Work and music subject of museum lecture
Courtesy photo (From left) Janet Humphrey, Mary Hartman and Michelle Cameron will talk and sing about the history of songs about work Thursday at the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center.
MOSES LAKE — Work, and how work affected (and still affects) the music people sang and played, will be the subject of a lecture, with musical accompaniment, at the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center.
“Bandannas to Badges: Songs and Stories of Northwest Workers” is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, featuring the Tri-Cities folk group Trillium-239. Admission is free.
The trio of Mary Hartman, Janet Humphrey and Michelle Cameron have been playing and writing folk music, together and separately, for about 12 years. Their music combines guitar (Humphrey and Hartman), banjo (Hartman), percussion (Humphrey) and cello (Cameron).
“Real people and real experiences are the foundation of folk music,” the ladies wrote in a press release from the museum.
“Songs change as people’s experiences change,” Hartman wrote. She cited the example of an Irish dance tune borrowed and set to new words to tell the stories of American pioneers. A 19th-cCentury Washington pioneer rewrote it to describe his attempts at farming and mining – which, alas, didn’t work out – and how he ended up in Puget Sound “happily surrounded by ‘acres of clams.’ Even the personality of a singer can change a song.”
While work was different from place to place, work everywhere had certain things in common, good and bad, Hartman said. “Music became a powerful force of unity during the development of labor unions in the early 20th century.”
History, and even modern work, inspire modern folk songs. The trio performs songs by contemporary writers about work in World War II, including one about the early days at the Hanford nuclear facility. The lecture includes a song about working a modern West Coast tugboat written by a contemporary writer, Hartman said. “Our last song will be a modern tech workers computer coding shanty. We can’t let the sailors have all the good songs.”
Trillium-239 takes its logo and name from the flowers of the trillium plant – each flower has three petals – and the plutonium isotope traditionally produced at Hanford. The group performs original music as well as classic and contemporary songs.
The trio is a side gig for its members. By profession Hartman is a hydrologist and Cameron a nuclear chemist; Humphrey is an “internet forum moderator.”
Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinheraldcom.