Good afternoon, everyone. So nice to see you here in the Busker Chimlee Theater in what is our closing
concert of Lotus Festival, what is it, 32, 2025? I know, aw. But, you know, it was so good. And now
we have hope for next year, right? Yeah.
So my name is Tamara Lowenthal. I am the artistic director for the Lotus Education Arts Foundation.
Yeah, woo. And before we get started, I just wanna begin this afternoon by gratefully acknowledging
the native peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant native
communities who make their home here today. So it's been quite a weekend, right?
I hope you felt the joy and ecstasy of the artist's performance as the last two evenings. It's just
been amazing. The music that we've been hearing, it's such an incredible reminder of the beauty in this
world, and it's a real antidote to some of the ugliness we have seen directed to those who are not native
born. So we should really be celebrating what Lotus does for our world and for our community.
So our hope is that you are going to leave this weekend inspired and also hopeful that music can indeed
change hearts and minds because that is our goal at Lotus. Now I have a bunch of thank yous to give
today, so bear with me and maybe even join in celebrating some of those people. We want to thank everyone
who made the festival possible this year. Our staff, volunteers, our board, interns, student fellows,
our donors, sponsors, and grantors, and also
this big undertaking, it just isn't possible without all these different people coming together to make
it happen. So let's give all of those people a round of applause. We also want to send out some appreciation
to an incredible group of people, the Lotus Scene Savers, who raised nearly $30,000 to invest in the
festival and bring back the Sixth Street Tent. Who visited the Sixth Street Tent this weekend?
It was so awesome to have it. So you can see their names on the back of the program if you have a program,
but thank them if you know them because they all love Lotus. So of course, we're so grateful to see
you here this afternoon. Did you know that Lotus is a charitable organization? Probably you did.
For 32 years, we have been able to celebrate the world's diversity through music and the arts because
of the support of our local community. The ticket you bought to enjoy the exceptional music today, what
percentage of the festival do you think it covers? 30%. You must have been hearing this before. You
know the answer to that. Okay, so it's right. That's only 30%. So that means we have to raise money
so we can do all the work we do.
And I should tell you that Lotus still needs your support because we are trying to raise $100,000 before
the end of the year. So please consider, if you enjoyed the festival this weekend, and if you want to
see us do more of this kind of work, please consider supporting the festival, supporting the
Lotus Foundation, because every gift counts, whether it's $5 or $500. We appreciate every gift. So talking
about gifts, we actually want to thank the people who have helped us this year. So this year, presenting sponsors,
our Indiana University Bloomington with many, many partners, and I wanna read those partners to you
because there are a lot of our cultural programs at IU that support the festival. So IU African Studies
Program, Department of French and Italian, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Department of
Spanish and Portuguese, the Hutton Honors College, Indiana Moral Union, Jacobs School of Music, Kelly
School of Business,
Department of Business Ethics and the Office of the Provost, the Robert F. Burns Russian and East European
Institute, the Student Union Board, and the Vincent and Eleanor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory
and Political Analysis. Please give all of these folks a round of applause. So we would also like to
thank our producer sponsors, Old National Bank
and the Right Design Group, as well as our benefactor sponsors, Farr Center for Contemporary Arts, Bloom
Magazine, Free Think Apparel, Holiday Inn, Rumpke Waste and Recycling. So give those guys a round of
applause too. See, you didn't know that'd be that much applause, so you are actually participating with
percussion today. Thank you. So we also wanna thank... Give a
Big thank you to the staff board and supporters of the historic Buskirk Chumlee Theater, because we
love this theater, and it is really our home, so we're grateful for that. It's just a favorite venue
for me, and I'm so glad we've been partners all these years. One more time, we wanna send an enormous
gratitude to all our individual donors who contribute to the festival, to Lotus Blossoms, to Outreach
Programming, and to our General Operating
operating support, because all of you, all of you are essential to the mission of Lotus, supporting
both global artists and our thriving local communities. So thank you. I want to now just talk about,
let's see, logistics. You see the exit signs? If you wanna leave this building for any reason, use the
exit signs going back first, and if those aren't available, side doors are good too. So I wanna introduce
today's performing artist to you.
Grammy award winning American roots artist, Cathy Fink, Marcy Markser, and our Chinese classical hammered
dulcimer player, Chow Tian, formed this trio of folk infused world music exploration. Chinese and American
songs are accompanied on, this is the word I didn't look up, Yang Jin, Yang Kin, you'll tell me, Chinese
hammered dulcimer, the gourd banjo, five string banjo, ukulele, guitars, dumbeck, cello banjo,
and mandolin. Will you please help me welcome Cathy, Marcy, and Chow.
So during one of our recording sessions, we decided to, I decided actually, yeah, right? I said, I don't
like what we play. Let's play something crazy. And we tried and we kind of like it. Now it's another
Chinese tune, right? I don't know if I should have called it Chinese still. But yeah, the song is called
Yong Jun Yan Kou. Yan Kou is a type of traditional Chinese dance, like square dance here.
So people after dinner, they went to the square or the open place and danced together in a group. It's
very delightful. And the next tune, surprising, this is another Chinese tune. It's called Snake Song,
a quite popular melody of the famous Chinese legendary story, The White Snake. The story actually is
a tragedy, but we
selected the most delightful part of the whole tune. We're going to sing the snake song. I'm going to
play the lady who is called Lady Bai. So she says in that story, she's a snake spirit and she eager
to find true love. So she practice those magic Taoism and transform her body into a human body and try
to find love. And snakes, white snakes, she has
animal friends. Ta-da, Cathy and Marcy here. So they're going to be my animal companion friends and
you guys are also can be my animal friends. There's a sing-along part. It's very simple. Yeah, you won't
be able to sing Chinese with me. I know, I know that. So very simple. Once you hear that, Cathy will
lead you to join them, okay?
Why don't you tell them what the words are going to be? It sounds like, I hi, I hi yo. I hi, I hi yo.
Does it make sense to you? You will know.
to meet a lot of our heroines in old-time music and early country music. We toured with Patsy Montana
for many years, the first woman in country music to sell a million records. We hung out with old Belle
Reed and Lily Mae Ledford. One of the people that we never got to meet was a terrific character from
Harlan, Kentucky, Cousin Emmy, whose real name was Cynthia Mae Carver. And there's a funny little story
about Cousin Emmy.
This is in tune. Good enough. Cousin Emmy was a very famous performer for a long time, and then she
kind of dropped out of the scene for a while. Well, our friend Mike Seeger with his New Lost City Ramblers
went looking for so many of the people whose 78s and early recordings that he loved of early country
music, and they were all over Kentucky, and Cousin Emmy was on the list. Where would we find this person?
Couldn't find her, couldn't find her, couldn't find her. One day, the New Lost City Ramblers are out
in California, and on a day off, this is a hard thing to imagine, but on a day off, they went to Disneyland.
And there's Mike Seeger at Frontierland. Right there is a picture I can barely deal with. However, from
far away in the distance, they heard a banjo. And lo and behold, walking towards that banjo at the opposite
end of Disneyland, Cousin Emmy was performing.
She had a big bouffant blonde hairdo, super high heels, her great big country smile, her five-string
banjo, her harmonica, and she loved entertaining an audience. She also had a hit song. She took the
fiddle tune, Ruben's Train. Oh, Ruben had a train and he put it on the track. You can hear the whistle
blow a hundred miles. And she wrote new words to it. Ruby, are you mad at your man?
And the Osborne brothers took that song and turned it into a great big hit. Well, we never got to meet
Cousin Emmy, but when we first met Patsy Montana and I walked into her front door and we sat down and
started visiting, I'm looking around her little apartment and I see this doll of a bouffant blonde hairdo
with a banjo and a red gingham dress.
And I said, what is that? And she said, oh, that's a Cousin Emmy doll. We did a benefit concert for
Cousin Emmy because she needed some money for some health things. And those were the table centerpieces.
And I got the table centerpiece. And I coveted it for years.
And after we produced Patsy Montana's last album, she sent me the Cousin Emmy doll. She said, I think
I've caused you enough trouble. You deserve this. And we still have it. It's as close as we've ever
come to meeting Cousin Emmy. But I want to urge you all to go to the internet and watch Cousin Emmy
on Pete Seeger's RainbowQuest television show. You will see exactly the image that I've given you. Plus,
you'll see something else that you'll never see anywhere else. Cousin Emmy playing music.
on a rubber glove. So this is her song, Ruby, Honey, Are You Mad At Your Man, along with the Chinese
dulcimer and the doombeck, exactly how she imagined it in Harlan, Kentucky.
Chinese percussion instrument which is called si bao. The translation can be four pieces of treasures.
Actually there are four pieces of bamboo sticks. So it's very important percussion instrument for nan
yin music popular in southern China, southeastern China, Fujian province. We adapted this
instrument for our trio. The next tune is going to be a combination among this and Marcy Marksor's beautiful
vocal for the gospel sound actually we're going to improvise based on the the tune it's called Mary
Don't You Weep. So the instrument is actually sounds like this
People says, oh, it just sounds like a rhythmic bone, but actually the playing technique is quite different
because I don't play, I don't put a finger in between, so I hold it like parallel, two for each hand
and use all fingers to play it. Not shaking, not shaking. Come and see me after the show, I'll show
you. It's magic.
I can't even tell from looking up close.
her and her beautiful angelic voice. It sounds like my family's here tonight. Thank you. So this next
piece is a really good example of where the center of our band from China to Appalachia really sort
of formed. Chow was an artist in residence and
at the Music Center at Strathmore, a major performing arts center in North Bethesda, Maryland. And I've
worked as a mentor and an advisor in that program now for 20 years. This is my 21st year. And Marcy
has also worked some in that program. And along comes a Chinese hammered dulcimer player. We didn't
have a clue what that meant. We were thinking Malcolm Douglish
in a female body. That's what we were thinking. And along comes Chao with this Chinese dulcimer with
147 strings tuned completely differently than an American dulcimer. And she was thoroughly classically
trained in China since the age of five. Classically trained in both Chinese and Western classical music,
but she had never played music off of the written.
So we invite Chow over to our house for a jam session with all different kinds of musicians. And poor
girl thought it was about food because of the word jam. And we got together and we said, OK, your turn
to play something. She goes, what? Where's the music? We said, we don't have any music. We just know
these things. We know these tunes. And it took her about five minutes to join in
and make this gigantic jump out of the classical world into this improvisational folk music world from
which she has never turned back. No, I'm Chow Bob. That's another story. That's right. Yeah, so we're
driving around Virginia. Chow quizzes Kathy and Marcy about our middle names. We have middle names.
Cathy Amphink, this is. Marcie Marie Markser. And Chow says, Chinese people don't have middle names,
I want one. And I immediately, I mean it took two seconds, I said, how about Bob? She said, okay. And
I explained that there were connotations to that, but she was all right with it. And now Chow is a PhD
student in ethnomusicology at Boston University, and when she gives her papers, they introduce her as
Chow Bob Tian.
Our centerpiece of this unusual combination of instruments is Marcy playing the four-string cello banjo.
It is tuned like a cello exactly. It's got a 15-inch pot, big fat heavy strings. Again, an influence
from Mike Seeger who came over to our home studio for the purpose of making some recordings together.
When Marcy picked up the cello banjo and started flipping out fiddle tunes on it, he kind of looked
at her and said, well, that's pretty interesting. I think I'm going to leave that here for a little
bit. And it didn't take long before we posted something on YouTube, and the gold tone company called
Marcy and said, we need to make those. And they started making them. Marcy is playing the Marcy Markser
model cello banjo, Every Girl's Dream. Yep. But it's really,
It's sort of the secret ingredient to the tonalities of bringing these instruments together. And so
we're going to do a tune that we learned from Mike. It's a hybrid version of a very well-known Appalachian
tune. Shady Grove, my true love. Shady Grove, I say. Shady Grove, my true love. Now I'm going away.
And this one is called Little Betty Anne. It's in a crazy banjo tuning.
It's my job to make music out of that. It's their job to make it sound good with me. And then we're
gonna medley that with a tune called Kitchen Girl, an Appalachian old time fiddle tune that I believe
Henry Reed played it and Alan Jabbour collected it from him. So we're sitting around playing Kitchen
Girl and that's when Chow Bob says, you know, there's a Chinese tune that sounds just like that. It's
called the Me Do Mountain Song. So Marcy's gonna kick off Kitchen Girl,
Chow's gonna get into the Me Do Mountain song and then we're gonna mash it all up in our little Appalachian
Chinese soup and see what happens. There's a chorus in Little Betty Anne that you can join us on.
She's a pretty little girl, neither black nor brown. Just looks like a thunder man before the rain comes
down. Step alight, my little Betty Anne. Step alight, I say. Step alight, my little Betty Anne. I'm
bound to go my way. That's your part. Step alight, my little Betty Anne. Step alight, I say.
So far.
artists of Lotus Fest. Marcy had the great pleasure of meeting Lotus for the first time in the 1970s
at the Indiana Fiddler's Gathering. What was it, the Fiddler's Gathering? Indiana Fiddler's Gathering.
It was run by Dylan Buston back then. And Lotus, I was reminded by a new friend backstage, I remember
that Lotus had a car that
needed work and the transmission was gone and or was not working, the car would only go in reverse and
he would drive around in reverse. Yep. I've never heard that story. That's a great story. It's a great
story. Well, we both got to spend quite a bit of time with him in the 80s when he was at the Augusta
Heritage workshops and got to hear his phenomenal
fiddling, and also his brilliant songwriting. When you really study his songs, his lyrics, his imagination,
his wordsmithing, that was quite a mind. And he also put to music this beautiful Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
poem, Psalm of Life. I'm sure some of you know it, so we hope that you'll sing it with us. It is the
beginning of our adventure of getting Chao Bap into our trio style American old time harmonies.
Tune in, hang on.
earnest and the grave is not its goal, dost thou art to dust returneth was not spoken of the soul. And
if you miss a word just sing a note
So they can see really encourages me to try a lot of new things. I mean singing come on Yeah, and also
I danced a little bit the flat foot dance in a Floyd country store and that doesn't work well So don't
let don't ask me dance anymore I can dance with my two hands not the feet. I mean So the next tune is
91 a Chinese tune. I'm going to sing as the vocal to
And Kathy Morrissey, they sound it beautifully in Chinese. They're going to sing with me. That's my
revenge to them. You know, they put me on the hard part to sing. I put them on a harder part to sing
in Chinese. What about that? It's her punishment.
It's all about punishment. But this coming tune is actually a beautiful melody talking about people
trying so hard to beautiful their hometown into a better place. It's called Nan Ni Wan. We also included
an English version that comes from Cathy Fing. Beautiful lyrics. I hope you can sing along with us once
you feel good.
I did an amazing translation of the Chinese in my sleep. So do I for the three parts harmony.
You just have to throw it to the wind and throw it down. Well, before we do our last song, a billion
thanks first and foremost to Tamara Lowenthal, who brought us here to Lotus Fest for the first time.
Thank you. To this amazing crew here at the Buskirk Theater, Wayne on the sound.
Tony on the monitors, everybody else in this theater has treated us so beautifully. It's been an incredible
experience. We are delighted to share it with you. Thank you for coming today. And, you know, one last
big thanks to the amazing Marcy Marksor on ukulele, mandolin, doomback, cello, banjo, guitar, and incredible vocals.
She's the one and only Chinese Yang Qin virtuoso and has many secrets in her back pocket. And she will
show you some of them out there in the lobby at intermission. Chow Bab Tian. And in the center of the
group, first woman to win the West Virginia State Banjo Contest.
First woman to win the Clif Top Banjo Contest. Singer, songwriter, great musician, Cathy Fink. We have
a small handful of CDs left in the lobby. Don't make us take them home. And if we run out of something
you want, we're very low on the China to Appalachia CDs, but we have more coming in any day. You can
get them off of Bandcamp.
And that comes directly to us. We also have an email list out there. And that's where Chow Pop will
be showing her secrets. Thank you all so much. We want you to join in on this last song. It's one that
we closed with yesterday as well. So if you were here, you already know it. But in case you don't, it
goes like this. We're gonna hold each other up. We're gonna lift each other high. We're gonna love each
other better than before.
And our hearts will keep on yearning for each other when the world is so unsure. We live in an unsure
world right now and events like this help us come together, join our voices, charge our batteries, go
back to our five calls app, hint, hint, hint, so we can on a daily basis
call into our representatives, tell them what we want because we run this country, we pay them. Let's
get together and do what needs to be done. And by the way, Chow is now going to do one more transformation
and turn our Chinese dulcimer into a honky tonk piano. One, two, three. We're gonna hold each other
We're gonna love each other high. We're gonna love each other better than before. This whole world will
keep on turning and our hearts will keep on yearning for each other when the world is on show. We've
seen troubles in the past, some gone by and some at last.
stop