By Michaela Cavallaro
From our October 2024 issue
Penobscot Nation musician and fashion designer Jason Brown stands with his back to the Bangor Symphony Orchestra and 138 choral singers in an iridescent, floor-length vest he and his wife, Donna Decontie-Brown, made of stiff silk. It rustles faintly as he moves, accompanied by the tinkling of the glass beads and metal balls that adorn the garment. Wearing a wireless mic and gesturing with an eagle-wing fan, Brown, who performs as Firefly, sings in Penobscot in the first collaboration between a Wabanaki person and the Bangor Symphony Orchestra in the organization’s 128-year history.
But that 2023 concert, playing on video in the Music in Maine exhibition at the Maine Historical Society, in Portland, isn’t the first time a Wabanaki artist has performed orchestral music for a large audience. A century earlier, mezzo-soprano Lucy Nicolar Poolaw, a Penobscot woman who went by the stage name Princess Watahwaso, traveled across the country as a professional singer, blending arias with native songs. A large black-and-white exhibit photo depicts Nicolar in a headdress and buckskin dress endemic to Plains tribes, which she wore to conform with 20th-century stereotypes of what indigenous people looked like.
In the “Play” section of the exhibit, which explores Maine’s live-performance traditions, Brown and Nicolar, along with a mannequin donning Brown’s luminous, crinkly vest, appear alongside photographs of international opera star and Farmington native Lillian Nordica, in various elaborate costumes and lacy gowns, and enlarged contact-sheet images of The Same Band, a punk group that formed in Brunswick in the late ’70s. The “Hear” section tells stories of recorded music, showcasing a banjo by renowned Topsham luthier Jimmy Cox, photos and memorabilia from the ’60s-era Dave Astor Show, a homegrown version of American Bandstand, and late- ’60s and early-’70s records by the cantor at a Portland synagogue. Around the corner, a carved Passamaquoddy rattle, a 1911 violin crafted from wood from a collapsed Bangor bridge, and an electric guitar signed by legendary blues guitarist Buddy Guy for Paul Benjamin, organizer of Rockland’s North Atlantic Blues Festival, are among the artifacts that constitute the “Make” section, dedicated to Maine-made instruments and people who played or promoted music in their homes and communities.
Clockwise from top left: Dick Curless record, 1965; Civil War drum, 1861; Passamaquoddy rattle, Pete Moore, 2018. Photos courtesy of the collections of Maine Historical Society/mainememory.net
“I was happily surprised at all the different musical movements in Maine and how polar opposite they are,” says curator Tilly Laskey, who spent two and a half years developing the exhibit with 18 collaborators from across the state, who contributed written accounts and artifacts. In addition to Brown, they include Portland musician Robert Sylvain, who wrote about translating the Acadian folk songs in his grandmother’s notebook from French to English, and retired journalist and historian Bob Greene, of South Portland, who loaned a 1925 photo of The Katahdin Mountaineers, an interracial country band that performed at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was active in Maine.
MHS invested in a handful of motion-activated speakers that are scattered throughout the exhibit. Step in front of a placard with a short essay by Penobscot Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Chris Sockalexis and you’ll hear powwow singing by his group, The RezDogs. Stop to contemplate a pair of deep-turquoise cowboy boots with “LONE PINE” emblazoned in red across the front and Fort Fairfield native Dick Curless’s smooth baritone will croon “A Tombstone Every Mile.” On loan from the Maine Country Music Hall of Fame, the footwear belonged to Old Town native Harold Breau, who was part of an explosion of country and bluegrass music in Maine starting in the 1930s. Performing as Hal Lone Pine, Breau fronted the Lone Pine Mountaineers with his wife, Auburn’s Rita Cote (who performed as Betty Cody).
More than a century before Breau and Cote were dominating Maine’s country charts, Portland poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow carried a boxwood-and-ebony flute, displayed under glass in the exhibit’s “Hear” section, on a walking tour of Europe. “He said he used it when he was going into a town because people were more likely to connect with him if he was playing music than if he was just some random guy,” Laskey says. “That’s what music does — it connects us.”
Music in Maine is on view through Dec. 31, 2024. 489 Congress St., Portland. 207-774-1822.
