The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum presents a music history double feature
on Sunday afternoon, September 27, 2026, with a talk by musicologist Poe M. Allphin on the
musical histories at Forty Acres and in the PPH collection, followed by a concert with
Grammy-nominated ethnomusicologist, experimentalist, and legend in folk music, Tim Eriksen.

Poe M. Allphin’s talk, featuring music by Tim Eriksen, will be held in the Corn Barn at 1 p.m.,
and Tim Eriksen’s concert will take place in the Sunken Garden at 3 p.m.

This double feature combines scholarship and performance to explore the region’s music history,
unearthing sonic cultures of the Connecticut River Valley and New England through the material
collections at PPH, as well as through popular secular and sacred tunes of the past and present.
From the psalm tunes sung by Elizabeth Porter Phelps as a young woman and still sung today at
local shape note sings, to the history of the “guitar” played by three generations and on view at
Forty Acres today, Eriksen and Allphin’s performance and research reveals the integral role of
music in everyday life in the region, in the past as in the present.

Poe M. Allphin is a Research Fellow at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, where he is
working on a multigenerational history of music in the Porter-Phelps-Huntington family and at
Forty Acres. He received his PhD in historical musicology from the CUNY Graduate Center.
Allphin’s scholarship, which appears in Resonance and Contemporary Music Review, has
previously been supported by the New England Research Fellowship Consortium and the Center
for the Humanities at CUNY.

Tim Eriksen’s music springs from fierce curiosity and radical exploration, and he is best known
as a pioneer of post punk American folk song. He received a PhD in ethnomusicology from
Wesleyan University in 2015 and has published related work on early New England music in
connection with 19th-century Abolitionism, apocalyptic religion, technology, and the birth of
science fiction. He has crafted his own distinctive, hardcore Americana sound that combines
thrilling vocals, banjo, fiddle, guitar, and bajo sexto–a Mexican acoustic bass. Using this sound,
Eriksen has transformed the American folk tradition with his unmatched interpretations of love
songs, ballads, shape-note gospel, and dance tunes from both New England and Southern
Appalachia. Along with his extensive performance career, Eriksen is a prolific educator and
regularly teaches workshops on American music history, shape-note harmony, ballad singing,
and instrumental accompaniment. Eriksen is also the founder of the world’s largest Sacred Harp
singing convention in Northampton, MA: the Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Convention.
Above all, Eriksen’s work, in both performance and education, is an investigation into the human
experience and an unapologetic expression of its truths.

The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum is located at 130 River Drive, Route 47, Hadley, MA 01035.
The research talk is free. Concert admission is $12, $2 for children 16 and under. The museum and its grounds are a smoke-free
site. For further information please call (413) 584-4699 or view www.pphmuseum.org.

The Porter-Phelps Huntington Museum sits on ancestral Nonotuck lands. The House was built
in 1752 by Moses and Elizabeth Porter and was central to the 600-acre farmstead known as
“Forty Acres.” Today, the 114 acre property is “Forty Acres and Its Skirts”, a National Register
of Historic Places district that includes the PPH museum and homestead, and neighboring Phelps
farm, surrounded by protected farmland, forest, and river frontage. The Museum contains a
collection of the belongings of seven generations of one extended Hadley family, and portrays
the activities of family members, enslaved people, artisans, household servants, and farm
laborers who made "Forty Acres" an important social and commercial link in local, regional and
national cultural and economic networks. The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Family Papers, one of
the largest collections of family papers in the country, are now housed at Special Collections &
University Archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum is located at 130 River Drive, Hadley, MA, on Route 47
just two miles north of the junction of Routes 9 and 47 North in Hadley. (413) 584-4699
www.pphmuseum.org