Maine Memory Network

'State of Maine Song,' Portland, 1932

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: 1932 Media: Ink on paper

  view a full transcription

'Stein Song,' 1930

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: 1930 Location: Westbrook Media: Ink on paper

  view a full transcription

D. W. Snow house at 361 Danforth Street, Portland, 1891-1926

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: 1891–1926 Location: Portland Client: D. W. Snow Architect: Stevens & Cobb Architects

Songs of Winnebago

An enduring element of summer camps is the songs campers sing around the campfire, at meals, and on many other occasions. Some regale the camp experience and others spur the camp's athletes on to victory.

Of Note: Maine Sheet Music

Of Note: Maine Sheet Music features captivating covers of original sheet music along with stories about Maine connections to the songs. Before people had easy access to popular music from records, radios, and the internet, they played songs of the day on instruments at home, using sheet music purchased at music stores. Iconic Maine subjects like lobsters, pine trees, and winter were perfect for lyrics sung by luminaries like Rudy Vallée of Westbrook, and intricate artwork of Maine’s landscape graced the sheet music covers.

John Martin: Expert Observer - Intro: pages 129-142

"Grant song Gilman Townsend 1872 election results Death of Horace Greeley Irish National Movement Hannibal Hamlin"

Historic Hallowell - The Stevens Training Center Serenaders

"There they recorded six songs for a record album entitled Stars Over Stevens. Nothing is known of the individual singers. The Serenaders from 1965."

Mémère’s Notebook
by Robert Sylvain

My Mémère’s Notebook of old Acadian Folksongs

Powwow Music
by Chris Sockalexis

Playing powwow music with my group, the RezDogs

Longfellow Studies: Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith" and "Whitman's Song of Myself" - Alternative Constructions of the American Worker

Grade Level: 9-12 Content Area: English Language Arts, Social Studies
Most if not all of us have or will need to work in the American marketplace for at least six decades of our lives. There's a saying that I remember a superintendent telling a group of graduating high-school seniors: remember, when you are on your deathbed, you will not be saying that you wish you had spent more time "at the office." But Americans do spend a lot more time working each year than nearly any other people on the planet. By the end of our careers, many of us will have spent more time with our co-workers than with our families. Already in the 21st century, much has been written about the "Wal-Martization" of the American workplace, about how, despite rocketing profits, corporations such as Wal-Mart overwork and underpay their employees, how workers' wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s, while the costs of college education and health insurance have risen out of reach for many citizens. It's become a cliché to say that the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" is widening to an alarming degree. In his book Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips says we are dangerously close to becoming a plutocracy in which one dollar equals one vote. Such clashes between employers and employees, and between our rhetoric of equality of opportunity and the reality of our working lives, are not new in America. With the onset of the industrial revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, many workers were displaced from their traditional means of employment, as the country shifted from a farm-based, agrarian economy toward an urban, manufacturing-centered one. In cities such as New York, groups of "workingmen" (early manifestations of unions) protested, sometimes violently, unsatisfactory labor conditions. Labor unions remain a controversial political presence in America today. Longfellow and Whitman both wrote with sympathy about the American worker, although their respective portraits are strikingly different, and worth juxtaposing. Longfellow's poem "The Village Blacksmith" is one of his most famous and beloved visions: in this poem, one blacksmith epitomizes characteristics and values which many of Longfellow's readers, then and now, revere as "American" traits. Whitman's canto (a section of a long poem) 15 from "Song of Myself," however, presents many different "identities" of the American worker, representing the entire social spectrum, from the crew of a fish smack to the president (I must add that Whitman's entire "Song of Myself" is actually 52 cantos in length). I do not pretend to offer these single texts as all-encompassing of the respective poets' ideas about workers, but these poems offer a starting place for comparison and contrast. We know that Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century, just as we know that Whitman came to be one of the most controversial. Read more widely in the work of both poets and decide for yourselves which poet speaks to you more meaningfully and why.

Longfellow's Ripple Effect: Journaling With the Poet - "The Song of Hiawatha"

Grade Level: 6-8, 9-12 Content Area: English Language Arts, Social Studies
This lesson is part of a series of six lesson plans that will give students the opportunity to become familiar with the works of Longfellow while reflecting upon how his works speak to their own experiences.