Song & Story Swap
Songwriter and fiddle virtuoso Eric Lee will be the guest performer Saturday at the Song & Story Swap at the Nacul Center, 592 Main St. in Amherst.
Lee began studying classical violin and traditional Irish fiddle at the age of 9 and was soon performing and recording with local artists.
After moving to western Massachusetts, he continued playing live and in studios, branching into psychedelic rock and bluegrass, playing in pit orchestras of musicals and writing his own compositions.
At 18, he attended the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival where the newly formed group The Stangelings, fronted by musical luminaries Pete and Maura Kennedy spotted Lee and his fiddle and invited him to join them on an informal campground performance. By Saturday night, two days into his first music festival, Lee was playing on the main stage as the band’s newest member.
He now plays regularly with the New England-based bluegrass band The Gather Rounders.
Song & Story Swap is open to all ages. Come and sing, lead everyone in singing or request a song or story. Or just listen. A donation of $5 to $10 is requested for the guest performer.
“Farmers’ Castles,” an exhibit of paintings by Robert Strong Woodward, will be on view Sept. 1 through Oct. 30 at the Memorial Hall Museum, 8 Memorial St., Deerfield.
The exhibit features the painting “Farmer’s Castle,” a dynamic canvas of the Warfield barn in Charlemont recently donated to the museum by John Warfield Glaze and Shirley J. Glaze, and five privately owned and rarely seen paintings of Buckland, Colrain and Charlemont barns.
Using perspective to literally heighten the barn on the canvas and in the viewer’s mind, Woodward (1885-1957) succeeded in dignifying this rural structure to a position of honor.
Born in Northampton, Woodward turned to painting as a profession after a gunshot wound paralyzed him from the waist down. He found refuge in his grandparents’ Buckland farm, and in 1910, he briefly studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Museum hours are Tuesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission costs $6; $3 for youths and students (6-21). For information, call 774-3768, ext. 80, or visit www.deerfield-ma.org.
“The Sky and Earth,” a group show by artists Janet Walerstein Winston, Rochelle Shicoff, Julia Rivera and Larry Rankin, will be on view Sept. 1 through Oct. 28 at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 300 Westgate Center Drive, Hadley.
There will be an artists’ reception Sept. 8 from 4 to 6 p.m.
For this exhibit, the four artists have expressed a relationship to nature in their own chosen art form, printmaking, painting, mixed media and photography.
Gallery hours are Mondays through Fridays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
