Old Songs, Current Times: Ben Traverse Brings the Ballads to Negaunee

There is a particular kind of musician who could make a comfortable living on nostalgia and refuses to. Ben Traverse is one of them. The Michigan folk balladeer plays banjo, guitar, mountain dulcimer, and autoharp, and tonight — 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 29, at the Negaunee Public Library — brings a program pointedly titled "Old Time in the Current Times" to the U.P., a few miles west of Marquette.

The Mining Journal previewed the Negaunee date, part of a run of library performances Traverse has been playing across the region. The pitch is not a museum tour. Traverse treats old-time songs as lenses — ways of looking at where the music came from, whose labor and whose culture built it, how it's been perceived and misperceived, and how a living tradition keeps evolving rather than freezing into amber. It's an all-ages, everyone-welcome show in a public library, which is exactly the unglamorous, essential kind of gig that keeps folk music breathing between festivals.

Traverse's roots run to a camp built around Alan Lomax's near-century-old field recordings across Michigan, and over the last decade the artist has become one of the state's more serious young traditional players — as much a community educator as a performer, hauling programming into libraries, schools, and community centers alongside the listening-room and festival sets. Three releases in, the catalog runs from solo collections of old American ballads in the Folkways spirit to collaborative records of seafaring shanties and Irish-diaspora tunes.

Here's why a library gig deserves a spotlight in a summer stacked with breweries and bandshells. The U.P.'s traditional-music ecosystem — the one that produces Hiawatha every July — doesn't sustain itself on the festival weekend alone. It needs the year-round drip: the school assembly, the library afternoon, the workshop where a ten-year-old touches a dulcimer for the first time. Traverse's whole model is that infrastructure. A kid who sees this show in Negaunee is a kid who might be jamming three campsites over at Hiawatha in a decade.

It's also just a good hang. Free, air-conditioned, no cover, a genuinely gifted player working a room the old-fashioned way. Bring the family, bring your questions about that weird stringed thing on the table, and let someone remind you that "old time" was somebody's brand-new song once. The current times could use it.

Sources: Traverse to perform at NPL — Mining Journal; Ben Traverse — official site; Folk singer performs for families at Ishpeming Carnegie Library — Upper Michigan's Source