Pamela Goddard

Folk Songs

Me and My Folk Music

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Bio

The Short Story

A writer and dance caller, traditionally influenced a capella singer Pamela Goddard lives in Ithaca, NY. For the past 30 years she's learned traditional songs from both sides of the Atlantic and is now focusing on the songs of New York State and New England.

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Raised in the boom of the 1960's folk revival, Pamela Goddard sang with her father at home, with the church choir, and travelled up and down the Hudson River soaking up music at the early Clearwater Picnics. The singers she heard at these Picnics (now known as the annualHudson River Revival Festival) have long since melded into her musical personality.

The chance discovery that her high school library contained a full collection of Library of Congress field recordings permanently altered her life and saved her from an adolescence of heavy metal rock music. She exchanged too many math and science classes for an exposure to blues, ballads, and chain gang songs, and set out on a path of seeking out traditional music wherever she could find it. Recent years have found her exploring the sound archives at Cornell University and Middlebury College, and she continues to promote the traditional singing of New York and New England.

By the 1980's, Pamela was a literature major in college, studying folk songs in their narrative form while soaking up local history as a staff member of the Sleepy Hollow Restorations living history museums. Pamela also encountered American and English Country Dancing during her college years, and has become a popular caller/instructor of both styles of dance.

Pamela emigrated "upstate" in 1989, moving to the Finger Lakes region of Central New York. Working full-time as the Curator of Education and Co-Director of a local history museum, she continued calling dances and singing traditional songs. In 2000, after nearly twenty years as a museum educator, Pamela decided to focus on her song and dance interests, and is now a free-lance writer, country dance caller, and folk singer.

Pamela Goddard has sung at coffeehouses, small festivals, and historic sites from Staten Island to Rochester, New York, and from Penobscot Bay in Maine to Ontario. When not singing solo versions of the traditional songs of North America and Great Britain, Pamela performs with the eclectic a capella trio Diamonds in the Rough. In performance, she blends an intimacy with the music and careful historical scholarship with light humor, creating an easygoing relationship with her audience. Much of her repertoire is performed in the pure, unaccompanied style, and Pamela also accompanies herself on the mountain dulcimer.