By Ashley M. Casey
Staff Writer
Zig-zagging across the canal system from New York to Buffalo, the Heartland Passage Tour will ring in the 200th anniversary of the digging of the Erie Canal with a new documentary bookended by storytelling and musical performances.
The Heartland Passage Tour, which begins Sept. 2, will make its last stop in Baldwinsville on Sept. 23 at Mohegan Manor. The project is sponsored by Livingston Arts, the Erie Canal Museum and City Lore. The latter two organizations collaborated in 2013 and 2014 on the B’ville Voices project
“Although it was called ‘Clinton’s Folly,’ the Erie Canal was an engineering miracle,” Karen Canning, folklorist and project co-director, said in a news release. “By linking the port of New York to the Great Lakes and the Midwest, it made fortunes in its wake. The Heartland Passage Tour celebrates the Canal and the folklore it spawned in song and story.”
The tour is centered around the documentary “Boom and Bust: America’s Journey on the Erie Canal,” directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Wagner. Dan Ward, one of the nation’s premier Erie Canal scholars and former curator of the Erie Canal Museum, will serve as host for the evening.
“We spent 10 years out along the canal, filming, interviewing people,” Ward said. “It’s a half-hour film that we edited out of 800 hours of interviews — and that was just the bits about the economics of Central New York.”
City Lore Founding Director Steve Zeitlin said the story of the Erie Canal is split into two parts: the economic boom of industrialization in the 19th century, and the de-industrialization of New York state’s economy in the late 20th century.
As commercial use of the canal declined, “America was recreating [the canal] as a tourist byway,” Zeitlin said.
Zeitlin became interested in the idea of celebrating the Erie Canal during a family vacation. According to Ward, Zeitlin’s son had asked to go on a riverboat ride on the Mississippi River. Instead, Zeitlin said, the family rented a houseboat on the Erie Canal.
“When you’re on the boat, your whole life slows down on the canal,” Ward said. “[Zeitlin] went from New York City pace to 4 mph.”
Ward, who grew up in Seneca Falls, knows the pace of canal life well.
“I grew up on the canal and I’ve always had a strong interest in it avocationally,” he said.
The young Ward and his brother set out on an adventure to learn about the canal.
“My father bought this rotten old boat and gave it to his two sons, thinking we’d never fix it up,” he said. “But we did, and we made it seaworthy.”
The brothers found that most stops along the canal lacked “amenities for pleasure crafts,” but Baldwinsville — which Ward called “our favorite port” — allowed easy access for refueling. Today, boats that pull into Lock 24 can hook into water and electricity for a fee.
“Baldwinsville for me is my favorite port, because as a kid, that’s where I wanted to go,” Ward said.
Ward has another family connection to the canal. His cousin, folklorist and singer George Ward, specializes in traditional New York and New England folk music. The latter Ward will join several other musicians and storytellers at the B’ville stop on the Heartland Passage Tour.
“My original interest in folk music came from my family, people who sang, played and listened to music of many kinds,“ George Ward said in a news release. “I learned a certain amount of Anglo-American and Irish-American folk music really early. I became fascinated with music that ‘ordinary’ people made.”
“They bring the real feel of the canal era music,” Dan Ward said of his cousin and his fellow musicians. “They’re going to do songs that were very contemporary to the Towpath [Trail] and bring it into the 21st century.”
The headliners of the Heartland Passage Tour are Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, a husband-and-wife team of folk singer-songwriters. Ungar composed “Ashokan Farewell,” which became the opening theme to Ken Burns’ 1990 docuseries “The Civil War.” In 1992, Mason and Ungar composed the soundtrack to Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s documentary “Brother’s Keeper.”
“I met Jay playing at Woodstock back in 1974,” Ward said. “He’s a pretty well-seasoned guy. He’s one of those masters.”
In addition to celebrating the tunes and tales of the canal, the Heartland Passage Tour will come full-circle with City Lore and the Erie Canal Museum’s previous project, B’ville Voices. A marker commemorating Decoration Day, the precursor to Memorial Day, will be unveiled after the dockside storytelling portion of the evening. Unlike most other government entities, the village of Baldwinsville celebrates Memorial Day not on the last Monday in May but on its traditional date of May 30.
“We’re very excited about doing this,” Zeitlin said. “It should be a wonderful day of music and storytelling.”
