Walter Parks & The Unlawful Assembly at the Merryall Center

May 9 | New Milford, CT

The Merryall Center for the Arts opens its 75th anniversary season with Walter Parks & The Unlawful Assembly, a project that Parks built around the music that created American roots: old-school spirituals, gospel, blues, and prison work chants woven together with Appalachian hymns and swamp hollers. The band melds roots music of divergent origins as the soundtrack to American Black history intertwined with the music of white homesteaders.

The project began after Parks had to sing spirituals and hymns at his father's memorial, which sent him deep into research on the music's origins. He ended up at the Library of Congress, where he found field recordings of Francis Harper documenting music from Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, unearthing rustic old hymns, Appalachian reels, and hollers. The Library of Congress has since invited Parks to archive his own research with the American Folklife Collection. The band includes drummer and co-founder Steven Williams and vocalist Ada Dyer, who is currently on the Bruce Springsteen world tour.

The Merryall Center itself is worth knowing about if you don't already. Founded in 1952 by ten families who purchased a run-down building and opened it as a community center, the venue was dedicated in a ceremony where actor Fredric March read the Declaration of Independence and Marian Anderson sang the national anthem. It seats 75 people, which makes for an unusually intimate setting for a band of this scope.

Merryall Center, 8 Chapel Hill Rd., New Milford, CT. More info at merryallcenter.org.