AMERICANARAMA!
Our live set includes songs by Bob Dylan, Old Crow Medicine Show, The Grateful Dead, Billy Strings, the Carter Family, Flatt & Scruggs, Pete Seeger, Charlie Poole, Red River Dave, Avett Brothers, Bright Eyes, White Stripes, Tom Waits, Violent Femmes, John Prine, Billy Bragg, Woody Guthrie, the Beatles, Johnny Cash, as well as choice fiddle, traditional and string band tunes.
LOCAL HISTORY SONGS
A sampling of some of the traditional and original songs in our set that pertain to Western New York history:
The Automatic Man.
Quebec-born WNY inventor Philip Perew (1862-1946) built a so-called "Frankenstein of Tonawanda" in the mid-1890s. He claimed the towering wooden automaton could be a super soldier, an advertising device, or (when equipped with a hidden phonograph) a persuasive political orator. In the end, it became a brand likeness for a hooey foot corn cure. It was reported to have walked in the opening ceremonies of Buffalo's Pan-American Exaposition in 1901.
The Burning of Buffalo.
A sweeping and sometimes darkly funny account of the horrifying events of December 1813 on the Niagara Frontier, performed in the style of an Irish jig.
E-ri-e Canal (The E-ri-e Was Risin').
This rousing number laments an imminent tragedy in its singalong chorus: "The E-ri-e was a-rising, and the gin was a-getting low!"
From Buffalo to Troy.
"Johnny Bartley used to sing [it] at the 'Alhambra Varieties' on Commercial Street, in Buffalo, in the eighteen-eighties." Harold W. Thompson's "Body, Boots & Britches" (1939)
Highway 62.
A fever dream history of Niagara Falls Boulevard and beyond, name-checking former Buffalo mayor and two-time president Grover Cleveland, McKinley assassin Leo Czolgosz, and touching on the intergenerational anguish of certain Buffalo sports disappointments that shall not be named here.
The Legend of Hannah Johnson.
A new song about an old fortuneteller, Hannah Johnson (c.1799-1883). She was born as a slave in Schenectady in the house of New York Governor Yates before being freed as part of the so-called Gradual Emancipation of New York. From about 1826 (just after the opening of the Erie canal) she lived in the town of Wheatfield, in present-day North Tonawanda, with her husband, John. It has been suggested that she assisted Blacks seeking freedom on the Underground Railroad into nearby Canada. Hannah became a part of local folklore in later generations, an occult figure that haunted the woods on North Tonawanda's southeast side.
Low Bridge! Everybody Down!
No Erie Canal repertoire would be complete without this Thomas S. Allen classic. We give it a bit of an update to a folk-punk tempo, and include all the additional verses as they appeared in the first-known sheet music of 1913 (including the refrain "fifteen years on the Erie Canal," not "fifteen miles").
The Lumbershovers' Song.
"Lumbershovers" load and unload the great quantities of lumber that arrived in the Tonawandas from the Great Lakes and was sent to the east along the Erie Canal. This song celebrates the harmony and honesty of work life on the Erie Canal. Some of its depictions were inspired by Richard Garrity's book, "Canal Boatman: My Life on Upstate Waterways" (New York State Series).
Murder at the Docks.
The Erie Canal was big business with big money at stake, and tensions could run high. On the P. W. Scribner docks in Tonawanda in 1895, they exploded into the grisly double murder of canal boat captain Lorenzo Phillips and his son Charles, as surviving daughter Flora hiding in the cabin below is left to drift towards the falls with her dead family.
O Mighty Niagara.
Many have succumbed to the deadly allure of the Niagara Falls, and its promises of fame and immortality.
O Captain, My Captain
(The Love Song of Samuel de Champlain).
(The Love Song of Samuel de Champlain).
When French explorer Samuel de Champlain met up with his young interpreter and guide Étienne Brûlé in 1615 after a four-year separation, it might have gone something like this. This gently fictionalized account "critiques colonial practices, prompting listeners to reconsider historical narratives of discovery". That's what ChatGPT says, anyway.
The Pirate, Michigan.
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White House Blues.
Traditional song about the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley at the Pan Am Exposition in Buffalo, NY.
Where Is Love?
The notorious Thayer brothers were the unfortunate subjects of the only public hanging in Buffalo, attracting virtually the entire regional population.
Zolgotz.
Another song about the McKinley assassination.
