Lynn Noel is an Instigator — she has lit more fires under more traditional music events in the Boston area than anyone I know. She’s a mentor and coach to young performers. She’s a personal kickstarter and guide for older performers. I applaud her spirit of “Well, why don’t we?” that she applies to every opportunity to create traditional music community.
—CDSS Local Hero Recognition
They say “Conform, go crazy, or become an artist.” They don’t tell you it’s a cycle, and the fourth stage is “go broke.” In 1986, I left a Ph.D. program to become a working folk artist and environmental educator. In 1997, my first marriage collapsed under the weight of debt and unemployment, and I went into tech to dig out. In 2006, I reflected on 20 years of Crosscurrents Music, but I couldn’t bridge the gap between my two careers. In 2015, I took a leap out of a well-paying but exhausting IT job without a plan and hung out my shingle as an independent consultant. I founded Digital Heritage Consulting then with the goal of integrating the two halves of my life. It took me another ten years. Then AI and globalization took my job, and I decided to retire and find my own artist voice again.
I’ve been broke, and I’ve had a day job, and now for the first time ever I have the means and the time to do as I like. It’s what I’ve always been doing, really. I’ve been a folk artist and a tech professional for the same thirty years. DHC exists because I keep seeing talented artists fall through the same gap between those two worlds that I lived in for all that time. I discovered that I love to teach, mentor, and coach, and now I’m looking to give back to the folk and heritage music community—the next generation in the sessions and at the festivals, and the experienced leaders who have been at this long enough to think about what comes next. They both talk about an intergenerational “folk family,” and it’s true. I have a partner, but we don’t have children of our own, and my folk family has sustained me through hard times and always been there to welcome me as a participant and a leader. DHC is for you.
Research Rabbitholes as Permission
When I was a fiery young singer hitchhiking through England in 1984, I ripped into the chantey Rio Grande at a festival session. The leader, some old guy with a cap and a beard, came up and clapped me on the shoulder and said “most women shouldn’t sing sea chanteys.” I didn’t take it as a compliment. And that’s how I met sea music legend Johnny Collins.
What I didn’t know then was that Rio Grande was collected by a woman, Joanna Carver Colcord, in 1924. A century later for Joanna and forty years later for me, this story came full circle with a research concert on the Colcord collection at the Connecticut Sea Music Festival’s Symposium on the Music of the Sea. I was a woman singing chanteys from the woman who collected them. My colleagues clapped me on the shoulder for it.
This is the scale and scope of work where Research Rabbitholes can take you. Research can give you a level of permission that ultimately you give yourself.
DIY Digital as Self-Respect
I’m really bad at finding gigs. I go out and do a program and then wait for the next presenters to find me. I’m also so in love with research that I do a program once and then abandon it for the next new shiny idea. But when the Colcord program got booked at the Sea Music Symposium, I was so excited about it that I went out and found other places that might like it and—get this—I wrote to them and asked. Eleven of them said yes! That’s how I put together the Joanna Colcord Centennial tour. I focused on one program and refined it eleven times for each audience, from two international conferences to two bar gigs. In the process, not only did the program get much better, but I got paid in credibility and recognition on my gig list and enough money to cover travel expenses with enough left over to support some new research.
To build a tour, I had to do things differently. I had to manage a mailing list of my audience, which had grown exponentially when I launched the Mermaid’s Tavern, to tell them what I was doing and invite them to see the program. I had to build and manage a list of where I had pitched and where I was with each opportunity—a system that corporations call a customer relationship management system, or CRM. I had to figure out how to sell tickets to online concerts, which is something I intentionally hadn’t done for the Mermaid’s Tavern, and then convince my audience to buy them. And I had to rethink my online tip jar and my patron platform, because I had about four patrons who were the same four people in the front row of all my concerts. I had to think like the sales and marketing and product development teams did in my tech world.
I wasn’t giving my day job the respect it deserved for teaching me those skills, and I certainly didn’t want to be seen as “selling myself.” But I got what I wanted out of the tour. I spent a day in the archives of the museum Joanna helped found, in her hometown of Searsport, Maine. I got back into live performance after the pandemic. And I paid for my Zoom license and for pressing another set of CDs.
I had the skills from tech. I just hadn’t thought about them as applied to my own work. There’s that permission thing again. “If you love something, you should do it for free.” I need to treat my own work as valuable enough to develop, promote and sell, and do it on my own terms and not as some extractive corporate geek. I am the working artist I wanted to be.
Forty years ago, I thought you had to be starving to be an artist. Twenty years later, I needed to take the starving out of artist to survive. Now I want to help—by sharing my story and helping you find and tell yours. Let’s talk.