NEWBURY, Vt. — A few years ago, singer and researcher Linda Radtke was looking through the sheet music collection at the Vermont Historical Society in Barre, when she noticed that some composers were identified by a couple of initials and their last name. Following her curiosity, Radtke tried to find out their full names.
“When I started digging a little deeper, they were women composers,” Radtke said, adding that the women were often identified a “Mrs.” in front of their husband’s name.
At 2 p.m. on Sunday at the Tenney Memorial Library in Newbury, Vt., Radtke will give a presentation on her findings called “Vermont’s Musical Ladies.” The Middlesex, Vt., resident will perform songs from the historical society’s collection accompanied by pianist Arthur Zorn. The free program is sponsored by the library, the Newbury Women’s Club and the Vermont Humanities Council.
“I love to learn about history through the music people were listening to at the time,” Radtke said. “My main interest is getting them out of the vault there and giving people a chance to hear them after all these years.”
The earliest piece in the collection is from 1798 and the presentation covers up to 2000, when These Green Mountains — composed by Diane Martin and arranged by Rita Buglass Gluckstate — was selected as the Vermont state song.
Many of the songs were based on English ballads, including two of Radtke’s favorites. Frozen Charlotte is about a young girl on her way to a party who freezes to death which Radtke described as “morbid, but fun too” and The Tune the Old Cow Died on is “about a farmer who sang and a cow who tried to sing along and he dropped down dead.”
There are songs about community events and Lake Champlain and parlor songs about life in Vermont. Middle class women, in particular, were the ones who wrote them.
“It was a skill for middle class women to sing and to play,” Radtke said. “Just about every farm wife had a musical education and a lot of farms had a piano, or if they couldn’t they got an Estey organ,” which were manufactured in Vermont.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Helen Hartness Flanders, of Springfield, Vt., made it her mission to collect and record these songs out of fear that they would be lost to time. Her father was a previous Vermont governor and her husband a U.S. senator.
“She was really interested in going up in the hills and collecting music,” Radtke said. “Part of it was people were afraid when radio came into rural areas that people would stop singing those songs around pianos. She set about to make sure they didn’t fall into obscurity.”
The presentation includes 15 songs and lasts about an hour.
“I think how relevant the songs are today,” Radtke said, adding that while today’s music might be different, “the words and the appreciation for the beauty of Vermont and the people of Vermont comes out very strongly.”
Editor’s note: The Tenney Memorial Library is located at 4886 Main Street South. For more information, call 802-866-5604. Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
