PLYMOUTH NOTCH, Vt. – The President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site hosts this season’s first Grace Coolidge Musicale Sunday, Sept. 12 at 2 p.m. The concert will be held in the Union Christian Church and is free; donations are welcome.
The program features old-time fiddler Adam Boyce and pianist Sue Hunt, who will perform “The Roaring Twenties, and Then Some! A Musical Walk Down Memory Lane.” The duo specializes in music popular in rural Vermont in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The program includes numbers played by the Plymouth Old Time Dance Orchestra, which went on a national tour in 1926 culminating at the Coolidge White House.
Adam Boyce has been playing the fiddle for nearly 30 years and is a student of the legendary Harold “Chuck” Luce of Chelsea, Vt. His repertoire includes traditional jigs, reels, and hornpipes of early New England-style dancing, as well as older popular music, Tin Pan Alley, early country-western songs, church hymns, and his own original compositions. Boyce has been a regular performer at Coolidge Site events since 1999.
Sue Hunt has been fascinated by New England traditional dancing and music since she was in elementary school. Influenced by dance callers Ralph Page, Dudley Laufman, and Duke Miller, she plays piano and accordion regularly in New Hampshire and Vermont for public dances and private events, and also calls square and contra dances for reunions, weddings, and other gatherings.
The Grace Coolidge Musicales are organized by the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation and generously sponsored by the Alma Gibbs Donchian Foundation. The second and final musicale is scheduled for Oct. 3. This second program also has a decidedly 1920s theme to coincide with the centennial of that dynamic decade and the Coolidge Site’s new exhibit, “The Roaring Twenties: Fashions, Fads, and All That Jazz!” For further information, call 802-672-3773 or visit our website, www.HistoricSites.Vermont.gov.
The President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site is open Tuesday through Sunday until Oct. 17, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For further information and event listings, visit us online at www.historicsites.vermont.gov and on Facebook at Vermont State Historic Sites.