This talk explores 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, music has played an integral role in everyday life in the region.
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.