Collecting area: Performing arts

Founded by Betsy Siggins in 2009, Folk New England’s mission is to document, preserve, interpret and present the ongoing cultural legacy of folk music in all its forms, with emphasis on New England’s contribution to the enrichment of North American life. The organization continues a dialogue between New England’s distinct folk music heritage and its future, through the establishment of a regional folk music archive, robust collections development and access, multi-disciplinary outreach and education, and engaging entertainment programs for the public.

The Folk New England collections document the folk music scene, broadly construed, with an emphasis on the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s to the present. Although the performers and music are central, the growing array of collections also documents producers, venues, photographers, and others involved in the scene.

View all FNE collections

An East German actor, writer, and film director, and an insightful analyst of German culture and film history, Jörg Foth was born in Berlin on Oct. 31, 1949. After completing military service and working briefly in television, Foth entered the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen „Konrad Wolf“ in Postdam, graduating in 1977. During his long ascent through the East German film system, he worked as an assistant director at the DEFA Studio and in GDR television and collaborated with Ulrich Weiss and others. His directorial debut came in 1984 with the children’s film Das Eismeer Ruft, however it was another six years before he was permitted to direct his second film, Biologie!, the only DEFA feature ever to deal with environmental issues. A few months after he was promoted to Director, the East German political system collapsed and the DEFA studios were closed. Foth has since worked as a freelance director and writer for both film and television.

The Foth collection provides unique insight into East German cinema; the diverse career of a noted writer, director, and actor; and more generally, the shifting artistic environment during the last years of the DDR. Along with writing and research materials from many of Foth’s films, the collection includes a range of writing, ephemera, and on topics ranging from film theory, the theater, and literature to Marx, Stalin, and Lenin.

A professor of English at UMass Amherst, James A. Freeman is a scholar of seventeenth century British literature who has compiled an impressively eclectic array of publications and research projects. Educated at Amherst College (AB 1956) and the University of Minnesota (PhD 1968), Freeman joined the faculty in the English Department at UMass shortly after completing his doctorate. He has published on topics ranging from Latin and Greek poets to Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Tennyson, James Agee, Donald Duck, 17th century regicides, and 1930s radio. He has also served as a regular contributor and editor for the Association for Gravestone Studies Quarterly.
The Freeman collection consists of many hundreds of cassette tapes of radio broadcasts from the 1930s through early 1950s, reflecting the culture of commercial radio during its golden age. The collection includes representatives of most of the major genres, including comedy, drama, suspense and mystery, soap operas, and westerns. There is some depth popular programs such as Amos and Andy, the Great Gildersleeve, Philip Marlowe, and Nero Wolfe, but the collection also includes less common and short-lived shows.

Raised in suburban Boston, Charlie Frizzell became a well-known photographer of the music scene during the height of the folk revival of the early 1960s. At the age of 14, Frizzell took up photography after landing his first job at a camera shop, and he developed his talents under the mentorship of a local commerical photographer, Bob O’Shaughnessy. As a regular at Club 47 in Cambridge, Frizzell photographed the most popular performers of the era, from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Geoff and Maria Muldaur and Jim Kweskin. He left Massachusetts in the late 1960s for Berkeley, Calif., and according to folklorist Millie Rahn, created a sort of conduit between the music scenes in Berkeley and Cambridge. Frizzell died in Berkeley on May 29, 2004, following complications from a liver transplant.

Dating primarily from the mid-1960s, the collection includes approximately 50 prints and some negatives from Charlie Frizzell, including images of Jim Kweskin, Maria Muldaur, Bob Siggins, and Bonnie Dobson, along with images of performances at Newport Folk Festival.

Co-founded by Charles Light and Daniel Keller, Green Mountain Post Films has produced and distributed films for more than twenty-five years. Their first documentary film released in 1975, Lovejoy’s Nuclear War, was one of the first films to question the nuclear energy policy of the United States. Since then GMP Films has continued to produce movies that explore social issues, and their films have been used as educational and organizational tools for activists working on peace, veteran, nuclear, environmental and other related issues.

The collection contains hundreds of film and video elements (masters, release prints, negatives, dailies, work prints, outtakes, mag tracks, audio) of several GMP projects. In addition there are several boxes of administrative files consisting of research files, correspondence, and proposals relating to film projects either produced or under consideration. There is also an assortment of alternative press publications from the 1960s-1970s.

Born in 1944 and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Mitch Greenhill was a regular at Club 47, first performing there in 1961. Growing up, he was exposed to the music of a wide range of folk legends who his father, Manny Greenhill, produced, including Rev. Gary Davis, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, and many others. These experiences formed the basis for his book Raised by Musical Mavericks. As a musician, Greenhill recorded two albums for Prestige, which were reissued on a Fantasy twofer titled Shepherd of the City Blues; and three later collaborations with Mayne Smith, with whom he spent a number of years in the band The Frontier. Their work as a duo included tours of Britain and Italy, as well as festivals and concerts in North America. He also worked as a session musician for Rosalie Sorrels, Jack Elliott, and a number of film and television projects. In 1976, Greenhill joined the family business, Folklore Production (now FLi), which he now runs as president, along with his son Matt. The company has represented the likes of Doc Watson, Taj Mahal, The Klezmatics, and Lúnasa, among many others. It publishes compositions by Joan Baez, John Fahey, Rev. Gary Davis, Jesse Fuller and others; these include songs recorded by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead.

The collection includes five scrapbooks featuring news clippings, photographs, and flyers documenting key figures in folk music history, such as Doc Watson and Rev. Gary Davis, as well as letters to Greenhill’s father, Manny Greenhill, who founded Folklore Productions in 1957.

While in college, Tommy Hadges expected to become a dentist. After graduating with a Biology degree from Tufts University, he attended Harvard Dental School for 18 months, but discovered that his calling wasn’t in dentistry, it was in radio. While at Tufts, Hadges was involved in resurrecting Tufts’ campus station WTUR, & also worked at the MIT student-run broadcast radio station WTBS. Still an undergraduate, Hadges was recruited by Ray Riepen in 1968 to be among the first DJs (along with along with fellow WTUR announcers Joe Rogers & J.J. Jackson) at WBCN, Riepen’s experiment to bring freeform, rock radio to Boston. WBCN was a massive and groundbreaking success, and after 2 years splitting school with part-time announcing at WBCN, Hadges returned to the station in 1970 to be a full time announcer. Hadges was promoted to Program Director at WBCN in 1977 and then left to become Program Director for neighboring WCOZ in 1978. Hadges gathered significant experience in commercial radio at WCOZ and later at Los Angeles’ KLOS, where he doubled the station’s ratings. This experience positioned him to become a consultant with Pollack Media Group, eventually becoming President & spending several decades helping grow the consultancy into a major international business, serving as a radio producer for international broadcasts (including the Live Aid, Live 8 and Live Earth concerts) and helping new stations build technical infrastructure. Hadges retired from Pollack Media Group in 2018.

The Tommy Hadges Papers document his years at WBCN in Boston, and includes photographs — some of the only depicting WBCN’s Stuart Street location, ephemera, and promotional materials.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

An actor and motion picture assistant director and producer, Michael Haley was born in Pittsfield, Mass., in 1942. While an undergraduate student at UMass Amherst, Haley became involved in theater, joining the avant garde Buffalo Meat Company that performed original works in Massachusetts and New York City. Following a chance call from a producer looking for local help in 1969, Haley worked on his first film, the low-budget crime drama Honeymoon Killers. After work on several other film and television productions, Haley was among ten people selected for the Directors Guild of America’s Assistant Directors Training Program. During his forty year career, Haley’s credits have included work with a number of noted directors, including Sidney Lumet, Barry Levinson, and Penny Marshall, and he has enjoyed a particularly long and productive association with Mike Nichols. His films have included The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Stepford Wives, Biloxi Blues, True Colors, A League of Their Own, Groundhog Day, Primary Colors, and Closer. He was the recipient of two Humanitas Prizes (for Wit and Angels in America), and among others awards, the Christopher Award (for Wit), the Directors Guild of America award, Producers Guild of America award, and an Emmy (for Angels in America), a Directors Guild of America plaque (Working Girl), and the Berkshire International Film Festival Life-Time Achievement Award. He was named Artist of the Year at UMass and has been selected for a Bateman Fellowship.

Reflecting a diverse career in film, the Haley collection consists of scripts, photographs, memorabilia, and diaries, with a small quantity of notes and correspondence. The scripts, approximately 110 of them, are from films ranging from The Godfather Part II to Charlie Wilson’s War and Angels in America, may include several drafts. The photographs are both numerous and particularly rich, including some particularly interesting candid shots taken on film sets, as well as official shots taken by photographers such as Mary Ellen Mark.

A multi-talented performer, the African American expatriate Gordon Heath was variously a stage and film actor, musician, director, producer, founder of the Studio Theater of Paris, and co-owner of the Parisian nightclub L’Abbaye. Born in New York City, Heath became involved in acting as a teenager and enjoyed a career that spanned post-World War II Broadway to the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s. In addition to his many roles on film and stage, he and his partner Lee Payant enjoyed success as recording artists in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Heath collection includes personal and professional correspondence, scrapbooks containing photos and clippings from assorted television and film productions in addition to songs, poetry, and reviews of plays or playbills from productions he attended. The Papers also contain art work, sheet music, personal and production photographs, and drafts of his memoirs.

Professor of Physical Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when it was known as Massachusetts Agricultural College who established the physical education program for women and helped to create the women’s gymnasium and athletic field. In her retirement she composed music that was performed by the University of Arizona orchestra.

Includes musical scores, lesson-plan photographs illustrating instruction in modern dance, correspondence, printed programs for performance of the musical compositions, text of an address, a history of physical education for women at Massachusetts State College by Mrs. Hicks, personnel records, and brief biographical items.

View the online collection