Jim Allyn plays with a right hand confident and sure. His singing voice is strong yet plaintive. “Tonight she lifts her flame, and history’s taking names,” he sings. “The mother of exiles prays her child will be found.”
The phrase “mother of exiles” is the name that poet Emma Lazarus gave to the Statue of Liberty in her famous poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on a plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
“The irony of this is just killing me,” the Newtown-based Allyn recalled thinking to himself when he revisited the poem. “Because what we see that’s been going on — murdering the souls of immigrant children at the border … there are really no words to describe it. And when I saw that this iconic symbol of our openness had actually been named by a poet,” who then made her “a mother … a parent … I wanted to write a song that spoke to that. And yet every line had to be true of both an actual mother and the statue, and it became this matter of how to make it clear at some point that I was talking about the statue.”
“So it took a long time to write,” he said with self-deprecating humor, on a recent episode of WNHH’s “Northern Remedy.” “But I’m looking forward to playing it at the festival.”
The festival in question is the 2019 CT Folk Festival and Green Expo, held in Edgerton Park Saturday, Sept. 7, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. It will feature headliners Donna the Buffalo, along with Birds of Chicago, Ghost of Paul Revere, Amythyst Kiah, Susan Cattaneo, Quarter Horse, Christine Sweeney, the winners of the Grassy Hill Songwriting Competition, and — yes — the Jim Allyn Band. It will also feature over 75 exhibitors as part of the Green Expo, numerous food trucks, a beer and wine garden, a kids’ village, and other activities.
The themes of social justice and righting wrongs in Allyn’s song fit in with CT Folk’s efforts to make the festival more diverse in both performers and audience, a goal that CT Folk board member Charles Rothenberger had expressed back in 2017.
“We’d been having conversations for a while now about the need for greater diversity,” Rothenberger said. “Among the performers, but also, hosting this in New Haven, trying to reach out to the communities and have greater diversity in our audience as well.”
This year’s lineup marks a visible step toward that goal, as Amythyst Kiah and Allison Russell of Birds of Chicago recently have been making waves alongside Rhiannon Giddens and Leyla McCalla with Our Native Daughters, a musical project that calls attention to the deep tradition and contributions of black musicians in Appalachian music. The changes in CT Folk’s programming are part of larger changes afoot in folk and traditional music, as it reckons with the legacy of some of the uglier aspects of its history regarding race and class — a reckoning that is also invigorating the music with new voices and new energy from older voices.
Among those musicians are Allyn, whose band for CT Folk includes Richard Neal, Cadence Carroll, and Rick Brodsky, mainstays of the state’s folk scene. “As I was putting the set list together and I had written a couple protest songs, I thought, ‘this is definitely the gig to pull these out.’” Among them are an amusing novelty song called “FDT” about having a near-obscene abbreviated animus against the current American head of state (“These days I have to laugh or else I’ll cry,” Allyn said). But Allyn was also quick to separate that from his understanding of and compassion for the deeper grievances that underlie the president’s support in rural areas — the ways that many have been left behind and done wrong, for generations, expressed in his song “Lindytown,” about a family worn thin in a town decimated by mountaintop removal from coal mining. Music, for Allyn, was a way to bridge political divides that were difficult to do otherwise.
“It’s amazing how music can bridge those fraught feelings of assumed alienation. I’ve sometimes had conversations at length with people who would definitely be conservative compared to me. We’ll talk passionately and earnestly. And then we’ll play a Grateful Dead song and both agree that’s the tops.”
For Rothenberger, there is a sense of the music scene coming full circle from a high point in the 1960s. “Folk music has always been married to social justice and issues of equality and equity,” he said. “In the times that we’re living in right now, I would be amazed if musicians weren’t responding powerfully to what we see in the news every day,” Rothenberger said. “It’s encouraging to see people responding not only with a message of justice and opposition, but also hope.”
“I’m not a firsthand witness to the social justice movement of the 1960s, but … it seemed like a time when we weren’t as siloed as we are now,” Rothenberger added. “There were more people reaching across their particular cultural or ethnic or racial divides to support each other in the cause…. You see that coming around again.”
Amid all of that, in a time when many arts organizations find their funding to be lean, CT Folk is resting on solid ground. The festival is free thanks to “dozens of volunteers,” Rothenberger said, some of whom have been working the festival for over a decade — working everything from stage crew to first aid stations.
CT Folk also is able to raise the money it needs thanks to donations and grants. “The grant funding that we receive is by no means the lion’s share of what supports us throughout the year,” Rothenberger said. “We do have private donors, some of whom have been supporting the festival for years, who have been very generous.” They also have ticketed events during the year that held raise the funds to keep the festival free. Finally, “the suggested donations that we collect at the gate tend to be as generous as they can be…. Thanks to the great positive reception the folk festival has gotten over the last several years, we’re actually in a place where that’s approaching a self-sustaining event.”
Most of all, the CT Folk Festival promises to be, in a word, fun. It has drawn a lineup that suggests several chances for dancing. So along with the ferment of social change and addressing the past, you can also just shake a leg.
The 2019 CT Folk Festival and Green Expo happens Sept. 7, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. in Edgerton Park, on Cliff St. off Whitney Ave. Admission is free. Visit CT Folk’s website for details about performers, the performance schedule, and other activities at the festival. To listen to the full interview with Rothenberger and Allyn, click on the file below.