Skifflers Will Venture Into Newtown

For Second Of Library’s Concert Series

C.H. Booth Library’s free summer concert series continues with The Jackson Pike Skifflers, local favorites who have played at many New England folk festivals as well as Lincoln Center in New York. The concert will take place on Friday, July 14, beginning at 7:30 pm, on the library’s back lawn at 25 Main Street in Newtown.

Bring lawn chairs and a picnic dinner; the event is appropriate for all ages. The concert promises to be an evening of old-fashioned fun for the whole family.

The Skifflers’ repertoire comes from 200 years of American tradition, when people made music for themselves long before radio, television and electronic devices. The history and spirit that lies within such music is something the Skifflers feel should be loved and enjoyed instead of gathering dust in an archive.

The group derives its name from Jackson Pike, the old name for Sport Hill Road in Easton, where band founders Kate and Will Tressler lived at the time the group formed.

Sometime in the early 20th Century, the stonecutter’s term skiffle, which means to shape roughly prior to finishing, came to be applied to skiffle bands. These were itinerant groups of musicians who played and sang ragtime, country tunes, music hall and jazz melodies with any instruments available, such as washtubs, washboards, gut buckets, harmonicas, banjos, canes, fiddles and guitars.

Today The Jackson Pipe Skifflers features Will Tressler on banjo, guitar, dobro, autoharp, dulcimer and melodeon; Kate Tressler on bass, bones, spoons, gut bucket and limberjack; David McCann on fiddle and guitar; Tom Lasko on accordion and guitar; Roger Whitcom on washboard and gut bucket; Dan Tressler, fiddle; Sally Tressler, flute; Jim Sirch on whistles, bodhran and clawhammer banjo; and Tom Reilly on resophonic guitar.

The group performs country and folk music from 1800 to 1950; minstrel, vaudeville, jazz, jug band, blues and popular tunes from 1840 to 1930; and New England and southern country dance music based on English, Irish, Scottish and French-Canadian tunes from about 1750 on.

In the event of rain, the concert will move into the library’s meeting/community room. For additional information, contact the library at 426-4533.