George Ward will present songs of the Down-Rent Wars

George Ward — singer, raconteur, and multi-instrumentalist — will present a program on Anti-Rent War songs for the Clarksville Historical Society Nov. 1 at 7 p.m. in the Clarksville Community Church. The free event is open to the public.

To the Editor:

“Nowhere in the America of the late eighteen-thirties were the promises of the Declaration of Independence less fulfilled than in Albany, the capital of New York.”

These words begin Henry Christman's “Tin Horns and Calico,” a landmark study of the tenant rebellion that became a powerful cross-current in the restless sea of American politics preceding the Civil War.

Those who know of the rebellion inevitably summon up the image of the doughty Helderberg farmer’s wife sounding her tin dinner horn to warn her husband and his fellows of the approaching sheriff, of the need to don their calico Indian disguises to save the homestead of one of them from foreclosure and his family from ruin.

But many Americans know nothing at all of the citizen uprising that overthrew a near-feudal system of land tenure, pulling down an aristocracy whose privilege had survived the American Revolution.

This is so even though Anti-Rentism was a singing movement and still speaks to us through its songs. Its history, its war cries, and its propaganda were the stuff of ballad broadsides, newspaper poetry columns, and mass rallies.

Songs found in libraries, attics, ancient newspapers, and in the memories of families still proudly living on Anti-Rent land are as vital to the meaning of American democracy today as they were 150 years ago. They are vivid, passionate tales of battles won and lost. They are partisan texts composed by candlelight in remote rural farmhouses, or composed in prison on a forbidden fiddle, or sung by a chorus to a Fourth of July rally of thousands.

George Ward has been learning the songs and stories of New York, New England, and eastern Canada for over 50 years. He is a singer, raconteur, and multi-instrumentalist and he has carried those tales and tunes across America.

“Those of us who are drawn to these songs, tunes and stories are the tradition,” he writes. “And finding the right balance between reverence and irreverence, timeliness and timelessness, is what keeps that tradition alive.”

Join us on Nov. 1 at 7 p.m. in the Clarksville Community Church for an evening of music and history, open to the public, with refreshments following the program. For more information call (518) 768-2870.

Marilyn Miles

Clarksville Historical Society

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