If you’re a player or a fan of folk music in Rhode Island, there’s a good chance you’ve been to a Vox Hunters show, or attended one of the many community jams and sings they’ve led over the years.
“I would say that our music would fall under the category of social music,” said Ben Gagliardi, one of the two founding members of The Vox Hunters. “It’s music that brings people together. It’s participatory, no one’s really fully in charge. It has something for everyone to experience.”
That focus on the participatory element comes from their own entry into the folk world – each were taken under the wing of older tradition-bearers in the region, and welcomed into folk music spaces when they were young. They play traditional music, but in a way that’s welcoming and inclusive to audiences old and young. Armand Aromin, the other founding member, says no matter the context, they like to invite people into the music.
“When it comes to the songs that we sing, a lot of those songs have some sort of participatory element, so either chorus or refrain,” he said. “When it comes to tunes playing, whether it’s on stage or in jams, we’ve also started singing the tunes or lilting the tunes, vocalizing them. And so that’s a nice opportunity for people, especially people who are not instrumentalists, to be involved with the process instead of just being a bystander and maybe wishing that they were a part of it.”
Outside of performing, they host a bimonthly pub sing in Providence, where people of all ages and skill levels come from across the region to sing unaccompanied vocal songs – from sea shanties, to traditional ballads, to originals sung to old folk melodies. I asked them why they’ve been so drawn to that kind of singing.
“It’s that thrill of hearing a ton of voices all around you all doing the same thing. And the kind of, I don’t know, vulnerability and unhindered joy that comes with just singing together, in not a religious sense, in not a mundane ‘happy birthday’ sense” Gagliardi said. “It’s almost like the sense of fun that you get from playing a game. As adults, we don’t say, ‘let’s go play together.’ We don’t get that thrill as much. So I think it comes close to it. It’s spiritual for some, it’s social for some. It has so many levels to it.”
Going to folk music events in the region, Armand and Ben noticed a missing piece: no one seemed to be doing folk music specifically from Rhode Island. So they decided to find some.
“Well, we were inspired out of spite,” Gagliardi said. “Getting deeper into the folk circles and stuff, you kind of get a sense of regionality, and you’d meet people – we have met people who know sea songs from their area of the New England coastline, all the way up to Maine. We know folks who know lumber camp songs from upstate Maine and great old Vermont ballads, and friends who grew up in West Virginia who have Appalachian ballads that were handed down from their forebears. But we just wanted to find what was unique, special, diagnostically Rhode Island.”
The result of that curiosity, eventually, was a book: “The Ocean State Songster: A Sampling of Old Songs, Broadside Ballads and Folk Tunes From and About Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” And in 2020 they put out an album featuring some of that music, called “Fresh From The Board: Music From The Ocean State Songster.” It includes songs and tunes with names like “Trip to Pawtucket,” “Nell of Narragansett Bay,” and “The Belles of Providence.” Some of them are broadsides – cheaply printed sheets with lyrics about a recent event like a shipwreck, set to a familiar tune.
“Represented in those broadsides that go back to the early 1800s, late 1700s sometimes, there’s still that quirky local pride in things that are definitively Rhode Island,” Gagliardi said. “I mean, the ‘Johnny-Cake’ broadside is pretty phenomenal. It’s just basically touting Rhode Island farmers and all that they have – and above everything else, the Johnny-Cake is king.”
“Regardless of the recipe,” Aromin added.
The Vox Hunters, now a trio with cellist Flannery Brown, play a combination of Irish fiddle tunes, music from Cape Breton, old time, and many other traditional musical styles. But they also have a few original pieces that they like to work into their sets – from Flannery’s cello-centric fiddle tunes, to songs about insects inspired by Ben’s work in entomology, to songs like “The Vexings” by Armand, alternatively titled “Have You Got a Girlfriend Yet.” He said he wrote the song after running into the parents of a childhood friend.
“I said, ‘Oh, whoa, I haven’t seen you in so long. How’s it going? So nice to see you.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, hi. How’s it–’ No, they didn’t even ask me how it was going, they just asked me, ‘Oh, so do you have a girlfriend yet?’ And I got so annoyed at this, and I was just like steaming over that,” Aromin said. “And so, I had the idea to write a song about it … and it was one of the first songs that I wrote that not only is written in the spirit of like, yeah, a pub sing song that has a bit of a Irish, bit of a mixolydian feel to it, but also involves like Filipino cultural things, and queerness as well.”
You can find The Vox Hunters performing at Myrtle in East Providence on the first Sunday of every month. Their pub sing takes place every second and fourth Monday at Flatbread Pizza in Providence. For more information about their work and upcoming gigs, you can go to thevoxhunters.com.
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Music featured in this podcast:
- “Up in the Morning Early,” lyrics by Scottish poet Robert Burns
- “Old Kingston Jail” – notes from “The Ocean State Songster”: “Mr. David Matteson of Lafayette, R.I. sang this local song of unknown authorship for the Flanders Collection on May 8, 1945. The light-hearted ballad describes the conditions and various inmates of the Old Washington County Jail in Kingston Village, which had been present in some form and operating from 1792 to 1956. Since 1960 it has been the home of the South County History Center.”
- “Have You Got a Girlfriend Yet?” or “The Vexings,” an original song by Armand Aromin
