Shhhhhh!

Nah, that’s the sound from a library in the olden days. What do libraries sound like these days? Well just ask Rick Ceballos and the 5-Town Friends of the Arts group that will be hosting the second annual Winter Into Spring Musical Library Tour.

That’s right, area musicians will be performing on the third Thursday of the month from January through May at community libraries in New Haven, Lincoln, Starksboro, Bristol and Monkton. All performances start at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free with donations welcome.

“It went really well last year,” said Ceballos, who helps organizes the event with fellow 5-Town Friends of the Arts board member David Gusakov. “All of the shows last year were very well attended… In fact two of the shows were standing room only. I’d say it was very successful.”

So, they’re back at it again this year with a stellar line up that kicks off on Jan. 16 at the New Haven Community Library with the trio Va-et-vient.

“We are so pleased to be invited to kick off this new series,” said Carol Reed in a response on behalf of the trio. “In today’s post-COVID venues, performing in libraries has become a new, special community-building experience. We are delighted that our beloved libraries have joined other businesses in offering live music. The intimate setting provides more opportunities for musicians and audiences to get to know each other. We certainly appreciate the fundraising that allows anyone to attend for free!”

Va-et-vient features Carol Reed of Leicester (voice, guitar and mandolin), Suzanne Germain of Lincoln (voice and percussion) and Lausanne Allen of South Starksboro (voice, fiddles, flute, penny whistles, harmonica and mandolins). Reed and Germain first began performing together in 1998, then George Dunne joined and the group took on the name Va-et-veint (“Come and Go”). Michael Corn joined the group from 2004-2009 and Allen joined in when Dunne retired in 2015.

“Va-et-vient will be performing music from an array of different French-speaking cultures, as is our custom,” explained Reed. “Québec along with other parts of francophone Canada; France, with a particular draw to the music of Bretagne (Brittany); Louisiana, where Cajun music developed from the roots of its earlier immigrants from the North; and the Antilles, where French blends with many African languages to create Créole, perfect for both lively and touching songs.”

If you’ve heard Va-et-vient before, this time be ready for some more Créole songs.

“We are always adding new material, particularly as we travel and work with other musicians,” Reed said. But nothing quite compares with home. “We love performing in our home county, and have enjoyed attending concerts in the New Haven Library in recent years. Often, the organizers of our local library concert series are fellow musicians, and we appreciate their work to promote live music, drawing from the talent that surrounds us.”

“Music and libraries just go together,” Ceballos echoed. “There’s something about the atmosphere that is conducive [to intimate acoustic performances]. And the librarians have been so supportive and such good partners with us on this. They’re just as enthusiastic as the rest of us!”

Ceballos is excited for Tim McKenzie to be back on the bill this year — he had an injury last year and was unable to perform. Another special performance Ceballos pointed to is the finale of the season on May 15, with William Lee Ellis.

“He’s a world-famous musician,” Ceballos said. “It was pretty special getting him.”

How did Ceballos “get him?”

“Well,” Ceballos remembered. “I just out of the blue sent him a message, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, well certainly.’”

Go grab your pencils and mark your calendars, these concerts are more than quaint and you won’t want to miss them. And we promise, no one will shush you.

Winter Into Spring Musical Library Tour 2025

Thursday, Jan. 16

New Haven Library

Va-et-vient

Addison County group Va-et-vient (“Come and Go”) celebrates the many colors found in music from several French cultures. These musiciennes will take you through the centuries from France to Québec and New Orleans with lively dance numbers, touching love songs, kickin’ Cajun and Créole tunes, and rollicking Québecois favorites. From our neighbors to the north, they bring back traditional tunes learned from Québecois elders (and youngsters!), reweave them into their own arrangements, and have been spreading them throughout New England and Québec since 2001. The group includes Carol Reed (voice, guitar and mandolin), Suzanne Germain (voice and percussion), and Lausanne Allen (voice, fiddles, flute, penny whistles, harmonica and mandolins).

Thursday, Feb. 20

Lincoln Library

Tim McKenzie

Tim McKenzie hails from Burlington and is one of the very finest singers and guitarists in the state. A founding member of Pine Island, Vermont’s premier bluegrass/swing band of the ’70s, McKenzie dazzles with his unique finger-picking style on guitar; his throaty vocals are irresistible.

McKenzie has shared the stage or billing with such luminaries as Emmy Lou Harris, Vassar Clements, Ricky Skaggs and Doc Watson, as well as many of Vermont’s finest. After a long hiatus from the Green Mountain State, he returned to us several years ago and has embarked on a solo career here.

Thursday, March 20

Starksboro Public Library

Rick Ceballos

Rick Ceballos plays the five-string banjo and button accordion. Through the years he has gone down many musical paths. Ceballos’s music resonates with the vitality and excitement he learned in Maine dance halls in the 1970s. He gathers songs and tunes from France, Ireland, England, Galicia and the United States. His original compositions draw and elaborate on the colorful traditions he studies. The stories that surround traditional music and instruments fascinate Ceballos, and he shares these tales with his audience.

Thursday, April 17

Lawrence Memorial Library in Bristol

Ted Wesley

Ted Wesley has been singing and playing folk music, ragtime and country blues in the Champlain Valley for over 40 years. Lately, he has been adding to his repertoire by setting some favorite poems from the Classic Victorian Nonsense era to tunes of his own devising.

Thursday, May 15

Russell Memorial Library in Monkton

William Lee Ellis

Acclaimed Americana/Blues guitarist William Lee Ellis was raised in the deep roots of American music. Named after his godfather, legendary bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, Ellis grew up in a musical family — his father, respected banjo composer Tony Ellis, was one of Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys.

Growing up in the Kingsport-Bristol-Johnson City cradle of country music, Tennessee native Ellis was immersed in roots music heaven at an early age — some of his earliest memories include trips with his father to visit old time music master Tommy Jarrell and being bounced on his godfather’s knee. It was only natural to take up the guitar, and Ellis spent his adolescence backing his fiddle-and-banjo-playing dad at bluegrass festivals and contests across the country.

In college, Ellis took his musical studies in a new direction, spending the better part of a decade playing classical guitar and earning a master’s degree in classical performance from the University of Cincinnati — College Conservatory of Music. While there, Ellis chanced upon a musician who would change his life: Piedmont blues giant Reverend Gary Davis. Folk-blues revivalist Andy Cohen introduced Ellis to Davis’s intricate fingerpicking style, which fascinated the classically trained guitarist.

“Davis was both a brilliant sacred musician and bluesman, and that’s a mix I love dearly in pre-war traditional and folk music,” Ellis said. “A combination of the heavenly and the hellish, full of tension, drama and gut-hitting emotion.”

Along the way — including years living in Japan then Memphis — Ellis learned to combine Davis’s fingerpicking technique with his classical performance background and the bluegrass-infused memories of his youth. Yet it’s clear that he’s no revivalist — Ellis writes his own unique music, using old blues forms and apocalyptic gospel themes as a vocabulary to express contemporary experiences. In his quest to capture the timeless appeal of pre-war traditions, and to make the music’s message live for today, Ellis has created a brand of Americana/roots music that’s all his own.

Ellis’s recordings have been hailed by the international press from Billboard to the Times of London. His six albums include four for noted roots label Yellow Dog Records: 2000’s “The Full Catastrophe”; 2003’s “Conqueroo,” picked as one of the year’s best records by Acoustic Guitar magazine; 2006’s “God’s Tattoos,” which won a Best International CD honor at Australia’s BlueStar Awards; and 2023’s “Ghost Hymns,” nominated for Acoustic Blues Album of the Year at the prestigious Blues Music Awards.

The decade-long gap in Ellis’s recording activity is simple: he stepped into academia, earning a PhD in ethnomusicology and moving to Vermont, where he is Chair of Fine Arts and Professor of Music at Saint Michael’s College. In Vermont, Ellis has not only taught on blues, jazz and gospel music but has published on blues and folk art in equal measure, culminating in the spring 2023 show he curated at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, “Build a Heaven of My Own: African American Vernacular Art and the Blues.” He has also curated an ongoing series at Burlington’s Flynn Theater, “New Voices,” that celebrates the diasporic music making of regional acts and communities, many with an immigrant or refugee backgrounds.