Greg LoPiccolo and David Hull invited to play in Newfane’s Union Hall. But when they informed me there was no piano there, they put me in touch with Jennifer Yocom, music director at the Congregational Church, which has a well-maintained Samick baby grand.

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I was excited for the opportunity to play with Newfane multi-instrumentalist Dan DeWalt. In addition to his musical endeavors, Dan is an energetic activist. In 2006, he spearheaded a town-by-town nationwide campaign to impeach the president for attacking Iraq under false pretenses. This was doubly timely: just weeks before the concert, the centrist Council on Foreign Relations released the results of a survey of its members ranking the 10 best and 10 worst U.S. foreign policy decisions of all time; the invasion of Iraq was judged the worst of the worst, by a landslide. Meanwhile, the concert took place during the buildup to the U.S. attack on Iran, and at the time of the concert, Dan was coordinating efforts to put anti-Iran War resolutions on town agendas for Vermont’s annual Town Meeting Day, which was 11 days away—a war that may someday give stiff competition to the Iraq invasion in future surveys of foreign policy blunders.

This was all not just timely but relevant to a key Play Every Town project theme: the celebration of Vermont’s vibrant sense of community, evidenced (among other ways) in its healthy tradition of annual town meeting and local democracy. We thought it made sense to collaborate with resistance music, so we played the gospel song “Keep Your Hand On the Plow”, which has been adapted as a civil rights anthem, with Dan on trombone, and Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists” with Dan on accordion.

Of course Vermont’s record on civil rights and democracy is not without shame. Newfane was the site of Vermont’s last public whipping, in 1807. The offender was a middle-aged mother, who received 39 lashes for the non-violent crime of passing counterfeit money. This so upset the public conscience that the state outlawed the punishment the following year. To mark this history, we played the Allman Brothers’ classic “Whipping Post”.

(Newfane’s criminal justice history isn’t all ruthless. In 1895 a hotel wing was added to the jail; hotel guests and inmates were served the same food. It appeared comfortable enough that when Teddy Roosevelt visited and said he should come back and commit a minor crime so he could have a break and get some reading done.)

As at many PET concerts, I played music from the year the town was chartered, which was usually done by New Hampshire colonial governor Benning Wentworth. Wentworth was in a frenzy to name as many towns as possible to bolster New Hampshire’s claim to the territory west of the Connecticut River, to counter New York’s competing claim. This meant charting towns and giving or selling them to friends and speculators often long before there was any European settlement. Newfane was so chartered in 1753, and I played a dramatic sonata by C.P.E. Bach from that year. But a consequence of the mad rush to lay claim to the region ahead of any settler activity was that no town meeting was held in Newfane within five years of the town’s founding, which rendered the charter null and void. So the town—actually named “Fane” originally—was re-chartered as “Newfane” in 1761, prompting me to play selections from the five-year-old Mozart’s first compositions, written that year. Thus for the first time in the project, I got to play music from two different founding years—which will happen again in the very next concert, in Corinth, only this time because of competing charters from NH and NY.