank Warner, in 1949.
