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Lui Collins

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“…one of New England’s clearest and most distinctive folk voices, with unusually piercing lyrical insight…” – Hartford Courant

“Folksinger for our times.” – The Boston Herald

“…one of New England’s first and brightest stars.” – The Boston Globe

Folk singer/songwriter Lui Collins has been performing, writing and recording for over 45 years, her early Philo and Green Linnet recordings earning international acclaim and establishing her as a respected voice in the folk world. Lui has shared the stage with such notables as Pete Seeger, Bonnie Raitt, Stan Rogers, Dar Williams, and John Gorka. Renowned guitarist Dave van Ronk called her “one of the best guitarist-arrangers I have heard in years.”

“Lui sings my songs better than I do.” – Canadian folk icon Stan Rogers

From playful 4-string arrangements of some favorite original songs, to the fabulous jazz chords in American standards and Bossa nova, Lui translates her rich and complex guitar arrangements onto her tenor ukulele to create something unexpected and delightful.

Lui is often joined by guitarist/Grammy-nominated producer and longtime collaborator, Anand Nayak, accompanying her in a wide range of styles and languages. Their decade plus of creative collaboration is evident in the fluid musical dialogue of their live performance.

Additional quotes:

“Lui Collins sings the way people did a great long time ago, before most of us forgot how to breathe.” – Andrew Calhoun, Waterbug Records

“Lui’s got the juju!” – Geoff Bartley, singer-songwriter, guitarist

“Lui has a gentle way of capturing the hearts of her audience and having what amounts to a musical conversation with them during her performances… No one weaves a spell quite like she can.”

– Champlain Valley Folk Festival Newsletter

Alana Cline

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Alana is a Toronto-based fiddler specializing in combining Irish, Cape Breton and Scottish styles to create her own sound. She performs both solo and in a duo with her father, Leigh Cline.

Alana & Leigh Cline specialize in telling the history and stories behind tunes and musical styles, and many of their tunes are from the 1700s and 1800s. They also specialize in performances and workshops comparing different Celtic fiddle musical traditions. They include occasional Balkan tunes in their sets.

Having performed in Canada and the US, a small selection of performances include the Great American Irish Festival, Celtic Island Music Festival, Trenton Scottish Irish Festival, Irish Real Life Festival, Chris Langan Weekend, City of Toronto’s Canada Day Celebrations, The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, Music Niagara, Toronto Public Library, Burlington Public Library, folk clubs, and at private corporate events for Tourism Ireland, Corus Entertainment, Enterprise Ireland, Maple Leaf Foods, and Discover Halifax. Alana & Leigh have a self-titled CD.

Alana first started playing at the age of 8 under the tutelage of Cape Breton fiddler Sandy MacIntyre. She studied privately with All-Ireland Fiddle Champion Maeve Donnelly over a period of two years, and also studied the North-East Scottish fiddle style with Paul Anderson, whose teaching lineage goes back directly to Niel Gow and the Golden Age of Scottish fiddle music. 

Alana has augmented her playing style with private lessons from Irish fiddlers Kevin Burke, Liz Carroll, Tony DeMarco and Patrick Ourceau. In 2008 Alana became the first Canadian to be accepted to the auditioned Meitheal School of Irish Traditional Music in Limerick, Ireland with Paul O’Shaughnessy of Altan as one of her instructors. She has also studied fiddle at the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts in St. Ann’s, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Windborne

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“A quartet the likes of which I haven’t seen since… Coope, Boyes and Simpson, the Watersons, or The Voice Squad. Just absolutely phenomenal!” -BBC Traveling Folk

Windborne combines bold and innovative harmonies, styles from a variety of cultures with traditions of harmony singing, and a vocal blend that comes from longtime friendship and years of singing together. They also carry on the alliance of folk music and social activism, breathing new life into songs of change from the past that still ring true in modern times.

“The best musical discovery of the year…Stunningly powerful vocal harmony… Windborne sets a new bar for folk harmony singing today”  -Brian O’Donovan, WGBH-NPR

 

Hear Windborne in action:

Song of the Lower Classes – a protest song from the Chartists in England in the 1840s, a grassroots movement for voting rights

Stabat Mater (Corsica) live in Mont-Saint-Michel – a traditional setting of the Stabat Mater text from southern Corsica. A clip of this video went viral on TikTok in 2021, getting over 2 million views!

The Song of Hard Times  – Windborne’s arrangement and expansion of a song from the 1930s, found in the archives at the Library of Congress

WindborneSingers.com

Facebook.com/WindborneSingers

Instagram / TikTok: @WindborneSingers

YouTube.com/WindborneSingers

 

MORE ABOUT WINDBORNE:

Internationally acclaimed vocal ensemble Windborne is a group of vocal chameleons who specialize in close harmony singing, shifting effortlessly between drastically different styles of traditional music within the same concert. Their musical knowledge spans many cultures, but they remain deeply rooted in American folk singing traditions – a typical concert program includes music ranging from American labor anthems and English ballads to ancient Corsican polyphony and traditional Quebecois tunes.

 

Hailed as “the most exciting vocal group in a generation,” Lynn Mahoney Rowan, Will Thomas Rowan, Lauren Breunig, and Jeremy Carter-Gordon share a vibrant energy onstage – their connection to each other and to the music clearly evident. They educate as they entertain, telling stories about the music and explaining the characteristics and stylistic elements of the traditions in which they sing. 

 

But there’s another, crucial dimension to Windborne. They are adherents to folk music’s longtime association with social activism, in particular its ties to the labor and civil rights movements and others that champion the poor, the working class, and the disenfranchised. Breathing new life into old songs, they seek out music from movements over the past 400 years and sing them for the struggles of today’s world. They believe deeply in the power of music to change hearts.

In addition to performing in New England and around the world, Windborne has taught workshops in schools, community centers, singing camps, and universities. Seasoned teachers and song-leaders, they delight groups young and old with enthusiastic, clear, and nuanced instruction for musicians of all levels of experience. Singers not only learn the notes of a song, but also work on the varied vocal styles, language pronunciation, and gain an understanding of the song in its original cultural context.

In 2014, Windborne was one of 10 groups selected by American Music Abroad and the US Department of State to tour as cultural ambassadors through music. They traveled to Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Angola, touring with internationally known artists, performing at sold-out national theaters, and collaborating with traditional musicians in each country. They also taught music and dance workshops to schoolchildren, English-language learners, dance schools, choirs, and music conservatories.

 

Matt Watroba

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Touring folk music performer specializing in community singing and song leading. I also do a variety of educational programs–as a solo and with the amazing Robert Jones

Joseph Morneault

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Folk musician focused on early American music, old English songs, maritime music. Also an instrument maker of woodwinds that apply to these traditions – fifes, whistles, flutes.

Orit Shimoni

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A prolific and highly acclaimed singer-songwriter, Orit spent eleven years living on the road full-time, touring internationally.  She has released eleven albums which have received rave reviews and international radio play.  A multi-genre passionate singer, whose dedication to the craft and ability to connect to diverse audiences have won many hearts over.   Orit’s Jewish and Israeli background informs much of her work, in particular a passion for humanitarianism and peace advocacy.   You can also hear her harmonies on several recordings by other artists.

Ann Zimmerman

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Ann Zimmerman sings her native prairie into universal language and works magic from songs of life on the windy plains. Her confident Kansas style, compelling stage presence and award-winning songs have taken her across the continent singing a hundred gigs a year. Ann sings for and with children, families and adults. She tells stories and paints pictures with her guitar, her piano or just her voice. She regularly leads songwriting workshops for elementary and middle school students. On occasion, she performs spoken word pieces, plays autoharp and gathers a band. At presenters’ requests, her shows may focus on particular topics – food, gardens, weather, nature, rural life, human conflict, etc. – or historical periods or events – American Revolutionary War, pioneer life, historic Kansas.

Ann is a winner at the Wildflower! Festival, Great American Song and the Just Plain Folks national song contests. She appears annually at The Land Institute’s Prairie Festival and, beginning in recent years, the Walnut Valley Festival. With four independent recordings, Ann is also a lawyer and mediator, she runs a horse boarding stable with her husband near Salina, Kansas, and she is an elected board member of Salina Public Schools.

Leigh Cline

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I am a guitarist who works in Folk, Celtic & Greek/Turkish genres having been part of the 1960s -70s folk scene both as a player and as a presenter (Mariposa Folk Festival among others) as well as performing and recording in Greece & Turkey since the 1970s. I presently work with my fiddler daughter Alana Cline and we perform Cape Breton, Scottish and Irish traditional tunes from the 1700s onwards as well as modern traditional style material. We also  specialize in performances and workshops comparing different Celtic fiddle musical traditions.

Dan Schatz

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Traditional and contemporary folksinger, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer

Chuck Mitchell

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Chuck is a hubert humphrey democrat sensitive new age guy. He started singing in Detroit folk clubs and saloons back in the 1960’s. In Toronto, on his first out of town gig, he met a bony blonde Canadian songwriter named Joni Anderson. They married, and as a duo Chuck and Joni Mitchell played the coffeehouse circuit and gin rummy until she was 48,760 points and 50 home made songs ahead, and then they divorced.

In 2018, Chuck’s fellow FARM (Folk Alliance Regional Midwest) folk gave him the Lantern Bearer Award for “significant contribution to folk music in the Midwest”.  He couldn’t have been more grateful, telling his fellow farmers that after fifty-some years glowing next to a floodlight, it was really nice to be recognized.

In his one man show, Mitchell plays 6 and 12 string guitar and sings cabaret songs, animal songs, story songs, and Mitchell songs. He weaves poetry by Sandburg-Frost-Brecht-Hopkins and others into his shows. He has appeared on the Merv Griffin show (once) and A Prairie Home Companion’ (thrice).

His acting credits include ‘The World of Carl Sandburg’ (in the USA and the UK), Harold Hill in ‘The Music Man’, Woody in ‘Woody Guthrie’s American Song’, and Stephen Foster in ‘Mr. Foster & Mr. Twain’.  Ask Siri and Alexa and the other streamers to play Chuck’s music. On YouTube, enter “Chuck Mitchell Sings”. 

Hey, you say, is Chuck a Renaissance Man? Well, he’s old enough.

 

Erin Mae Lewis

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Mountain Dulcimer Aficionado and Folk Music Educator

Erin Mae is a mountain dulcimer virtuosa who has taken an obscure American folk instrument, and with it has developed a high level of technical proficiency and musical expression. Erin has been playing traditional mountain dulcimer for over twenty years and chromatic mountain dulcimer for over ten years. In that time, she has developed a unique and progressive style. Carrying the rhythm section with her signature percussive chop and flat-picking fiddle tunes with impressive dexterity; audiences nationwide show amazement as they watch her fingers dance over her dulcimer strings.

Erin Mae is also a respected teacher who has taught at hundreds of dulcimer festivals and conferences around the world. She has pioneered online mountain dulcimer instruction and helped numerous festivals pivot to online events during the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, Erin Mae teaches kids folk music workshops at schools and libraries, and organizes kids camps at bluegrass and folk festivals.