All Bangers No Clangers
Somerville-local purveyors of a capella joy, All Bangers No Clangers are powerhouses of unaccompanied singing, ranging from humor to tearjerkers but always providing choruses that are easy to grab onto.
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Love is Little: Shaker Chants, Hymns, and Ballads (E.J. Barnes and April Grant)
The celibate, communal United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (commonly called Shakers) are most widely known today for their furniture and other crafts. In our opinion, they should also be famed for the boisterous singing and dancing in their religious services. April Grant, a former Hancock Shaker Village Museum interpreter, and E.J. […]
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Have A Gay Old Time: LGBT+ Songs (Rebecca Maxfield and April Grant)
I’m proud to say that Rebecca Maxfield and I are now on our fourth year presenting this program of songs with LGBT+ themes! Some of the songs are from tradition, and some are the work of folksingers in recent decades. Others are our original songs or our musical settings of poems. We sing solo or […]
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Three Witches: Tales Of Dangerous Women
My favorite way to pass a long dark evening is with stories, and my favorite stories are creepy and funny and full of bizarre incidents. I’ll present three tales of women engaging in magic arts, wrecking their own and other people’s lives, and occasionally making everything come out OK after all. In “The Witch of […]
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Performance: Prairie Women
Laura Ingalls Wilder is famed for her youth spent in the westward expansion of the US, and for her Little House on the Prairie book series about that time. She had a life full of songs and music which appear in her books as characters’ comments on the action, and as part of their joy […]
ReadPerformance: Weird New England
The Devil walks abroad in Massachusetts – in fact, he comes into your living room and makes you a deal you can’t refuse. False lights burn on the coast, wrecking Boston-bound ships by night. The Knights Templar, the ancient Egyptians, and the monks of medieval Ireland build towers in New Hampshire and entomb their dead […]
ReadPerformance: Villains!
An evening of songs, ballads and stories with happy endings. Or baffling outcomes. Or endings where rocks fall and everyone dies. These tales are all united by villainy, as April presents the audience with a feast of stories about awful people, the harm they do, and those who sometimes defy them. The villain isn’t always […]
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