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Welcome to NortheastFolk
NortheastFolk.org is a website dedicated to the local and regional indie music scene in and around Boston and the Northeast. It is intended as a resource for performers, venues and service providers to exchange information and reach out to anyone interested in our community.
This website is about you, whether you're a listener, a performer or a venue. Feel free to join in and share the music.
Thanks for supporting indie musicians and our craft.
Note: We are not the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA), though we whole-heartedly support their efforts.
The NERFA web site may be found at http://www.nerfa.org
Folk Music Hall of Fame takes root in the Q.C.
By LYNN FARRIS - Creative Loafing - 11 Nov 08
Every few weeks a stately Irish fella named Charles McCutcheon, along with his distinguished wife, Alicia, make their way from California to Charlotte where they spend countless hours meeting with local cultural and tourism officials hoping one day to make their vision of breaking ground on the Folk Music Hall of Fame Museum and Media Center a reality.
No, that's not a misprint, you read that correctly -- the Folk Music Hall of Fame Museum and Media Center. Presently, there's no such facility anywhere else in the world and if the McCutcheons have their way, they'll make it happen right here in the Queen City.
Surprisingly neither Charles nor Alicia has previous ties to Charlotte. Charles spent much of the 1970s working in London for Warner Bros. Records and different public relations firms where he represented such artists as Eric Clapton, Deep Purple, The Four Tops and Bob Geldolf. Alicia is from the U.S. and has spent time living in "Music City" Nashville and California and yet neither of them express any reservations whatsoever about making Charlotte home to this beloved endeavor of theirs.
"In many respects there were a number of cities that we talked about," Charles explains in an exclusive interview with Creative Loafing. "There was Boston, New Port [Rhode Island] and in North Carolina [in addition to Charlotte] we looked at Raleigh/Durham and Asheville."
He continues, "We knew it had to be on the East Coast and in Appalachia, because when the European immigrants came across they fanned out from Ellis Island and basically reformed their homelands in the Appalachian Mountains initially, and a lot of the music that became American Folk Music came from this area."
"We also wanted it to be in a city that has a relevance to history. And quite frankly, a nice English Queen's name attached to it," he adds with a hint of laughter.
In the end, Charlotte's accessibility gave it the edge over the other cities under consideration. "If relevance was the only important thing, we'd have it in New Port, Rhode Island," Alicia opines. "But it has to also be a great location and be easy to get in and out of and Charlotte has that. We really like the fact that Charlotte has so many wonderful gateways from all over the United States as well internationally. It's a great location for anyone throughout the world to get to."