Southern New England has an odd culture.  Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire have solidly claimed what people think of as ‘New England’ culture (stone walls, maple syrup, white churches, village greens, etc, though actually those are or were more common in Southern New England originally).  And then there is Boston and New York….  We aren’t that either, even if they are the only things we mean when we say that we are going to the city.

Just what is it?  Music is often a short-hand for recognizing a location.  In this day of the Mp3 and Youtube, it is less about where the artists reside and more about the style and mood.  If I had to pick something that fits though, I’d go with that thing sometimes labelled as Urban Folk, which ends up with a range of artists stretching from Peter Ostroushko, to Lucy Kaplansky, to John Gorka, to Bill Staines, and so on. The difficulty is creating a weird balance between the original rust belt cities of the northeast* and the classic white church on the hilltop green, between the Irish, Italian, Jewish, Slavic immigrants, coastal Portugese/Gaelic, and the original WASP’s, between the glittering promise of the cities or open land somewhere else and the conviction that this is the center of the universe despite all contrary evidence. A good starting point, is any anthology compiled by the Red House label.   The label isn’t exclusive to the Northeast (it actually is from Minnesota) but it certainly has a tendency to collect artists who have some sort of connection to that odd concept of Urban Folk.

 

*I grew up assuming that all towns had massive abandoned brick factories in their center…