This past weekend was the 25th annual Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival, a celebration of sea songs and America’s sailing heritage. The event spanned two days and five venues across the historic waterfront of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and invited the public in to listen as 14 musical acts performed. Also on offer were demonstrations of traditional crafts, including a comprehensive look into the function that shanties played on a working ship.
“It’s our small way of keeping the area’s maritime tradition alive,” says Harrison Woodman, a volunteer with the event. Singers traveled from several states away to perform and share in the sense of community that the festival engenders.
“This is our first time here, but we’d love to keep coming back again,” says Dan Spurr of My Druthers. The band, which is based in Connecticut, does high energy folk and maritime music with a punk flair. “We play a lot of different bars and venues, but this is a totally different vibe.”
“A lot of the appeal [of being here] is getting together with other bands who do similar music and hearing their takes on songs that we all do,” adds his bandmate John Logan. And though My Druthers has a modern energy to their renditions, there’s a variety of musical stylings present and many take a more traditional approach.
Down by the docks where Piscataqua (a “gundalow” or historic shallow drafted sailing barge) is berthed, presenters gave a lesson to a small crowd of onlookers, complete with hauling shanties and a weight raised and lowered to simulate the work that would have been done to the rhythm of these songs.
“I got into this when I was really young. I was a shantyman at the Mystic Seaport Museum when I was 18, doing demonstrations and singing,” says Johan Heupel, one of the performers responsible for educational demonstrations at Saturday’s event. Though the Mystic Seaport Museum has changed their programming away from the kinds of performances Heupel started out with, he cites their sings and festivals as the genesis point that spun off many different strands of today’s sea song culture in New England. “There aren’t a lot of places with this sort of historical backdrop where we can share the music and maritime traditions, so this festival is one of my favorites.”
He says that the original organizers of Portsmouth’s festival stayed involved for nearly two decades, but in 2019, they were getting older and had decided to let the project wane. After a Covid hiatus, it was younger members of the community who stepped in to keep the festival alive.
The event concludes with a group sing on Sunday evening where all the performers and guests got together for one final meeting on the steps of North Church. The energy was high, and it was clear that this small but dedicated community of musicians have created something special here. With any luck, these past 25 years will be just the beginning.
For more on the Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival, visit pmffest.org.
