Traditional Arts Spotlight: Pete Sutherland and Emmett Stowell - "The Old Boom Chuck"
Master Artist: Pete Sutherland
Apprentice: Emmett Stowell
Traditional Art: New England Contra Dance Piano
The 2020-2021 ‘cohort’ of the Vermont Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program includes 13 collaborations between master artists and apprentices who are working together, in the face of the pandemic, to keep traditional cultural expressions vital and relevant to the communities that practice them. With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and a longstanding partnership with the Vermont Arts Council, the Vermont Folklife Center initiated this program in 1992 to support the continued vitality of Vermont's living cultural heritage. In this ongoing series of Field Notes we’ll introduce you to some of this year’s program participants and the traditional art forms they practice.
This note features text and audio excerpts from two virtual “site visits” with Pete and Emmett recorded via Zoom last spring and this winter. A site visit offers a chance for artists and apprentices to reflect on and make a record of their work together as well as a chance to build and maintain a relationship with VFC staff (this has felt particularly important during the pandemic). The VFC has been documenting the work of participants in the Apprenticeship Program since its inception. These interviews and audio-visual records are part of an ongoing collection in the Center’s archive centered around traditional arts, music, and trades.
The Old Boom Chuck
““I broke a banjo string, that’s how it all started!” ”
“I broke a banjo string, that’s how it all started!” This is Emmett’s description of how he came to sit down at a piano to learn how to play chords and rhythm to back up traditional contra dance tunes. Contra dance is part of the New England tradition of social dances with mixed origins from Great Britain, Ireland, France and North America, and is paired with tunes of the same origin usually played on melody instruments, most commonly the fiddle. As Pete says, “the basic purpose of contra dance piano is rhythm-keeping.” Think of a hall full of couples in long lines trying to dance together. Chords played on the piano with a strong and consistent rhythm—what Pete calls “the old boom-chuck,”—help keep the dancers connected to each other and the music.
Emmett and Pete
Emmett had been studying banjo with Pete for a couple of years before that string broke and Pete asked if he wanted to try some piano to fill up the rest of their lesson time. “Because Emmett’s a good banjo player with a particularly strong right-hand rhythm hand, rhythmically he started at a higher place to assimilate” to this style of dance accompaniment. Though Emmett still plays the banjo, he and Pete are in their second year of the Vermont Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, focusing their attention on learning the old boom-chuck.
Pete Sutherland
Pete is a living legend of the traditional music and dance scene in Vermont, and is nationally recognized as a musician, composer, visual artist, writer, and storyteller (hear Pete’s musings on the covid era in Episode 17 of the VFC’s podcast, VT Untapped). Pete describes his musical background starting as a youngster:
Pete Sutherland: I was a piano kid, so I took classical lessons when I was Emmett's age. And then I played in a rock band in high school and I realized I could play by ear and I could start hearing chords and imitating them. So I've been interested in chords ever since. And when I started playing fiddle and banjo, late college, I wasn't actually actively playing piano at all.
It kind of came back later when I started going to contra dances, I noticed that piano was part of the game and seemed really dead simple to me because I'd been listening to sort of jazzy pop music and stuff. But somewhere along the line, it really took hold because I was a banjo player as well. So I brought the same thing to the game that he's [Emmett] bringing to the game, which is rhythm that I was already practicing and hopefully getting pretty good at.
And so I think it kind of grew organically like that and then the harmonic stuff and all the moving lines... I've been drawing in from all kinds of places. I've been playing guitar since I was 12 and learned how to do bass runs. So I hear them in my head. I have them in my guitar. And then my left hand on the piano kind of finds them. So that's part of the game that I bring to Emmett. I try to turn him into listening for that.
Listen to Emmett and Pete talk about running bass lines and the relationship between the right and left hands when playing dance accompaniment on the piano:
Why contra dance?
Central to the Apprenticeship program is that the instruction addresses not only the skills and techniques of the art form being taught, but also its meaning and function within the communities in which it is practiced. Pre-Covid-19 this would mean Emmett would be attending contra dances, sitting on stage with Pete to listen to the band and watch the dancers, and/or playing piano himself. In the era of Covid this level of in-person immersion is not possible, but Pete and Emmett are still making time to talk about what the contra dance and dance music means to the people who practice and care about the tradition.
Emmett Stowell: A long time ago everybody would just like go to the town hall...it was like the socializing of the community because everybody was working, but then they would go to dances every week, and I think that's kind of still true today that it really brings people together.
Pete Sutherland: Totally has been true in recent times. Right now there’s no dancing, no dancing for obvious reasons. But up until a couple months ago, it was definitely exactly as you describe, and people doing all kinds of different work too, you know, it wasn't necessarily old style like barn raising, farmers come in right out of the barn or anything like that….I was just thinking about it this morning, actually, the reasons why we need it have not changed. Really, our lifestyles have changed, but the reasons why it's so valuable have not changed at all. That's my thought. Anyway.
Mary Wesley: What are the reasons that we need social dancing?
Emmett Stowell: Because it’s fun! And I think it's really good for people to...not worry about being cool or being professional and just...go for a dance.
Mary Wesley: And what is the role of the piano player in this scene?
Emmett Stowell: Keeps the rhythm. Because it's really important in a dance to have a real good rhythm because if you mess it up, then the dancers are kind of like, ‘Woah, what happened?’ You can definitely tell when you're dancing. You can definitely tell when the rhythm goes a little bit faster, a little bit slower...and a piano is pretty good for keeping that nice rhythm.
Pete Sutherland: Makes all the difference. You could have the best fiddler in the world and if you got a piano player, or any backup player that's not doing their job, it's not going to be something that people are going to find joy to dance to at all.
More from Emmett
Emmett plays at a jam at the Dance Flurry in Saratoga Springs, NY. February, 2020.
You can also see Emmett and his older sister, Fiona, being interviewed and playing an online concert hosted by the local arts non-profit Young Tradition Vermont: Watch here.
Thank you Pete and Emmett for sharing your work with us!