Charles Rothenberger is an environmental attorney and lobbyist who’s also a board member for CT Folk, which is holding its annual CT Folk Fest and Green Expo this Saturday in Edgerton Park.
On Tuesday’s episode of WNHH radio’s “Northern Remedy,” he was asked: Which came first, the music or the environmental activism?
“The music, obviously,” Rothenberger said. “That comes in the womb.”
CT Folk has been throwing its annual festival for over two decades now, bringing well-established folk acts and up-and-comers to the stage at Edgerton Park for a full day of music. Saturday’s event runs from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and features Livingston Taylor and The Ballroom Thieves as headliners. The schedule also includes sets from Forlorn Strangers, Laybird, local banjo hero Roger Sprung, Greg Cornell and the Cornell Brothers, Amy Soucy, The Promise Is Hope, Steve Pelland, and Kate Callahan, among others.
The Green Expo and its focus on environmental activism is a more recent addition to the festival, Rothenberger said. But in another sense, it was a long time coming.
“There’s really a natural connection between folk music, and the community that’s grown up around it, and socially conscious activism, whether it’s for civil rights or environmental awareness,” Rothenberger said. Protest songs have been a part of folk music since the beginning. So “it seemed like a natural marriage — having the space, putting on a large music festival which attracts folks who have these passions — to utilize more of the space for the Green Expo. So this year we have more than 75 vendors, nonprofit organizations, artisans, craftspeople — a whole slew of different folks united by the theme of environmental sustainability.”
Rothenberger’s own introduction to music began with the Beatles. He picked up guitar and mandolin and began “buying any interesting-looking record I could get my hands on, listening to the radio constantly, and going to tons of shows.”
Bob Lorenz Photo
Rothenberger.
He also plugged into Connecticut’s own “homegrown, vibrant music scene.” He grew up in Mystic, and “trying to find something semi-gainful to do with a history degree out of college,” he said, he worked in the education department at the Mystic Seaport Museum. The Seaport’s Sea Music Festival and the many other ways that music is integrated in the work there “was probably my first concentrated exposure to real classical folk music, if that’s what you want to call it,” he said. He heard the foc’s’le songs that sailors would sing to entertain themselves, the shanties they bellowed out to keep time with their work, and then “people just goofing around on the mandolin or the banjo on their off hours at the Seaport. It was constantly in the air.”
He got involved with CT Folk as a volunteer after going to the yearly festivals in Edgerton Park a few times, when his work brought him to New Haven. He set up tables, did what needed doing. “Then an opportunity came to join the board, and I leapt at it,” he said.
“It can be a lot of work,” Rothenberger said. “Fortunately, a lot of the work involves listening to music, and listening to a lot more music than probably you’d ever be exposed to naturally.” CT Folk seeks out and books its headliners, but many of the performers apply in the hope of playing the festival. This year more than 80 did. “The submissions we get come from all over the country,” Rothenberger said. Performers at the 2017 festival hail from across the Northeast and as far south as North Carolina and Tennessee.
“You see so many particular younger artists now really hearkening back to the roots and the beginnings of the folk tradition,” he said, “standing on the shoulders of those who came before, learning their techniques, and then expanding on them.” For Rothenberger, that trend began with the rise of Americana out of indie rock in the 90s and blossomed from there.
Albie Colantonio Photo
Livingston Taylor, who is headlining the CT Folk Festival this year.
“Folk music is a pretty broad tent. It can encompass the whaling songs of the Azores” and “Uncle Tupelo or Son Volt, some of the more contemporary artists who came out of the indie rock movement,” Rothenberger said. He also name-checked mandolinist Chris Thile taking over Prairie Home Companion and giving a generation of younger musicians a national stage.
For Rothenberger, the Green Expo has benefited the festival not only by expanding its sense of purpose, but creating chances to broaden what the festival entailed on the day it was held. “Once we had the vendors set up and there were opportunities for folks to walk the aisles,” he said, “then we saw more possibilities for the space — a lot of people mingling and interacting.” The festival added programming for kids, and has included contra dances in the past. “So it gives it much more of a community feel,” Rothenberger said. “It really makes it feel like a party.”
As the festival moves into the future, its organizers are interested in seeing the festival become more diverse, both on stage and off. “I’d love to see us expand more into different areas of ethnic folk music,” Rothenberger said. “There’s a real interest in making a proactive effort to bring in more ethnic traditions” — to put Appalachian music next to, say, klezmer, and beyond. The festival is, in fact, already taking steps in that direction by including Thabisa, a South African artist who relocated to New Haven, and the Latin duo Val Ramos and Tere Luna. “There are definitely opportunities here in New Haven to reach a broader audience.”
The broadening of musical styles, moreover, reflects changes in folk music itself. “It’s not going away, and it’s only getting stronger, and you see more and more younger musicians either performing in the folk idiom itself or bringing in some elements of that into rock ‘n’ roll or whatever else they play. That sort of cross-pollination is healthy,” Rothenberger said. “It’s fun when you see elements that get traded back and forth between the genres.”
He takes inspiration from younger acts that he hears combining and recombining music from all over the place to form something new. “Let’s mash them all together and see what we get,” Rothenberger imagines them saying. “And that is folk music.”
The CT Folk Festival and Green Expo happens Sept. 9 at Edgerton Park, 75 Cliff St., from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Admission is free. Click here for more information. Click below to hear Thabisa, state troubadour Kate Callahan, guitarist Mark Pelliccio, and event board member Lisa Kaston preview the festival on “Dateline New Haven.”
