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Dallas, Ore.—Join folklorist Amy Howard and Guthrie Park Community Center director and musician, Sally Clark, and selected musicians for a conversation about traditional music and music jams in Polk County. The conversation will take place just before the regular Friday night jam on July 20, 2018, 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm. at the Guthrie Park Community Center, 4320 Kings Valley Hwy, Dallas, OR 97338.

This open, community conversation invites audiences to connect with Sally Clark and local musicians about traditional music and the Friday night jam at Guthrie Park. Howard spent several days in Dallas and the surrounding area speaking to members of the community, documenting their traditions, and learning how their cultural traditions shaped their lives. Please come and chat with Clark and others and learn how they are actively passing their skills and knowledge through the generations.

Funding for this program comes from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Oregon Folklife Network, Oregon’s designated Folk & Traditional Arts Program. The project sent trained folklorists to meet and document culture keepers in the Willamette Valley counties of Polk, Benton, Lane, Mario, and Linn as well as with artists from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Free public programs are held in each county.

Amy Howard received a BA in Anthropology from Brigham Young University and an MA in American Studies and Folklore from Utah State University. Her love of folklore fieldwork began in 2007 on an undergraduate field study in Guatemala. Since then, she has interned at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, coordinated public programs, and worked on multiple documentation projects in Utah and Idaho. In 2013, she collaborated with other fieldworkers documenting and producing a book on quilting traditions in the Bear River Heritage Area. In 2015, she and two of her students documented artistic, occupational, and recreational traditions in the Southeast Idaho Snake River Plain for the Idaho Commission on the Arts. Together they created an exhibit and organized public performances at the Idaho Museum of Natural History. She is currently documenting Oregon traditions and culture keepers in the Willamette Valley.

For more information about public programs in Benton, Lane, Marion, and Linn counties, contact Jennie Flinspach at jflinspa@uoregon.edu or 541-346-3820.

Please contact Oregon Folklife Network Director, Riki Saltzman, at riki@uoregon.edu or 541-346-3820 with questions about the Oregon Folklife Network or recommendations for traditions, groups, or individual folk & traditional artists to be documented in the Willamette Valley. OFN always appreciates contact information for traditional musicians and dancers, quilters, storytellers, cooks, leatherworkers, fly-tiers, wood carvers, silversmiths, taxidermists, basket makers, and more.

The OFN is administered by the University of Oregon and is supported in part by grants from the Oregon Cultural Trust, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Historical Society, and the National Endowment for the Arts.