When I went looking for who collected Rio Grande, I was doing digital humanities and heritage interpretation research. I just didn’t call it that.
Joanna Carver Colcord published the first American chantey collection in 1924. That one thread led to a centennial research concert with eleven venues, a day in the archives in Searsport, Maine — and a program that has been booked more consistently than anything I’ve done since Lisette’s Journey in the 1990s. The research didn’t change the song. It changed what I could say about it, who would book it, and what I knew I was qualified to stand up and claim.
Bring your current research rabbithole. In three sessions, we’ll follow it together — and find out what it can do for your credibility, your programs, and your sense of what you’re actually qualified to say.
Who This Is For
You have a song, a tradition, or a program thread you keep meaning to follow further. You’ve gone down enough of a rabbithole to know there’s something there, but not far enough to know what to do with it.
You do not need to be a scholar. You need a question worth following and the willingness to follow it past the first Google result.
The Vox Hunters researched the Old Music of Rhode Island using the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection and the Harris Broadside Collection at Brown. April Grant built her Shaker program Love Is Little out of her years as a Hancock Shaker Village interpreter. Cate Clifford’s Helen Creighton program Farewell to Nova Scotia came out of following Creighton’s own collecting notebooks. None of them called it digital humanities. All of them did exactly this.
What the Three Sessions Do
Not a curriculum. A working relationship with a specific question you already have.
Session 1 — Where did this come from? We follow your thread into the primary sources: collections, archives, field recordings, broadside databases, whatever your material connects to. You leave with a clearer sense of the lineage and the names that belong in your program notes and pitch letters.
Session 2 — What does it mean that you’re the one singing it? Every singer stands somewhere in relation to a tradition. We clarify your interpretive position — not as a performance persona, but as a researcher’s stance. What are you claiming? What are you not claiming? What makes your version of this material specifically yours?
Session 3 — How does the research become the program? We build the through-line from what you’ve found to what you present: spoken context, sequencing, transitions, the sentence a library director or museum educator can put in their grant report. The research becomes the pitch.
Format
Three 90-minute sessions on Zoom. One artist or ensemble, one research thread, three sessions. Pricing on request — no one who is genuinely committed will be turned away for inability to pay.