>> Stephen Winick: Welcome, I'm Steve Winick of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress and this is a presentation of the homegrown, 2021 homegrown at home concert series. In normal pandemic years we hold our concert series in the historic Coolidge Auditorium and Whittall Pavilion of the Library of Congress. But since the Covid 19 pandemic we've been doing them online as homegrown at home concert series. This is our second series of virtual concerts and it is now in fact January 2022, but we are doing an interview with Bennett Konesni, who performed in the 2021 series. So, Bennett, welcome to the homegrown 2021 concert and interview series. >> Bennett Konesni: Thanks, Steve, great to be here. >> Stephen Winick: So, you performed a wonderful set of work songs from the state of Maine, with a large chorus of other singers. So, explain a little bit about your early life and music background that brought you to this point. >> Bennett Konesni: Well, I -- okay, I was raised off the coast of Maine on an island called Islesboro and also on shore in America, as we call it, in a little town called Appleton. Both Mid-Coast Maine towns and to go back and forth you have to take a fairy in Penobscot Bay. And in Penobscot Bay we've got America's largest collection of schooners sailing still to this day, over 20 mostly two-masted tall ships plying the tourist trade these days. Anywhere from two hours to 10 days, maybe -- some of them do two week trips still. And it's really a way of keeping the old boats alive, giving people a chance to see the coast of Maine and, you know, really keep our heritage alive, I guess I could say, we're famous up here for great ship building and just amazing sailing grounds. And when I was a teenager I decided I wanted to get onboard one of those boats and be a deckhand and pretty quickly the shanties came into my life just from doing that work, raising the sails, bringing up the anchor. And particularly on the schooner, Janie Riggin' [assumed spelling], which had a musical captain and crew, so there would be music every day in one form or another on the boat. And after that I got into farming and starting working on -- actually, my first job before the schooners was raking blueberries here in Maine and then I started working on organic farms when I was in college and they -- all the people I was working with wanted me to sing sea shanties while we were farming. And so that sort of brought this -- the idea of, well, wait a minute, these shanties are really work songs, they can help with any sort of work that needs doing. And that led me into sort of asking, well, what did farmers used to sing and learning about people working in the woods, the lumberjacks and the wood cutting songs and the songs of the shanties and up the Penobscot and the Kennebec River here in Maine and one thing led to another and I ended up back home. I started a farm in New York, I started a farm in Vermont, but finally came home and started a farm here in Belfast, Maine, which is on the Penobscot -- on Penobscot Bay and started a community chorus to revive work songs. I had had a Watson fellowship and traveled all over the world, I've been to over a dozen countries collecting work songs, finding people who are still working and singing, whether it be in Tanzania, Ghana, Mongolia, Switzerland, Scandinavia and finding a way to see how do work songs work in real life and how can we make it happen here. So I started a community chorus here, which is all about reviving really Maine's old work songs, whether they're shanties -- sea shanties or songs from the lumber camps and mainly from the archives. So that's who you saw in the video and that's sort of what my life is revolving around these days. >> Stephen Winick: That's great. So, you mentioned going to other countries to research work songs and did you find in those places that there were a lot of songs associated with farm labor, with farming work? >> Bennett Konesni: Yeah, it depends on where you are. For instance, I thought in Ghana that there would be lots of farming songs, because I'd actually heard about over just down the coast in Liberia rice working songs for farming rice from the Kpelle people, but in Ghana I couldn't find any farming songs, but a ton of fishing songs. So that was kind of interesting, fisherman singing day in and day out the whole time. Pretty amazing. So when I got to Tanzania I thought, well, maybe it's going to be the same. Instead, the Sukuma in North West Tanzania have one of the most sophisticated and deep traditions of singing and farming all documented by the great musicologist, Frank Gunderson out of Florida. And this is a tradition where they wake up every morning, get their neighbors and friends together, go to a small plot and weed sorghum and corn and tomatoes, whatever it is that they're growing at the time. Mostly sorghum. And then -- or planting, cultivating and as they're doing their farm work they're practicing songs that their leader dreams up in the, you know, in the early morning hours, writes down. And as they're singing and farming they're also developing dance routines that they use to compete at harvest festivals each, basically, during the harvest time and they win prizes, cash prizes or other sorts of prizes by out competing their fellow musical farming groups. So it's incredibly diverse, incredibly deep tradition that inspired me to then come back home and start something like that here. The idea being, well, we could do that here with our friends and neighbors to stack the firewood or stack the garlic or whatever it is that needs doing in our farming community. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, that's pretty amazing. And one of the major crops that you grow is garlic, isn't that right? >> Bennett Konesni: Yeah, so I've got a large plot of garlic. It's definitely one of the largest plots in Maine here and it's pretty much -- most of the work is done by the chorus. My community chorus will come together and meet on the farm and do that work on the farm and then we'll go to one of the members of this chorus, they might have work that they need done at their place, so we'll go to their place. I've got -- one of the members, Elliot Vanpesky [assumed spelling], has a farm and he needed saplings pulled out of his fence lines, he's got electric fences for -- he's got dozens and dozens of cattle and sheep and, so, the electric -- having working electric fences is key and here we've got saplings always coming up in the field edges. So it's quite easy to pull the sapling at certain times of the year, so we'll bring the chorus over there, go along his fence lines and clean out his fence lines. So that's the kind of thing we do, it works really well. I also was in Mongolia and Switzerland and they have, you know, herding songs for dealing with animals and livestock. And, so, kind of interesting to be working with Elliot, who's got his own huge livestock operation and my dream is one day that we have somebody -- well, my dream is that somebody calls me and says, "Hey, you learned how to sing to livestock in Mongolia in order to get orphan babies to be adopted by their -- by their parents or by a different mother, will you come and do that for our lamb?" And I've actually had a couple calls, but nothing -- the timing didn't work out, I wasn't able to get there in time basically to do the singing, so maybe that will -- that's in the future. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. But it's a shame that it didn't work out, but what a cool idea. >> Bennett Konesni: Yeah. >> Stephen Winick: So, I mean, one of the things that kind of strikes me in listening to you talking about this is that I'm not aware and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that farm work of that kind in New England was done with work songs, that in that I don't know of a lot of examples of that recorded. So you're essentially applying principles that you learned elsewhere in the world to your own backyard, is that right? >> Bennett Konesni: Yes and no. I mean, the -- I wanted to find a living work song traditions to really dig into how it was being, you know, what are the technical details of how to lead a work song in working context. Things -- some of that I'd learned on the schooners, because we were actually using them to bring up the anchor and put up the sails. But then there's also a much larger cultural piece around how to organize groups and convince people that this is worth doing and that it's actually more productive, more efficient and more fun to do it this way. And that was the kind of thing that I picked up in other countries, because we don't -- you know, on the schooners it's more of like a, yes, we can't get these sails up without everyone's help and, so, here's a song and this is part of the -- this is what -- we're on a schooner in Maine, we're tourists, we're going on a schooner in Maine and Bennett's going to lead a shanty to get the sails up. So it's kind of a mix, you know, I have this -- from the schooners this knowledge of one level of organizing people in one context with one certain type of song. Now as far as farming and farming songs, we don't have a broad understanding and knowledge of people singing while farming in New England in the same way that you see in Tanzania, for instance. But we do have the Shaker tradition and from the little amount that I've gone and sort of read and researched Shaker singing, there's all of these anecdotes like, well, we're out in the herb garden singing, you know, or this song, you know, this one particular refrain or 'tis a gift to be, you know, Simple Gifts would come up or other songs would come up. And haven't gotten to talk with Brother Arnold about this yet, but who was it, I was talking with Chris Moore maybe, or reading some of these books, there's books -- there's several really interesting books about Shaker music out there and there are these little anecdotes about working in the fields. Another one -- I feel like Dudley Laufman lives over near in Canterbury, New Hampshire and he was telling me about the -- talking with an old-timer and, you know, back in the 60s, somebody who'd been involved in the Canterbury community 30 or 40 years earlier and talking about scything and mowing hay fields with 30 or 40 people mowing and I feel like songs happening or being a part of that -- that system. The other thing I read was about Simple Gifts being a spiritual work song and when I read that first I thought, well, here's a work song, you know, it really makes sense. It says here in the description, people often describe it as a spiritual work song. Now, some people say, "Well, the work is the spiritual work." >> Stephen Winick: Sure. >> Bennett Konesni: On the other hand, their lives are all -- there's so much of Shaker life, any time you go to a Shaker village you see just how deeply life is a part of it. So I can't imagine -- the thought I always have when I'm mowing, I mow with a scythe, it's just perfect for a song, it's so perfect for a song, the way it opens your chest, the rhythm of mowing. Same when I'm chopping, I have a double bladed ax, which every once in a while I'll go out and chop and try some of the lumber camp -- the lumber camp song or the shanties from the small, what they called shanties, the huts in the north woods where they would stay while working. So many of those songs are ballads and they don't have a sort of call and response element that often works to coordinate people at work, but is not, of course, essential to work songs. But I really -- even some of the ballads when you think about -- when you're chopping and you've got a song like, Sing Around, it's from the Northwood songs, I think, or Minstrelsy of Maine, it's got just this, "When we go into the woods." Oh, I think John Gaullard [assumed spelling] may have sung it in my film. >> Stephen Winick: That's right, yeah, that's the one, yeah. >> Bennett Konesni: It's got such -- well, it's actually drink around, but we changed it to sing around, because -- >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bennett Konesni: We've got some folks who had drinking issues, drinking problems and we just thought, well, let's just sing around and it works well that way. But anyways, so many of the songs have this rhythm that comes well. The Lumberman's Alphabet is another one that we sang, I think, it's just got this great rhythm. I can't imagine -- once you see the images of the Allen Lomax [assumed spelling] and -- no, it was Bruce Jackson and what -- Toshi Seager [assumed spelling] maybe in -- of the live oak -- chopping live oak and singing, it just -- to me it's -- well, okay, probably what would happen is every once in a while there would be a lumber -- whoever was the lumberjack who was great at singing would sing whatever he had while he was out their chopping. And they didn't have four people on a tree or eight people on a tree like in Texas necessarily. But you can make the woods ring, you can make the woods ring when you are out there. So, I think it's maybe more of a thing that it wasn't glorified or it wasn't as common here in New England, but I can't imagine that it didn't happen sometimes. Especially when you consider that a lot of the farmers and lumberjacks were also working on boats. They would take some time sailing the lumber to the Caribbean and coming back, learning shanties. I think it even talks about that in Colcord's, in the introduction of Colcord's book, "Roll and Go". This -- it was sort of a fluid interchange of spaces and activities and it would be very common to have somebody from a boat end up in the woods or end up in the fields and I just can't imagine that the songs they were learning on the boats or -- weren't making their way into the woods and vice versa and sort of informing them. And to me, since we have work to do, that's all I really need, that's all -- that's all we really need is to know that, yeah, it may have happened and it certainly can work now. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah and I mean, one thing you mentioned, you know, the idea of the spiritual work song and it may be true, of course, that the work involved is spiritual work, but we know from our field recordings in the American Folklife Center Archive that spirituals were used as work songs for physical labor as well certainly. So there's no reason, as you say, that it might not have been used that way during farming and you have -- you have the anecdotal evidence anyway that people certainly did that. So that's, yeah, that's all just great stuff and it's nice to see how these can be used in different ways. I mean, one of the things that you did, you opened your concert with a version of the Cambric Shirt, which, you know, is one of those classic really old ballads, but it has a refrain and that makes it possible to use it as a work song. >> Bennett Konesni: Yeah. >> Stephen Winick: So what was it like adapting that for field work? Or for work in the field, I should say? >> Bennett Konesni: Yeah. It was pretty natural. The interesting thing about that song is that, you know, the more I do this the more I realize you get out of the field with someone, with people and the simpler the better, the simpler the refrain the better. It will be a mix of people. Some of the folks I'll be out there with are -- have been by my side for 10 years singing or more. Others this will be their first time. They heard about it from someone and they said, "Oh, we've got to go check this out," and they'll be brand new. So when those folks show up I try to have the simplest possible refrain, fumma lumma li, fumma lumma li loo lee. That is so easy to get. There's hardly anything to it and that's part of its genius. And the more -- the more I do this the more I'm looking for those songs that are deceptively -- they're deceptively simple, in the sense that if -- if you're arranging a set list to be on stage you might think, well, why -- we're not going to do the Cambric Shirt, you know, it's too simple. But in the field it actually ends up being more -- deeper, a deeper experience because of the simplicity of the song. Simple Gifts is the same way, once you kind of get into the rhythm of the song, once you get over the learning part of the -- then everyone's actually making music together, rather than learning music together and there's a really big difference, especially when you apply it -- when you've got garlic to pull, you know. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Bennett Konesni: Like, you can't spend any time, really, explaining what's going on or what to do. It almost has to present itself, it has to explain itself and the Cambric Shirt does that. A lot of the, you know, the Lumberman's Alphabet, a lot of the great songs that we use have that sort of self explanatory, you can just sing it at the drop of a hat. A lot of the shanties are like that, you know, it's almost like we have inside of us an intuitive knowledge of what to do in some of these songs. You get in a room and, you know, you sing Haulin' the Bowline and people just know where to sing, they just know how to do it and that's -- those are the ones we want if we're going to get the job done. >> Stephen Winick: Well yeah and it was adaptive too, of course, because the position that a crew would have been in on a ship is pretty much similar to the situation that you guys are in in the fields, which is, not everyone will know every song, so it's, you know, the easiest thing is to have these songs that are simple and can be, you know, can be learned on the spot so you don't have to spend too much time on the learning part. So that all really makes a lot of sense. So, and that song we should mention, the Cambric Shirt, came from the Maine Folklife Center, which is a collection that has been acquired by the American Folklife Center, so that was what we call an archive challenge. You were learning a piece that is actually in our archive and using it in your concert. So we thank you for doing that with us as well. That was a lot of fun. >> Bennett Konesni: Oh man, we love -- I just love the concept, what an awesome concept to have, get people out there. You know, the songs were collected -- they weren't collected to sit on the shelves, you know, they weren't. They were collected to be used and sung and enjoyed and made new again, made fresh, whatever it is that people need to do. And I believe so deeply in that -- that as a concept, that's why we're out collecting. If we're collecting music, that's why we're collecting it. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, we believe that too, so thank you so much again. And I -- another thing that I'll mention, you had talked about finding materials in Joanna Colcord's books, so what was your connection, was that just through having been a sailor and knowing that that was the best resource out there? >> Bennett Konesni: Yeah. Well, I only -- it took a long time actually to figure out that Colcord was my -- was the one for me. On the schooner we had a copy of Hugill and actually then when I went to work -- the first farm I worked on, it's called Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, New York, one of my co-workers had grown up near Mystic, Connecticut and he had -- he had met Stan Hugill and had a copy and he gave me his copy and signed by Stan Hugill. So he was like, "Bennett, you need to have this." So I took it. So I was really operating out of Hugill for a long time and only later did I kind of -- it was really it's been this whole process of food and music and thinking more about how our place that we are affects the things that we're enjoying or the things we're creating, right. So the ecology, the climate, the culture of the place, it -- somehow when you get -- when you get the place lined up with the product it's stronger, it's stronger. It's like if you're going to grow a potato in Maine it makes sense to grow a potato that has coevolved with Maine's climate. And the more I play music and I've gotten to play music from all over the world and I've gotten to play it all over the world, the more I do it the more the songs of Maine where I grew up and even this bay, Penobscot Bay and this little -- this amazing little corner of the world, they serve -- they serve better, they just works better and it's I think because of the alignment, you know. The songs here they help us -- they've helped, whether if, you know, sailing or the Shaker community surviving or people just getting through the winter in the woods, it's helped, it's worked in these exact scenarios for, you know, in some, you know, hundreds of years. So, same with the potatoes. And, so, I -- that's how I ended up coming around to Colcord, because I was looking for resources relating to what people were singing here, around here. And with this exact logical path, you know, okay, well, let's see what works here. And that's -- I ended up coming around to Colcord and, of course, Flord [assumed spelling], she's the next town over and one of the members of my chorus is her great nephew. >> Stephen Winick: Oh great. >> Bennett Konesni: So kind of cool that way. You know, there's still Colcords around, you just run into Colcords. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. Well, you know, we invite you any time you have a chance to come to Washington and come to the Library of Congress. One of the things that's cool about Colcord from our perspective, we don't have her collection, but she used to write to the heads of our archive all the time with suggestions. And so we have a lot of letters from Joanna Colcord and, in fact, some of our great collection of shanties are from sailors that she suggested, Allen Lomax and others. >> Bennett Konesni: Oh, cool. >> Stephen Winick: Duncan Emrich, she would write letters to us saying, "You really need to get, you know, collect from this person." So, yeah, bring her great nephew as well, we would love to meet him, so. >> Bennett Konesni: yeah, oh yeah, Bill Colcord, great guy. >> Stephen Winick: Sounds good. >> Bennett Konesni: I think the more we do it -- you know, Maine is a special place, I live in a special place, but everyone lives in a special place actually. Once you sort of untap this idea that we -- we co-evolve with our places and our arts co-evolve with our places, the beautify of the Library of Congress to me is that you have these little seeds from all over the country, all over the world that are housed there. You're like a seed bank for all this great art. Music, art, ideas. And as people who live in Washington State or who live in Texas or Florida, I think about all of the stuff you have from all the corners of this country, anyone can come and plant, you know, discover the seeds of their place and bring them home and plant them again. I just think it's the coolest thing, Library of Congress as seed bank and I want to thank you for, you know, making it happen, because it's like an American treasure and you've got it in good hands. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, you're very welcome and we do love to repatriate materials to communities. You know, sometimes for whatever reason the materials that we collect here end up being lost by the community's origin and we spend a lot of time and effort in contacting communities and repatriating some of our materials as well. I think the Maine material is for the most part pretty safe in both places, but it's kind of cool to have some materials that folks from Maine might not know about and would be able to come and listen to here at the Library of Congress as well. >> Bennett Konesni: Definitely and the resources. >> Stephen Winick: So, yeah, we welcome people all the time. >> Bennett Konesni: I think in terms of, like, budgets and staffing that you guys have down there are -- they're bigger than what we've been able to muster here in Maine, you know. Our library system just hasn't been able to muster -- lately the money and people that are needed to sort of help us access it. So, since you guys are there you have -- you can help us access it. I mean, to me that's huge. Not every community, even if you were to sort of give us all of that material and we were to keep it in Maine, we may not be able to sort of fund it, fund the things that it needs. So. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bennett Konesni: You know, we can all work together and, you know, just the material is -- just that it exists it's such an amazing thing. >> Stephen Winick: Well, thank you. So, to get back a little bit toward the, you know, your sort of process with work songs, one of the, you know, sort of traditions that we know about from all work song traditions is the process of sort creating new words for work songs. That is to say, the song wasn't necessarily the same length as the task and people would spit out new verses. Do you find yourself doing that, is that part of what your chorus does as well? >> Bennett Konesni: Oh, yeah, ad nauseam. I mean, it's one of the most -- I would say it -- it's one of the defining characteristics of this art form, is that it's a tradition of spontaneous invention. And especially in folks who've come up in traditions that see things as being rigid, you know, as being unchanged. They see tradition as unchanging. This tradition it's -- it's just clear that innovation is a core bedrock part of it. You know, if you're going to spend -- you don't know how long this particular row of garlic is going to take and, so, you got to pad it, otherwise it's unsatisfying to everyone if you just end with the verses you know. You just end with the verses you know, then the energy just dips, starts to dip. You know, whatever the verses were in the book. You got to, like, make up three more in order to get to the end of the row, otherwise you're going to have this team of people at your disposal for less amount of time, because they're going to lose interest, they're going to get tired. Whenever we're never singing people get way more tired and they don't last as long. It's simple math, it's economics, it's let's -- okay, I want these people here as long as they want to stay. And so the more you do it, the more you invent lyrics and -- oh, it's almost always -- they know when you're inventing lyrics pretty much, not always. Sometimes I can slide them in and they think, oh, that's the one my grandfather taught me. But the inventive lyrics they're so great, because you can include them in the song and once you do that you've got them, you know, they're not -- then suddenly they have such ownership over this thing that they're doing. This is my -- they just own it and they'll work to the end of the row, they'll work to the end of the day and they'll work harder and faster the longer we go. It's the craziest thing. Most people who run teams in a field would not -- these days they just wouldn't -- they don't believe -- they actually don't believe me when I talk like that, they don't believe me. But then when they come and see it it really -- they say, wow, yeah, wow, this really is something else. And the best songs are usually at the end. Like the best energy, say we're quitting at 5, well, that 4:30 to 5 time is usually when people are dragging, but somehow everybody just like leaves it -- leaves it out there. It's just we're going to leave it out here in the field and we're -- it's like the energy goes up and up and up right to the very end and same with jogging. We job and sing in this sort of Jody call tradition. We'll run for 3, 4, 5 miles and at the end it will be stronger, you know, we'll finish strong and the song is the thing that gets you there. Same with rowing, when we row and sing, it's just -- it's pretty great. And often the inventiveness is the thing that will take it over the top. And, you know, that Bruce Jackson work that he's done, his book, "Wake Up Dead Man," it's so cool, because he, you know, collected all of the inventions, where some of the older collections of songs seem to be like, well, we'll sort of choose some of the best and put those in there, because it's maybe more expensive, we can't publish 30 verses. Ah, sometimes you see 30 verses, but Jackson, he gave all the verses and then, like, different versions of the song with the different verses and you can see just the extent to which invention was a part of the Texas, you know, the Mississippi, the sort of the southern prison work song tradition. But then you see it in shanty books, you see it talked about in shanty books. I mean, it's -- I'd say it's -- and also, you know, in -- in Tanzania it was big, invention, you know, they would invent the songs sometimes the morning before they went out, but also add lyrics in the middle of the song to extend it. I should think about in Mongolia, I should ask my teacher over there, because he would -- there were these long epic songs about the mountains and the animals and women and horses and they would go on and on and I could only imagine that there's invention happening there as well. It's probably more the norm than the exception. There's a tradition in Latvia in Italy, north of Rome, singing sheppards spontaneously improvising as they sing from pasture to pasture across the hedgerow and I think Lomax may have recorded some of that material in his big Italian tour that he did. You know, this idea that we're going to spice up the moment with a little bit of linguistic cleverness, you know, that's like -- it seems like a real pinnacle of human artistic expression, if you ask me, it's like, ah, here we are, we're going to take this suffering, this moment of intense hardship and we're going to use our -- our wits to make just t his awesome verse that captures the moment that names people, names our surroundings, that expresses the angst that we have with the boss and his cruelty, you know, the sun and its heat, whatever it is. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bennett Konesni: I think the Greeks were even doing it and I think the fact that it sort of survived in this almost completely unsung way is a bit of a secret to life and I just hope that more folks find out about it and start to try it, because the rewards are enormous. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. Well, thanks also because so many of the collections that you mentioned, those collections by Allen Lomax and Bruce Jackson are ones that we're taking care of here at the Library of Congress as well. >> Bennett Konesni: Amazing. >> Stephen Winick: And so, yeah, it's great to hear that people are using these archival collections in these ways and sort of thinking about them in terms of what their implications are in the broader sense as well. So, thanks for that. >> Bennett Konesni: Well, we sing songs out of all those collections pretty regularly and for you guys we wanted to highlight the main material that we do. >> Stephen Winick: Sure. >> Bennett Konesni: It's sort of our -- it's the thing we can really provide to the world that's different, but we get a lot out of those other songs too. Particularly sort of like structural, there's a structural, practical side and then this metaphysical side as well. So. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. Well, speaking of the metaphysical side, you mentioned several times Shaker communities and, of course, they're deeply connected to Maine as well. What can you tell me about that and where did you find the Shaker songs that you do? >> Bennett Konesni: Well, Simple Gifts was taught -- is taught in Maine schools and probably around the country. You know, people seem to know that song. And I don't know if it was the 60s and the folk revival that did that or something else, but -- I mean, of course, it's an amazing song, so it deserves its place in culture for sure. So I learned that in first grade, Mrs. Evergard [assumed spelling] Appleton Village School. But I came back around to it, I think it was talking with Dudley and other folks living over in Canterbury actually, New Hampshire. Dudley Laufman, of course, is a major Northern New England songster and dance caller, dance master. But also has a great collection of songs and tunes that he plays on his various instruments. And, so, I think Dudley was talking -- sort of pointed me in the direction of the Shakers and said, you know, "Hey, you should really, like, dive in a little bit more to see what's going on in that world." And then I started finding more stuff -- you know, I teach work songs with an organization in western Massachusetts called Roots Rising, which brings urban and suburban kids together to work on farms, local farms. And one of the farms is at the Hancock Shaker Village in Western Mass. And in preparation, I've been doing that for 10 years and in preparation for that I started diving more deeply into the Shaker songbooks that I could find and one of which is here in Maine nearby at the Bagaduce music lending library, which is a really extraordinary music of -- sheet music lending library here in Blue Hill Maine. Over a million copies of music. You know, I think it's one of the world's largest independent freely accessible sheet music lending libraries. And they have several books of Shaker songs and I was diving into them several years ago and started seeing just a whole lot more than Simple Gifts. You know, there are these songs that have incredible rhythm and power and just from what I can see the description is that they were singing them while dancing and, you know, shaking, but to me especially the ones -- they're wordless songs, they're -- there's a whole collection, vast collection of songs that have no words. And when I -- just apropos to our -- the way we started this conversation, these songs that have no words are gold in the field, because you have people who they can -- think of what we're asking them to do, we're asking them to pull garlic, we're asking them to learn a new melody, we're asking them to learn words to a new melody, maybe we're asking them to try on some harmonies. And then you've got your rhythm and your dynamics. We're asking them to sing loud, which is probably new for them. Most people who sing inside or with electronics don't -- you know, with microphones, sound reinforcement, they don't have -- it's a whole new thing to learn to just project, to just use your entire lungs and sing outside. So we're asking them to do a lot. If you can eliminate the fact that words need to happen and just use vocables or just deedle Irish style or trull in Scandinavian style, it makes it a lot easier for people. So I haven't gone too deeply into the -- like, I need to basically get five or six or 10 or 12 Shaker songs in my pocket, you know, and just sing those a lot, because I think they'll be transformative in making people feel welcome and just drop right in. you know, I have a friend who farms in Goldsborough, Shepsy Eaton [assumed spelling] and he went to India and studied kirtan and he sings a lot of kirtan in the field and I'll go over and help and we'll sing kirtan together. And those Hindu incantations are very simple. They've got this same -- actually I think the parallel with Shaker music is very interesting, because they've got this almost wordless quality, especially if you don't speak Hindi, you know, it's sounds, connected to amazing melodies and you can be out there thinning beats for all day and it's boring as all get out, but you got this song and it just keeps you going and it doesn't need words and you just go. It's pretty cool. So that's my hope and I've got to get over and talk with Brother Arnold and I was so excited that we'd -- I was paired with the Shakers for this piece that you guys did, because it was like a reminder, okay, well, they were doing choral arrangements and that's fine, but I think that Brother Arnold and all of the Shakers that went before would be really interested in what we're doing with our farm and our community. I think that it just seems to fit in a way, you know, really -- you have these moments of transcendent euphoric connection with the universe and it sounds weird saying this on the screen and it sounds unusual, we don't talk about that sort of experience, transcendental experience in American life very commonly and it's easy to feel mocked or misunderstood for even saying it, but the reality is I'll get done with a project and singing with my community and I'll have more energy than when I started, I'll feel this overpowering connection with each of them, this sort of kinship and also a taste -- a sort of presence, it will even transform the way I see the world. Like, I'll see trees in greater fidelity, I'll see the spaces in between the branches and the songs somehow bring that out, they have this incredible lifting and this spirit, they just bring out the spirit. And you see that in cultures all over the world, of course, and I think the Shakers got it. That's what they we're -- I can't imagine they were up to anything else, other than transcending this space, feeling intense euphoria through music together. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, absolutely. So, to talk a little about other projects or projects that are related to your work song experience and just things that you've done and achieved, I think it's really interesting, for example, that you've done state department tours, sort of focusing on music. What can you tell us about that? >> Bennett Konesni: Man, it's amazing. The fact that we can spend a tiny fraction of our Defense Department budget or our massive budget that goes into dealing with things outside of our borders, right, we got a huge budget and we can spend some fraction of it sending out culture ambassadors to show a difference side of what America is, because they're getting either they're seeing either military or they're seeing mass media, Hollywood. To have a guy who's farming and playing the fiddle and singing in the fields and rowing boats, have him show up in Ukraine or Mongolia, both trips that I've done, I think it really -- first of all it's an honor to represent that, you know, this part of America, which I think -- you think of America the beautiful, these folk traditions, to me that's America the beautiful, and to share that with people and say, yeah, this is -- first of all, what happens is, when they see me performing a folk tradition, then their folk traditions are suddenly validated, because I think of the message folks get from a lot of American media is that you've got to be a part of an industrial -- industrial capitalist or digital capitalist culture, you could say, a culture that prizes very few industrially polished art makers, art music makers or it's even beyond art music. It's like just money music, it's music that's made to sell. Just sell as many -- as many little widgets as possible, crank them out. And when -- I think particularly Ukraine, but also Mongolia, the traditional musicians that I got to play alongside and swap songs and tunes with, I could see them just sort of feeling like, oh, yeah, yeah, we have something special here. And to have an American show up and acknowledge that meant a lot for the community surrounding the traditional musician. And -- and this just been cool music that we made together. There's a fun video -- I had my -- my 5 minutes of fame were in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, when we collaborated with a local, really fantastic local group called Alti, and we mashed up Wayfaring Stranger and one of the, you know, the great American folksong, Poor Wayfaring Stranger, and then with -- it just meshed really well with one of their traditional songs, which was about riding horses. And it got broadcast on Mongolian TV and made its way around the internet and it just -- it was just a beautiful thing to make that music together. Same in Ukraine, we discovered that That Fiddle Tune Spotted Pony has an almost identical B section -- no, A section as a really common Ukrainian folk melody. So, you know, these sorts of moments, you bring people together, it helps everybody realize, you know, breaks down the walls. I think one of the real issues we have in life, it definitely in folk music and music generally is the idea that we're putting everything in boxes, the categorization of things. Whether it's, well, is this a work song, is this not a work song, is this an American song or is this a Ukrainian song? It helps us understand things, you know, we got to put things in boxes in order to understand that in a way, but also we lose -- we lose a lot when we put them in the boxes, it's a real conundrum I think behind human, I guess, thought. But any time you get a chance to sort of explode the boxes or draw the connections between the boxes and sort of interdisciplinary connection, it gets really good really fast and I'm grateful to the State Department for -- for the, you know, American Music Abroad Program and also just some of those embassies are out there just hiring American musicians and bringing them over. Completely separate from, you know, American Music Abroad, they're just bringing us over to play music at their embassy and in various outposts around the country. I just think that is -- that's some enlightened foreign policy and the more we can do that, the better. >> Stephen Winick: All right. And it's interesting, you know, putting, as you were talking about the fiddle tune that resembled the Ukrainian tune, as well as not putting things in boxes and one thing that we should mention is that in addition to singing song you also play the fiddle. So we don't want to put you in that box of just a folk singer. So, talk a little bit about your fiddling life as well. >> Bennett Konesni: Okay, well, I play really a country dance music, well, let's see, I'm a blue grass musician, so I have a blue grass band. I play a lot of country dance music. Country dances are still really big in Maine. Or we could say it's been revived over the last 30, 40 years. And with the Gauller [assumed spelling] family and with my band, Drive Train, I've gotten to play a lot of country dances. Which feels really -- it feels like a return to my youth, because I grew up country dancing and also my grandfather called country dancing and my uncle is a dance caller, also my sister, her husband and her husband's sister start -- relaunched the Belfast country dance it's one of the best in the country. It's just amazing, people of all ages dancing unselfconsciously here in Belfast. Almost like -- they just stumble out of the woods or the barn or wherever. It's not a subculture, it feels like actually part of just the culture here. So, it's been fun to take that around the country and the world, teaching country dancing and playing fiddle or guitar with whoever, you know, whichever band I'm with. There's a cool -- it ties in with work songs pretty directly just in the sense that you've got this sort of caller and then the response is a dance. Instead of a call and response with a group of workers, you got call and response with the dancers and it's fun. I get to play with a fiddler named Ed Hal from Whitefield, Maine, who's just amazing and people call him from all over the country to come play their dances. You know, most folks outside of the community don't even realize that there's this massive country dance culture happening all over the country in grange halls and community centers and churches. So we've been to all corners of the country. Just pre-pandemic, Arizona, California, North Carolina, all over the place playing these dances. And when you get to play with great musicians, which I luckily get to, it just takes it to a whole other level. So the neat thing about both the Gauller family and Drive Train and Ed Hal is that we really have the same idea, we want to play Maine tunes, we want to play Maine tunes, because there's something fiery about the tunes that ended up in our archive up here. I don't know what it is. Ellen Gauller says she moved to Maine from Vermont because the -- it was actually the way that the tunes were played. They played with fire in their bows, she says. And the tunes, though, the tunes reinforce it, something about there's this up -- there's this real fire behind it. I think the backbeat, I also think my other side belief is the rhythm itself has it inside, we play like a particular type of boomchick and I'm often tasked with the guitar, so I get to do the boomchick and I think... >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bennett Konesni: And interestingly, my other theory is that it came from the Caribbean and the connection between Maine ship sailing from here bringing ice and hay and wood to the Caribbean and back, it's just a week sail, all kinds of people would pile onto those schooners, the coasters and sail down to Barbados and Jamaica and they had to be hearing music going on and then sailing home and had it and then they got to play for a dance. So to me it just makes so much sense why our music would sound so much like rock steady, our backbeat, you know, our rhythm approach. The fiddle tunes is a lot like rock steady and early reggae, so. >> Stephen Winick: And certainly if you were going to contrast it with Vermont, you know, what is it that Maine had that Vermont didn't have and that's one of the things I guess certainly, is that particular trade root, so that makes a lot of sense, yeah. >> Bennett Konesni: Absolutely, absolutely. >> Stephen Winick: That's cool. >> Bennett Konesni: Maybe that's a PhD project in the making. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, for someone. >> Bennett Konesni: If anyone wants it, take it up, because I think there's something there. And it really gets to the nice diversity piece, which often people think about Maine, well, it's a white state, there's no diversity in Maine, but I actually think that we've got an incredible amount of diversity and it's evidenced in the music. You know, we have -- there's a woman named Emily -- Emmaline Dean Reynolds who's studying black fiddlers and Maine actually has a collection of black fiddlers, believe it or not, in our archive, in our tradition. I'm not sure if it's in the Library of Congress, we'll have to find out where she's -- what she's looking at. But also the Franco connection and the cross boarder connection with Canada, you just see this constant. It seems like the impulse is to share and connect. That's what we're seeing, that's what I think is the thing, which makes sense that our backbeat would be so much like Jamaican backbeat. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Bennett Konesni: This impulse is sharing -- and that's what I'm really interested in continuing. Any time we get a chance to make music together and this summer I get a chance to play with Jerron Paxton, Blind Boy Paxton, who was raised, you know, in Los Angeles, but from a grandmother who grew up on a plantation in the Deep South. And he's got all these songs, but he knew Woodchoppers Reel, he just knew Woodchoppers, which, you know, is a great tune and he was ready to play it and he was ready to play it in a way that brought out the commonalities or the similarities between the two of us. And we couldn't be more different on so many levels, you know, but then we've got this amazing musical intersection and it just seemed like, even as different as we seem, the Venn diagram is vast, the overlap is huge. And so that, you know, I'm kind of rambling here, but to me that's what it's all about. It's why I love the Library of Congress, it's why I'm proud to do the music I do. And when we're playing country dances or singing work songs, doing workshops different places, that's what -- that's I think what I try to emphasize, what I think everybody should really focus on, especially in a country that feels sometimes really divided right now. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. Well, thanks so much for that and, you know, we are coming toward the end of our time, so I wanted to make sure if there was any project or principle that you wanted to articulate for our audience that you haven't had a chance to say yet, this is the time if you want to -- anything you think hasn't been answered at this point. >> Bennett Konesni: Yeah. Well, I guess the last thing -- I don't think I said this yet, is anybody can do this. It doesn't require professional education. Anyone can use the Library of Congress and look up, find old materials and bring them back to life. Anyone can use them as a setting off point for creating their own music at whatever work they have that needs to be done. We all need to wash the dishes and sweep the floor, no matter where we are, there's stuff that needs to be done and music can be a part of it. I'm telling you, it's a transformative thing, it makes it better, it makes it easier, it really does. It can help to learn the stuff while you're not working -- excuse me -- take a little time to learn some lyrics and melodies while you're not working. If there's nobody around to teach you, you know, sit yourself down and learn a few songs, learn a few shanties and then try them out while you're washing the dishes and sweeping the floor and whatever your work is. You know, it may be that you work at a computer all day and you're a spreadsheet jockey and it can be hard to figure out how to have music in an office setting, but even then, outside of that office -- well, there's whole things that can be done in offices even. Office choirs is a thing in England and I think maybe even starting, pre-pandemic starting over here, taking an hour after lunch to have a chorus and then staying an hour later at the end. But jogging, rowing, think of all the exercise that folks are doing. To me there's just ample opportunities to use music to enhance your work, whatever that work is and I would encourage you to do it. There's no tryouts, it's mostly here, it's mostly deciding to do it and deciding to be okay with whatever people think about you, because you're singing. And, you know, that didn't used to be as much of a problem, it is these days, but that's our work, we get to just learn how to not care as much about what people think about us. So. >> Stephen Winick: Well, Bennett Konesni, thank you so much for your -- the interview that you just gave us and also the concert that you gave us of work songs with your community chorus, it was just a great experience to have that concert and to have you here to talk to us. So, Bennett Konesni, thank you very much. >> Bennett Konesni: Thank you, Steve, and keep up the good work down there, can't wait to come visit in person and paw through those letter from Joanna Colcord and everything else. I mean, obviously, what a gift you guys are saving for the world, so keep it up and we'll see you soon. >> Stephen Winick: Will do, we look forward to having you.