Concert One Hundred Three: August 9 2026 at Plymouth Congregational Church

...donations benefited the Echo Lake Protective Association

Tom Wagner invited us to perform at the East Charleston church, and proposed that donations benefit the Echo Lake Protective Association. Echo Lake’s landowners make great efforts to protect the shoreline. It is one of the cleanest lakes in Vermont, the first to receive the state’s Gold Lake Wise award for Best Management Practices.

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The old East Charleston General Store sits across the street from the church. The store used to be run by the Castle family, who hosted our concert just the day before in neighboring Holland. In one of the P.E.T. coincidences that keep popping up, both the Charleston store and the Holland venue figure into the saga of the notorious Mac’s Parties of 1972 and 1973. You can hear John Castle tell about them over at the Holland concert writeup.

Charleston was originally called “Navy” in honor of Admiral Whipple, a revolutionary leader famous for his defense of Charleston South Carolina from the British navy; the land-locked town was renamed the less cryptic “Charleston” a while later. Of course, I had to play Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag” as well as the iconic Charleston dance song by James P. Johnson. The song is today much better known than its composer, who also wrote the standards “If I could Be With You” and “Old-Fashioned Love”, but was best known in his time as the greatest virtuous in the Harlem Stride piano tradition. It was especially apt plot play such this landmark dance tune in here, as Charleston is home to the Mad Brook Farm, a communal venture founded in the 1970s and home to musicians and dancers including Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton, originators of contact dance improvisation.

Charlestonian Mark Bechtold sang his environmental anthem “Be So Kind”, while other pieces were keyed to Charleston’s historic timeline. The Charleston Rag was first recorded on disc in 1921, the year a fire swept through East Charlseston, destroying most of the village’s buildings; but townspeople doused the church from above in the steeple, saving the historic structure where we were grateful to play 105 years later.

Mark was not my only resident collaborator. Annabelle Jensen, a rising high-school senior, sang two songs including Stephen Foster’s “Gentle Annie”, written the year the church was built.

Echo Lake, the beneficiary of the day’s concert donations, was also the site of our visit with concert organizers and hosts extraordinaire Tom and Amy Wagner, who invited us to stay with them between the Holland and Charleston concerts at their environmentally friendly lake house. They generously hosted both of our performer collaborators and their families for a dinner the evening before the concert. P.E.T. stage manager/driver/recordist/fiddler Annelies broke the ice in the crowd of mostly strangers by asking everyone to recount their bear story. Annabelle won easily. She repeated her story (above) for the concert audience the next day.

Amy is a quilter, as were her Aunt Lily and her Lily’s friend Betty Carr. Lily and Betty made two fabric maps of Vermont, where each patch represents one of Vermont’s 14 counties, and each has two pockets: one to hold tiny cards of the towns not yet seen, the other to receive the cards of towns once visited.

On the way out of town we stopped at Delaney’s farmstand/curio shop. Tom had evidently done yeoman duty promoting the concert. On the westward ride home, the sun was an uncannily deep and brilliant orange. We assumed the worst and checked the air quality index, which was however comfortably in the green range. Sometimes a gorgeous sunset is just a gorgeous sunset.