Learn About the Great Emancipator in Hennepin
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| Image courtesy of the Putnam County Record |
“I’ve been playing folk music for 40 years. When the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum opened up, I started playing there. I play mountain dulcimer, jawharp and other instruments there,” Anderson said.
Anderson has participated in a lot of craft fairs and re-enactments that have hit this particular time period and has learned a lot over the years.
“The program that I will be doing will be based on the instruments that the soldiers of the Civil War played. Lincoln, of course, will be a part of it, but some of the focus is on the portable instruments the soldiers played,” he said. “There was a lot of music written during the Civil War. The soldiers used the music as an escape. They knew that they could go out and die tomorrow. They were doing anything they could to not think about this.”
Anderson has been giving this presentation for about 10 years. He has worked at the Lincoln museum in Springfield throughout the years and has learned from his experiences there.
“When it (the museum) opened up, I was teaching mountain dulcimer. A group of kids that I organized called the Mountain Dulcimer Kids performed at the opening,” he said.
Anderson has led the New Salem Storytelling Festival and the Clayville Music and Storytelling Festival. He worked to build them up into national events. He has also appeared at the National Mountain Music Festival and holds a position at the Mountain Dulcimer Workshop at Appalachian State University.
“The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln” is the 11th program in the 2014-15 Putnam County Public Library District humanities program series, “Traces and Byways Discovered.”
Source: Putnam County Record