Week 6: Planning a Listening Party
Shortly after I began combing through the Farm Series Collection in the Vermont Folklife Archive to create keywords, my supervisor and VT Folklife Director of Education, Mary Wesley, and I had set an additional goal of selecting excerpts from the recordings to synthesize into bite-sized media. While I was listening through hours of recorded interviews, I kept an ear out and marked down timestamps for particularly interesting or representative moments of the collection. There were nearly endless possibilities with the interesting, funny, or bizarre things the interviewees spoke about. The challenge for me came when we settled on the idea of having a “listening party” where we would take a selection of these clips and make them into a playlist for public enjoyment. Having a group of funny and/or interesting clips was great, but we needed to make a playlist for the listening party that was cohesive, one that told a story with intention. To make this listening party happen, we needed not just a theme, but also soundbites that, out of context, could stand on their own in order to reduce the need for drawn-out context or explanations.
The listening party will be a collaboration between the other summer intern, Anita (who is also helping to process the Farm Series), and myself. Anita and I met to go over what we had collected and put into writing what we wanted the theme of this listening party to be. We decided a few things:
That the majority of what we had listened to had been recorded in the central Vermont region, particularly Washington and Orange counties, so we wanted to host our listening party in a place where the community ties to those interviewed would be strongest.
That over and over we heard themes of community being vital to small farmers, both for socialization but also for mutual aid.
That many of the farmers interviewed commented on changes over time for the good and the bad. While some of the interviewees reminisced about the past, we wanted to avoid presenting that under the trope of “the good old days” because, in truth, the farmers had many good and/or nuanced things to say about the changes that have taken place in their communities over time.
With some themes picked, we were ready to narrow down our search for sound bites and sort through what we had already collected. One last detail to sort out was the location to host our event. With the help of Mary, we were able to secure the Middle Branch Grange in East Bethel for mid-July. This location was a great fit for our purposes not only because it was central to the homeplaces of many of the interviewees, but also because granges have played an important role in farming communities over the years. Granges historically served as meeting places for those looking to represent the interests of agricultural communities in state and local affairs. They also served as community gathering places for leisure and entertainment. Today, farms are fewer in number, and the role of the grange is adapting and changing to serve communities' modern needs. Some granges have gone under as membership has dwindled, but the Middle Branch Grange is a great example of adaptability over time that so many of the farmers in this series have demonstrated.
Event Poster for our Listening Party
