College student Nora Rodes narrates this episode on folk legend Margaret MacArthur, whose love of music led her to preserve and document many old songs, creating a home in Marlboro Vermont, very close to Brattleboro, where she set down deep roots for her family and an extended folk family. Through Nora's storytelling and adroit use of multiple musical selections, we learn about Margaret's peripatetic journey growing up, her college years in Chicago where she met her husband, and the young couple's move to Marlboro to start a family. Margaret discovers local music and begins gathering songs and oral histories with the help of Edith Sturgis’ 1919 book 'Songs from the Hills of Vermont' and Helen Hartness Flanders’ 1937 book 'Country Songs of Vermont.' She forms important relations with the authors and other Brattleboro-area folk musicians and scholars Tony Barrand and John Roberts (who wrote the book 'On the Banks of Coldbrook') and James Atwood, among many others. Margaret collected stories, songs and made numerous field recordings as well as writing her own pieces. We learn about her instruments and marketing of the 'MacArthur Harp' during the American Folk Revival. Her relations with Smithsonian Folkways Records' Moses Asch and her first album with them in 1962 are also covered. The historically significant song "Marlboro Merchants" and its relation to the MacArthur Collection at the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury, Vermont are included. She recorded nine albums, appeared at folk programs and festivals with her children performing original songs as well as traditional ballads and other songs of the lives and ways of Vermonters of the past. As a visiting artist at elementary schools, she spread the joy of song-making with many children and helped keep stories alive. Margaret's many accolades are mentioned, including her June 2005 concert at the Library of Congress and songs performed there. The piece concludes with how Margaret's home was a welcoming hub for folk folks who often gathered there in her warm embrace.
This episode was written, narrated and produced by Nora Rodes. Editing was by Dave Snyder, Daniel Murphy and Alec Pombriant. Mastering was by Guilford Sound. Musical selections were chosen by Rodes and are listed below. Photo credit is Megan Littlehales. A historic marker for Margaret is at the Marlboro Historical Society.
Haughton House – Make the Wildwood Ring CD (Front Hall Records, 1981) (0.59)
(Front Hall, NY label, founded 1973, published 21 CDs, including a # for Tony Barrand/John Roberts/Nowell Sing We Clear) Instrumental
Frog Went A Courtin’ – Odis Bird (Max Hunter Collection) (1.04 0r .30)The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection - Missouri State University
Magnolia Tree – Fred Atwood (MM Collection, VFC)
Barbara Allen - Make the Wildwood Ring, Margaret MacArthur, Megan Littlehales, Dan & Gary MacArthur
The Half Hitch – On the Banks of Coldbrook CD (Tony Barrand and Keith Murphy)
Braes of Yarrow – Ballads Thrice Twisted CD (©1999 MM) Margaret MacArthur
King John and the Bishop – Ballads Thrice Twisted, Margaret MacArthur
Little Red Hen – Winifred Landman, Margaret MacArthur Collection, Vermont Folklife Center
Single Again – May Nichols, Margaret MacArthur Collection, Vermont Folklife Center
The Tailor and the Mouse – Barbara Linden, Margaret MacArthur Collection, Vermont Folklife Center
Marlboro Merchants – Vermont Ballads and Broadsides CD (Whetstone Records) (©1989 Margaret MacArthur)
Stratton Mountain Tragedy – On the Mountains High CD (Living Folk Records, 1971) (appears another essentially self/close-connection “label”) (©2001 Margaret MacArthur)
Central Vermont Railway Tragedy –On the Mountains High CD Margaret and family
Mary Shaminski I love you – Make the Wildwood Ring, Margaret MacArthur
Farmers Alphabet – Vermont Heritage Songs (©1994, 2006 Margaret MacArthur) Margaret MacArthur
Maple Sweet – Vermont Heritage Songs, Margaret and Megan Littlehales, Dan MacArthur
Newbury’s Bendell Bridge – Vermont Heritage Songs, Margaret and school children
Hills of Dover – The Old Songs CD (Philo, 1975) (Philo bought out by Rounder 1982) Margaret MacArthur
Ranadine – On the Mountains High CD Margaret MacArthur and family
Peri Meri Dixi and Domini – On the Mountains High, Margaret MacArthur and family
PRIMARY LINKS
The Margaret MacArthur Collection at the Vermont Folklife Center, Middlebury, Vermont
Margaret MacArthur’s Performance at the Library of Congress - June 6, 2005
Film recording of Margaret MacArthur performing ballads and songs from Vermont.
Part of the Homegrown 2005 Concert Series sponsored by the American Folklife Center.
https://www.loc.gov/item/2021687781/
Script for Brattleboro Words Trail Segments and Podcast
Margaret MacArthur –
Marlboro Folk Music Legend
By Nora Rodes
HOST: Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail.
[Instrumental prelude: Audio Clip of ‘Haughton House’]
NARRATOR/WRITER NORA RODES: What makes a home? How do we connect, and reconnect, to places? Where do we find and create meaning in our lives?
Margaret MacArthur began asking these questions as a young woman growing up in the 1930s. And it was Marlboro’s good fortune that she found her answers here in Vermont - in stories, in folktales, and mostly in the songs people pass down and sing as part of making a home and keeping it in their hearts.
My name is Nora Rodes, I am a rising college senior studying and singing traditional music. Although I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I have learned a lot of folksongs in New England, and heard Margaret mentioned from North Carolina to Maine all my adolescence. So I was thrilled to have the opportunity to get to know her through her own music and recordings and to share what I’ve learned with you.
(Interlude 2-3 sec)
Margaret was born in Chicago in 1928. She spent much of her childhood moving across America from coast to coast. Her father was a forester who moved with his job, so she grew up in California, Arizona, the Midwest, Missouri, and South Carolina. And the people she met and music she heard during the 1930s and 1940s stayed with her. Margaret spent five years in Missouri – a state in the Ozarks mountain range that was full of folk songs.
Here is a version of a children’s song she almost certainly heard in the Ozarks – you may know a version too – it’s about a frog who went a’courting, and was recorded from Odis Bird in 1958 –
AUDIO CLIP Frog Went A Courtin
These years were important to Margaret’s growing feelings about home and community. Through all her childhood travels, music - like her mother’s lullabies and her Missouri neighbor’s songs - gave her a sense of belonging, a place to feel happy, loved and safe.
In the mid-1940s, Margaret returned to Illinois to attend the University of Chicago where she majored in Rural Studies. She was an enthusiastic member of the folk music movement that would later sweep the country as the American Folk Revival.
Margaret married John MacArthur and in 1948, they moved to Vermont where he would teach physics at Marlboro College.
With two young children and very little money, they worked hard to restore an abandoned 1803 farmhouse. While it didn’t have running water or electricity, it did have porcupines and beautiful views of the Dover Hills –which are part of Vermont’s Green Mountains.
Margaret worked as a school music teacher and set about making a home for what became her five children. For all her young students, and her own family, Margaret was eager to learn the stories and songs of Vermont.
She set to work with the help of two books: Edith Sturgis’ 1919 book Songs from the Hills of Vermont and Helen Hartness Flanders’ 1937 book Country Songs of Vermont. Margaret was delighted to learn that Edith Sturgis’ Hills of Vermont were the very Dover Hills just beyond her farmhouse window.
In the early 1900’s Edith Sturgis, a published poet and pioneering woman folk collector, whose husband was a school master in Massachusetts, was summering in this area of Vermont. She spent several years finding and transcribing the songs passed down here, beginning with those of the West Dover stone mason, James Atwood, who worked on her summer home. And over 50 years later, Margaret tracked down Atwood’s son Fred – by then in his 80’s and himself living in Massachusetts. They became close friends, and Fred came to visit and record songs at their Marlboro home.
One of the songs he sang was ‘Magnolia Tree’, a melancholy but beautiful song which he learned from his father. This is from the recording they made in1964:
AUDIO CLIP Magnolia Tree
Margaret had a great surprise one night when she was sharing one of James Atwood’s long story-songs. These types of songs are often called “ballads”. And that evening a woman told Margaret that she was signing the tune to the 17th Century English ballad, ‘Barbara Allen,’ wrong!
Some days later she brought Margaret a hand-written manuscript from Sturgis’ collecting – which included ‘Barbara Allen’ and many other songs and tunes.
Here is Margaret singing the opening of Atwood’s version of this tragic love story. She is joined by three of her children – Megan, Dan and Gary.
AUDIO CLIP: Barbara Allen
Margaret was thrilled to add these songs to her repertoire and share them with her Vermont folk community. Many were also later published, and their histories preserved, by Brattleboro folk musicians and scholars Tony Barrand and John Roberts in their book, On the Banks of Coldbrook.
Here is a recording of Tony and Keith Murphy, also of Brattleboro, singing ‘Half Hitch’, a hilarious story in which a clever young woman disguises herself most unattractively to test her wealthy suitor.
AUDIO CLIP Half Hitch
Margaret formed an important friendship with Country Songs of Vermont author, Helen Hartness Flanders – then a resident of Springfield, the daughter of a Vermont governor, wife of a United States senator, and herself the foremost New England collector of traditional songs.
Flanders – who collected over 4,800 songs from the 1930s to the 1960s - shared her life’s work with Margaret, who adapted and later recorded many of Flanders’ collected versions of ballads.
I’ll play you an excerpt of Margaret’s recording of ‘Braes of Yarrow’, a haunting Scottish story of a treacherous murder. You can hear Margaret playing her Appalachian dulcimer –a stringed instrument strummed on one’s lap - in the accompaniment.
AUDIO CLIP Braes of Yarrow
And this is a little of her recording of a 16th Century riddle ballad about a shepherd who fools the English King John. Helen Flanders collected this from Elmer George of Montpelier, and it was a very rare and exciting thing for her to find here in New England four centuries later.
AUDIO CLIP King John and the Bishop
In addition to preserving and giving new voice to earlier collections of Vermont folksongs, Margaret was also an active collector of stories and songs of her own communities. Here is a sampling of what are called “field” recordings – things she collected while traveling about and visiting people. Margaret used a reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder. In the 1960’s those recorders typically used 7 inch reels and weighed about 50 pounds.
This first is a clip of Winifred Landman’s story of the ‘Little Red Hen’, which he told to Margaret in Marlboro in 1962.
AUDIO CLIP Little Red
Next is May Nichols recording of ‘Single Again’, a song she learned from her husband’s mother, and gave to Margaret in Gilford in1961. Both May and Margaret clearly enjoyed their light-hearted exchange of this frank and amusing story of an exasperated young mother.
AUDIO CLIP Single Again
And finally, this is a wonderful, uniquely Vermont version of an old English children’s tale, ‘The Tailor and the Mouse’. Barbara Linden sang this, and several other little songs, to Margaret in February 1964. You can hear Barbara and Margaret giggling together at the end of this song and its wonderful chorus: Hey Diddle Diddle Kum Full.
AUDIO CLIP Tailor and the Mouse
While some of the songs Margaret was given, like these, are mostly for the fun of singing them, some hold extraordinary accounts of Vermont traditions and events. And some we only have now because Margaret was here then.
In the early 1960’s, Moses Asch, who was the director of Smithsonian Folkways Records, asked Margaret for some music. She sent him several audiotapes – made at her kitchen table one night after the children were asleep! And those tapes became her first recording - ‘Folksongs of Vermont’ released in 1962. That album’s last track, ‘Marlboro Merchants’, illustrates the historical importance of song stories she collected.
The song’s manuscript, handwritten in 1787, was given to Margaret by Elsie Newton Howe, and contains a 12-verse catalog of market wares being sold in nearby Newfane, by peddlers in the 18th century. It is now a part of the MacArthur Collection at the Vermont Folklife Center, in Middlebury. Here is an excerpt of Margaret’s singing, accompanied by her harp-zither:
AUDIO CLIP Marlboro Merchants.
Margaret’s harp-zither, which you just heard, was a diminutive 12-string harp, made of willow. It was given to her by an elderly Rawsonville neighbor, and had been hanging, long neglected, behind a wall of ivy in his barn! (Margaret’s dulcimer, which you heard in Braes of Yarrow, was another type of zither.) She and her husband John gently restored it, and the harp-zither became one of her treasures.
A manufacturer expressed interest in this unusual antique instrument and began successfully making and marketing it as the “MacArthur Harp” in the 1960’s – when the American Folk Revival was in full swing and folk stories were being sung at festivals and gatherings from coast to coast.
For over four decades, Margaret continued to share the stories and music of her own Vermont communities. She collected almost everything - ballads, tales of local events long and not-so-long- ago, work songs, seasonal songs, children’s songs, even silly parlor songs.
Margaret continued to find and recorded songs of Vermont history, including Stratton Mountain Tragedy - which happened on another mountain visible from her home.
This terrible incident occurred in 1821, when a family crossing the mountains from Arlington, on their way home, were caught in a blizzard. They were separated, and the young mother perished while protecting her baby. The story, like many others, was written to mark an important event - to pass the community’s memories and feelings on as part of their living history.
Margaret recorded ‘Stratton Mountain Tragedy’ on her album ‘On the Mountains High.’
AUDIO CLIP Stratton Mountain Tragedy
We’ll listen to a little of one other history ballad. ‘Central Vermont Railway Tragedy,’ also known as ‘The Hartford Wreck’, which Margaret collected from her Marlboro neighbor, Natalie Bruce in 1962. This ballad recalls the worst rail disaster to ever happen in Vermont.
In February of 1887, when the temperature was 20 below, an express train to Montreal jumped the rails about four miles north of the White River Junction, and plunged from the wooden bridge into a gorge. One of the rails split as the engine went over it, one car slipped, and then all the cars broke from the engine and went over the bridge and onto the ice 40 feet below. Loose burning coals set the cars and then the bridge above on fire, and many people lost their lives.
Here are Margaret and her children singing the folk story which sprang up soon after the tragedy.
AUDIO CLIP Central Vermont Railway Tragedy
While important, sometimes tragic, events like these have been remembered in song-stories by Vermont communities, so have more recent and humorous events.
In 1974, “Mary Shaminski, I love you” appeared painted in great big - three-foot-high - letters on a railroad bridge just north of Brattleboro. The message was left for a woman who had moved away to elude a too-persistent suitor in New Jersey. It got everyone’s attention, and was soon immortalized in postcards, a book title, sermons and folklore. Margaret wrote a song to help preserve this amusing and touching story, and it begins this way:
AUDIO CLIP Mary Shaminski I Love You
Many aspects of community life – not only noteworthy events – become part of its folklore and songs. Here in Vermont, everyday ways of life are celebrated in more contemporary songs, like ‘The Farmers Alphabet’, a chronicle of local farming traditions both written and sung by Margaret herself. She is joined by her daughter, Megan Littlehales, who sings harmony. Have you ever played an alphabet game? See how many of these first few things you can remember?
AUDIO CLIP Farmers Alphabet
And local customs are carried on with older folk songs marking the traditions of the seasons. One of the most popular is ‘Maple Sweet’, which accompanies the annual harvesting of maple sap and the lovely “bubble bubble bubble” it makes in the pan as it thickens into syrup. This song was written by Vermont poet Rev. Perrin Fisk in 1858, and here is Margaret singing it with a group of children:
AUDIO CLIP Maple Sweet.
In the midst of all her mothering, teaching, music collecting and the work of rural life, Margaret recorded nine albums and often performed at folk programs and festivals with her children. And she always included original songs of modern Vermont - as well as traditional ballads and other songs of the lives and ways of Vermonters before them.
As a visiting artist at elementary schools, Margaret also helped students learn about their town histories by interviewing elder community members.
She taught her young pupils songs she learned from their grandparents, and how to write songs of their own. This witty little song, ‘Newbury’s Bendell Bridge,’ is about the bridge built over the Connecticut River in the 1860’s – and is being sung by the class of 4th and 5th graders who wrote it more than a 100 years later.
AUDIO CLIP Newbury’s Bendell Bridge
Margaret didn’t just contribute to the Vermont folk community, she embraced it. Her homestead became a gathering place. Visitors and impromptu music sessions often crowded the rooms, and the lively bells of Morris dancers sometimes rang from the grass.
Margaret was warm, vibrant and unfailingly kind. She welcomed everyone, and made them feel that they belonged; and she helped build connections between storytellers and listeners, and between generations.
Margaret was rightfully honored as a New England Living Art Treasure in 1985. And in 1997, she represented Vermont in a national celebration at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Her set included Marlboro Medley, Maple Sweet, and The Hills of Dover – a song about those hills outside her window:
AUDIO CLIP Hills of Dover
In 2002 the Vermont Arts Council awarded her the Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts.
In June 2005, a year before her death, Margaret gave a concert at the Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium. Her songs that night included several ballads collected by Edith Sturgis and Helen Flanders (who had presented her own concert at the Library of Congress 50 years before). Margaret also recounted first meeting Fred Atwood, and sang the version of Reynardine, or as he says (Rine-o-din) she collected during his visit in Marlboro that summer of 1964.
Here are Margaret and her family singing that disquieting tale of an encounter with a stranger on the mountainside.
AUDIO CLIP. Ranadine
Margaret’s childhood experiences, of adapting to each new place, gave her a special understanding of what “home” can mean and why it matters. She brought her own attention and appreciation - for all the cultures she encountered as a young girl —to everything she did. She put down deep roots in Marlboro; created an enduring home; and filled every life she touched with grace, joy, stories and music.
I hope you enjoyed this segment on Margaret MacArthur and the Vermont story-songs she kept and created for us.
I will leave you with a little 15th century riddle song, Perri Meri Dixie Domini, which Margaret learned from Alice Fairbanks, and sings here with her children, Dan and Megan, and her harp-zither.
AUDIO CLIP. Perrie Merrie fading out…
HOST: This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast was written, narrated and produced by Nora Rodes. Editing was Dave Snyder, Daniel Murphy and Alec Pombriant. Guilford Sound did final mastering. Executive producer was me, Lissa Weinmann. Margaret MacArthur’s daughter, Megan Littlehales, was a content consultant. A full list of credits for the many musical clips used in this episode are on its podcast page. We’re grateful for the MacArthur family, the Vermont Folklife Center’s Margaret MacArthur Archive and Smithsonian Folkways for their support. Thanks for listening and see you next month on the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
END