Folk Music and Dancing Recreate Lincoln’s Time

The Lincoln Bicentennial celebration moves toward its conclusion with the campus visit of David Para and Cathy Barton from Boonville, Mo., national figures in traditional American folk music. 

Their evening concert, “Songs of the Brothers’ War,” will provide an hour of partisan songs from the great crisis of Lincoln’s presidency, in Georgian Room B Oct. 19 from 7:30-8:30 p.m.

Following an intermission, attendees may dance to Barton and Para’s music for a second hour: circle, line, contra and square-dances, such as Lincoln and friends would have danced to during his prairie years, will be called by Bob Nothdurft until 10 p.m.

Para and Barton are husband and wife singer-songwriter-instrumentalists who are nationally and internationally known for their interpretations of American folk music. They perform regularly in several folk festivals around the country, they have appeared on the Grand Ole Opry, and they serve as artistic directors of the “Big Muddy Folk Festival” held each year in Boonville, Mo. This fall they’ll take a touring company, “Gumbo Bottoms,” to Washington, Mo., Nov. 21-22. Their last visit to Truman was at the 2003 state conference of the Missouri Folklore Society. Learn more at http://bartonpara.com.

Nothdurft, retired professor and occasional lecturer in physics, plays and sings with several bands and regularly calls local dances.

There will be no charge for either the concert or the folk-dance, thanks to the Schwengel endowment for Pickler’s Lincoln collection and the annual Lincoln Competitions in oratory, essay and art. For further information about the final events of the Lincoln Bicentennial on campus, go to http://Lincoln200.truman.edu.
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