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The Mammals
The Mammals are a contemporary folk rock band based in the Hudson Valley area of New York, in the United States. The band tours internationally and consists of founding members and principal songwriters Mike Merenda (guitar, banjo) and Ruth Ungar (fiddle, guitar) plus Konrad Meissner (drums) and a rotating cast of players on bass, organ, and pedal steel. The Mammals sing and play in a style heavily influenced by traditional folk, soul, old-time, blues, Cajun, Celtic and rock and roll. Their lyrics sometimes address political and environmental concerns; topics such as war, social justice, and sustainability. Ungar is the daughter of fiddler/composer Jay Ungar who is best known for his composition ''Ashokan Farewell'' which the band also performs. Band history Merenda, Ungar and Tao Rodríguez-Seeger formed The Mammals in 2001. Initially a quartet with Alicia Jo Rabins on the fiddle /sup> they quickly shifted to a trio with Ungar as the sole fiddler. In 2004, they beca ...
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Woodstock (town), New York
Woodstock is a town in Ulster County, New York, United States, in the northern part of the county, northwest of Kingston, NY. It lies within the borders of the Catskill Park. The population was 5,884 at the 2010 census, down from 6,241 in 2000. History The first non-indigenous settler arrived around 1770, and the town of Woodstock was established in 1787. Later, territory from Woodstock was contributed to form the towns of Middletown (1789), Windham (1798), Shandaken (1804), and Olive (1853). Woodstock played host to numerous Hudson River School painters during the late 1800s. The Arts and Crafts Movement came to Woodstock in 1902, with the arrival of Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Bolton Brown and Hervey White, who formed the Byrdcliffe Colony. In 1906, L. Birge Harrison and others founded the Summer School of the Art Students League of New York in the area, primarily for landscape painting. Ever since, Woodstock has been considered an active artists colony. From 1915 thro ...
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Crooked Still
Crooked Still is an American band consisting of vocalist Aoife O'Donovan, banjo player Gregory Liszt, bassist Corey DiMario, cellist Tristan Clarridge and fiddler Brittany Haas. They are known for their high energy, technical skill, unusual instrumentation, and innovative acoustic style. The string band's style has been described as progressive bluegrass, folk-country, and Americana. O'Donovan states that the band is playing its "own sort of continuation" on the bluegrass tradition that began in the U.S. with Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin. History 2001–2008 O'Donovan and DiMario met at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts in the spring of 2001. Former member Rushad Eggleston, who was studying cello at Berklee College of Music, and Liszt, a graduate student at MIT, were playing music together around the same time, and when the four met that summer, they formed a band that became Crooked Still. While its members finished school, the group played v ...
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Cajun Music
Cajun music (french: Musique cadienne), an emblematic music of Louisiana played by the Cajuns, is rooted in the ballads of the French-speaking Acadians of Canada. Although they are two separate genres, Cajun music is often mentioned in tandem with the Creole-based zydeco music. Both are from southwest Louisiana and share French and African origins. These French Louisiana sounds have influenced American popular music for many decades, especially country music, and have influenced pop culture through mass media, such as television commercials. Musical theory Cajun music is relatively catchy with an infectious beat and a lot of forward drive, placing the accordion at the center. The accordionist gives the vocal melody greater energy by repeating most notes. Besides the voices, only two melodic instruments are heard, the accordion and fiddle, but usually in the background can also be heard the high, clear tones of a metal triangle. The harmonies of Cajun music are simple and the m ...
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Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern (the blues scale and specific chord progressions) of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current str ...
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Soul Music
Soul music is a popular music genre that originated in the African American community throughout the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It has its roots in African-American gospel music and rhythm and blues. Soul music became popular for dancing and listening, where U.S. record labels such as Motown, Atlantic and Stax were influential during the Civil Rights Movement. Soul also became popular around the world, directly influencing rock music and the music of Africa. It also had a resurgence with artists like Erykah Badu under the genre neo-soul. Catchy rhythms, stressed by handclaps and extemporaneous body moves, are an important feature of soul music. Other characteristics are a call and response between the lead vocalist and the chorus and an especially tense vocal sound. The style also occasionally uses improvisational additions, twirls, and auxiliary sounds. Soul music reflects the African-American identity, and it stresses the importance of an African-Ameri ...
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Folk Music
Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted orally, music with unknown composers, music that is played on traditional instruments, music about cultural or national identity, music that changes between generations (folk process), music associated with a people's folklore, or music performed by custom over a long period of time. It has been contrasted with commercial and classical styles. The term originated in the 19th century, but folk music extends beyond that. Starting in the mid-20th century, a new form of popular folk music evolved from traditional folk music. This process and period is called the (second) folk revival and reached a zenith in the 1960s. This form of music is sometimes called contemporary folk music or folk rev ...
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United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo-Americ ...
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New York (state)
New York, officially the State of New York, is a state in the Northeastern United States. It is often called New York State to distinguish it from its largest city, New York City. With a total area of , New York is the 27th-largest U.S. state by area. With 20.2 million people, it is the fourth-most-populous state in the United States as of 2021, with approximately 44% living in New York City, including 25% of the state's population within Brooklyn and Queens, and another 15% on the remainder of Long Island, the most populous island in the United States. The state is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to the east; it has a maritime border with Rhode Island, east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the north and Ontario to the northwest. New York City (NYC) is the most populous city in the United States, and around two-thirds of the state's popul ...
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Hudson Valley
The Hudson Valley (also known as the Hudson River Valley) comprises the valley of the Hudson River and its adjacent communities in the U.S. state of New York. The region stretches from the Capital District including Albany and Troy south to Yonkers in Westchester County, bordering New York City. History Pre-Columbian era The Hudson Valley was inhabited by indigenous peoples ages before Europeans arrived. The Lenape, Wappinger, and Mahican branches of the Algonquins lived along the river, mostly in peace with the other groups. The lower Hudson River was inhabited by the Lenape, The Lenape people waited for the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano onshore, traded with Henry Hudson, and sold the island of Manhattan. Further north, the Wappingers lived from Manhattan Island up to Poughkeepsie. They lived a similar lifestyle to the Lenape, residing in various villages along the river. They traded with both the Lenape to the south and the Mahicans to the north. The Mahicans lived ...
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Alicia Jo Rabins
Alicia Jo Rabins is a performer, musician, singer, composer, poet, writer, and Jewish scholar. She lives in Portland, Oregon, in the United States. Her use of language and words is central to her work: "Words may be the closest we get to immortality as humans. Death has no power over those words. Geography has no power over them. They transmit something beyond any one, or any community's, lifetime." She played violin for eight years in the rock-klezmer band Golem. Biography She got her B.A. in English and creative writing at Barnard College, received an M.F.A. in poetry from Warren Wilson College, an M.A. in Jewish gender and women's studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and studied for two years at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. During the Fall 2016 session, she taught a course, "Arts and Jewish Experience: Exploring Diverse American Identities through Art", at Portland State University. In 2014, Rabins performed "A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff". She ...
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Tao Rodríguez-Seeger
Tao Rodríguez-Seeger (born 1972) is an American contemporary folk musician. A founder of The Mammals, he is the grandson of folk musician Pete Seeger. He plays banjo, guitar, harmonica and sings in English and Spanish. Biography Rodríguez-Seeger is the son of Mika Seeger and Emilio Rodríguez, a Puerto Rican filmmaker. After his father was invited by the Sandinistas to document the nation's civil war, Seeger spent nine years of his childhood in Nicaragua. In 1986, Rodríguez-Seeger started performing with his grandfather, Pete Seeger. In 1999 he was a member of the band RIG, with Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion. In 2001, he founded The Mammals with Michael Merenda and Ruth Ungar. In 2006 he recorded an album, ''¡Que vaya bien!'', with Puerto Rican folk singers Roy Brown and Tito Auger of the Puerto Rican rock band Fiel a la vega and he formed the Anarchist Orchestra (now known as the Tao Rodriguez-Seeger band) with Jacob Silver, also of the Mammals, Laura Cortese and ...
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Ken Maiuri
Kenneth Maiuri is an American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Florence, Massachusetts. Since early 2016, he has been the keyboardist for The B-52's. He has played in numerous other bands, such as Pedro the Lion and The Mammals. He has been part of the live band for performances of numerous "Picture-Stories" created by Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy, including ''The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island'', ''The Friends of Dr. Rushower'', ''A Checkroom Romance'' and ''Up from the Stacks''. Maiuri also co-composed the music to Jason Mazzotta's 2015 short film ''The Century of Love, Part I''. He has appeared on ''The Tonight Show with Jay Leno'' and ''The Ellen DeGeneres Show'' (as a member of the Young@Heart Chorus band), ''Fresh Air'' (with Mark Mulcahy), and ''Mountain Stage'' (with Mark Mulcahy and The Mammals). Career * MediaDarlings (1989-1994) (guitar/vocals, with Cullen Faugno on bass/vocals) * Sourpuss (1994-1995) (guitar, with Alyssa Marchese on bass, Brian Marchese on ...
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