Folk New England Archive Story

When we call ourselves New Englanders, we lay claim to traditions that stretch back across the generations and all along the landscapes we love.  Constant among these is the unbroken thread of song that binds the elements of our cultures together over the ages.  Stretching from Indian chants to lullabies, sea shanties, broadsides, folk hymns, fiddle dance tunes, ballads, blues, and ragtime all the way to the modern folk revivals, this is a living heritage that was old when the first Europeans arrived in America.  Across the long years, this legacy is still touching the hearts of young people in the 21st century at festivals, on dance floors, and wherever family and friends gather in song.

Founded in 2008 by Betsy Siggins, one of the original directors of the Club 47 and later managing director of Club Passim, and with the help of Tim Mason, of the Old Vienna Coffeehouse,  Folk New England began collecting and protecting hundreds of artifacts stretching back in time: tapes from coffee house performances and house parties, songs and photographs from folk.festivals, dances, and concerts, posters, rare vinyl records, and treasured spoken remembrances in print, audio tape, and videos. In 2011 The New England Folk Music Archives came into being as a non-profit, with Tom Curren as Chair of the Board and Brian Quinn, formerly program director of WUMB radio, as Managing Director. The collection was taken in and protected by The Cambridge Historical Society, but soon outgrew that space and had to be stored at the Watertown Armory. Progress has granted us potent new tools in technology and preservation, but time is of the essence as much of this material is subject to the vagaries of events, the deterioration of tape and paper, and the loss of memory about the times of revolution and revival when we believed that music could be at the heart of the process of building a better world. Over the years Tom Curren and a devoted group of volunteers worked to digitize and preserve as much as they could of the collection, but it became clear as the Archive kept growing that the it needed to be treated professionally and housed permanently.

In 2018 Tom Curren began discussions with Robert Cox, Curator of Special Collections at the W.E.B. DuBois Library at UMass/Amherst. The focus of the collections was that they related to social movements in New England over time. The history of the folk revival fit that vision perfectly, and a process was started to bring the Folk New England Archive into the Special Collections at UMass/Amherst. All was going smoothly until Rob Cox was diagnosed with cancer and passed away in a very short time. He was replaced by Aaron Rubinstein, but almost immediately COVID struck and, for all intents and purposes the Library was closed for nearly two years. During that time Tom Curren continued to sort and digitize material and helped secure major collections from Jim Kweskin and Tom Rush.

In December of 2023 Tom Curren suddenly died just as he had started finalizing the agreement with UMass Amherst to donate the Folk New England Archive to the newly named Robert Cox Special Collections at UMass Amherst. Brian Quinn and the Board of FNE asked Jim Rooney to step in as Interim Chair of the Board and complete the transfer. This endeavor ensures that our treasured recordings, photographs, papers and ephemera will be digitized and professionally archived, to be available to scholars and interested parties for future generations. We encourage you to visit the FNE Collections @ UMass Amherst: http://scua.library.umass.edu/tag/fne/