Brief Bio
Lynn Noel has been a working folk and heritage artist since 1986, when she left a PhD program to do music full time — a decision she has never entirely stopped second-guessing and has never regretted. She tours nationally and regionally as Crosscurrents Music, co-founded the Boston Area Chantey and Maritime Sing and several local Boston sings, runs the Mermaid’s Tavern online folk club, and serves as Board member and Program Chair of the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA). The Country Dance and Song Society recognized her with a CDSS Local Hero commendation. Her award-winning book VOYAGES: Canada’s Heritage Rivers grew out of thirty years of research into the value of Canadian waterways, receiving Best Conservation Publication from the Natural Resources Council of America. Her recent Joanna Carver Colcord Centennial tour — eleven venues, one program, the woman who collected the chanteys — came directly out of the research practice she now teaches through Digital Heritage Consulting. She has been mentoring emerging folk artists for twenty years, first informally and now through DHC, because she keeps meeting talented musicians who have everything they need except a clear sense of what comes next and the practice to pursue it with authority.
Full Bio
Lynn’s lived experience flows through river systems, data networks, storytelling through music and visual arts, and a keen eye and ear for harmonious design. Theatre calls it a through-line. Two currents have run in parallel for decades: life as a working folk and heritage artist since 1986, and a career as data management and digital strategy professional with the IT and leadership chops to start her own consulting practice. The confluence is Digital Heritage Consulting, carrying forward what forty years in two careers has produced —paying it forward and passing it on across generations.
Vivacious, charismatic, and energetic, Lynn Noel knows the story behind the song and makes you a part of it. Her clear, powerful voice is equally at home in rhythmic sea chanteys and lyrical ballads, and her repertoire extends to over fifteen languages. Lynn accompanies herself on treble, baritone, and bass dulcimer, shruti box, bodhran, and spoons, but her favorite instrument is the audience. She has a winning stage presence, an encyclopedic knowledge of her material, a huge sense of fun, and a joy in singing that shines through every song. Lynn’s deep, rich, and award-winning heritage research includes three program series on women’s history (Lisette’s Journey and Gudrid the Wanderer), maritime heritage (Joanna Colcord collection and Songs of the Voyageurs), and seasonal customs (Wassail workshop), and she has nine recordings on Bandcamp. Lynn tours internationally and regionally in the Northeast and performs duo with tenor Ken Mattsson as Power Harmonies.
Chanteys from the Colcord Collection started as a Zoom concert in response to the sea chantey craze during the pandemic. Everyone was on TikTok singing The Wellerman, which wasn’t a working chantey, and they were all men. Joanna Carver Colcord published the first collection of American sea chanteys in 1924 as Roll and Go: Songs of American Sailormen. Lynn sang a chantey at a UK festival in the 1980s to be told “most women shouldn’t sing sea chanteys.” It was past time to reclaim women’s voices in sea music. For the centennial of Colcord’s collection in 2024, Lynn developed an illustrated research concert for Connecticut Sea Music Festival Symposium on the Music of the Sea. Eleven venues booked the program for a cross-Atlantic centennial tour that ranged from conferences with the American Folklore Society and the English Folkdance and Song Society’s Cecil Sharp House to bar gigs in American and English pubs to Joanna’s home port museum and archives in Searsport, Maine, where Lynn spent a delicious day delving in Joanna’s correspondence and collection of glass lantern slides. The program included visual timelines, animated maps, photos taken by Joanna, and demonstrations of working chanteys sung in traditional call-and-response style. Joanna Colcord taught us that women should definitely sing sea chanteys.
The Country Dance and Song Society’s Centennial commendation calls Lynn an “instigator” who lights fires under ideas for traditional music events. In 2005, Lynn co-founded the Boston Area Chantey and Maritime Sing with David Kessler “for selfish reasons: we wanted a chantey sing that was local.” Twenty years later, Lynn co-leads the series and the NEChanteysings Facebook group with April Grant, who has been singing chanteys with Lynn since she was twelve. Lynn co-founded a local pub sing that’s now been running in Somerville for the same two decades, which spawned the Boston Community Burns Supper and indirectly the Mermaid’s Tavern. Lynn created this online folk club during the pandemic, now in its sixth year and drawing 20-30 singers monthly from North America, the UK, and Europe. Lynn serves on the Board of the New England Folk Festival Association (NEFFA) as Program Chair of the annual Festival, now in its 82nd year. NEFFA has been a regional institution since 1944 with 2000 participants, nearly 1000 of them performers, in 300 events over three days in twelve halls.
Lynn graduated with honors in Geography and Women’s Studies from Dartmouth College and earned her M.S. in Geography and Environmental Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a Research Fellow of the Dickey Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth, she wrote and edited VOYAGES: Canada’s Heritage Rivers, named Best Conservation Publication of the Year by the Natural Resources Council of America. Lynn’s first album, Crosscurrents: Sense of Place in Song and Story, received the Tree of Learning Award from the International Union on the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and she was presented with the inaugural leadership award for service to river conservation as co-chair of the first national conference of the Canadian Heritage Rivers System. As an independent scholar, Lynn works intensively and extensively with primary collections from Francis James Child and colleagues, Joanna Carver Colcord, Helen Hartness Flanders, Helen Creighton, Edith Fowke, Eloise Hubbard Linscott, Marius Barbeau, Ernest Gagnon, Edward Ermatinger, Barzaz Breizh, and more. She has been a keynote and featured performer at museums and historic sites including the Canadian Museum of History, the Smithsonian, the Franklin Institute, Old Fort William, and Mystic Seaport.
After thirty years in enterprise IT and data management, Lynn has more than a day job in tech. She has worked as a technical writer, business analyst, information and data architect, program director, and Agile project lead. She recently retired as a data governance consultant to the Fortune 50 with AIM Consulting and continues her work as a Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP) as an advisor to the Data Management Association’s DAMA Northeast chapter and a leader of their CDMP certification study group. As Vice-President of Digital Strategy at Data Blueprint, Lynn earned her MIT Sloan executive certificate in Digital Business Strategy. She holds certifications in AI governance (Collibra), business intelligence reporting (Microsoft), and User Experience (UX) design (Rutgers). This eclectic collection of credentials is no accident. Like an agile polar bear leaping across melting ice floes, Lynn survived and thrived through the turbulent early years of digital business.
In 2015, Lynn took a leap of faith. She left enterprise corporate IT to chart her own course as an independent data management consultant, taking advantage of the “future of work” as a remote knowledge worker in the digital economy. The data business was booming, but she took time to write, think, and research, reinvesting Crosscurrents research projects with a new level of rigor and polish. In the process, she joined an intergenerational women’s group that led to informal mentoring and creating the first DHC “internships” to dive down rabbitholes as Crosscurrents research assistants and social media marketing interns. This sparked an early iteration of DIY Digital that accelerated during the pandemic when everyone was trying to get on Zoom, Instagram, and Patreon. With retirement, Lynn is reframing these early projects as more formal offerings, structuring how best to be of service to the folk and heritage arts community through Digital Heritage Consulting.
A Closing Note
Twenty years from now, I want to see and hear more and different voices in a folk and heritage arts community that carries traditions forward. I want women, LGBT+ people, people of color, and yes, even old white guys to welcome and share songs and stories as strong, confident community leaders with revitalized institutions that smooth the transition across generations. I want younger musicians to give themselves the permission and self-respect to create their own artistic practices, and I want older musicians to be respected as elders and mentors but not as barriers to change. I want to leave a legacy that flows from folk tradition to digital future in a human-centered and lasting way. And I want to take the starving out of artist for the next generation, even if they have day jobs.
“Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.” (1912 Lawrence textile strike, James Oppenheim poem and Mimi Fariña song)