NOTE: This program has been moved to Zoom due to ongoing construction at the C.H. Booth Library.

Derek Piotr travels around the state with a doctor’s bag. Inside the bag are two simple items: a recorder he bought off eBay and a camera. While he travels from town to city to village, Piotr is oftentimes invited into people’s homes and to document something special: American folk songs.

Piotr is a local folklorist who hails from New Milford and has dedicated the past five years of his life to preserving the disappearing oral history and tradition of Appalachia. It started with his grandmother, whom Piotr said he was very close to.

“I had a wonderful relationship with my grandmother,” Piotr said. “She didn’t sing, but she was telling stories all the time about growing up in the Cross River, Katonah area, and some of the strange jobs she had.”

Piotr said when he got his first mobile phone around the age of 17, he started “clandestinely recording” some of her “outrageous stories.” When his grandmother passed in 2018, he began to compile the recordings of her, which totaled about an hour. He put them into an iTunes playlist in chronological order and that became the “prototype” of his fieldwork.

“The next year, I was really preoccupied … with the WPA recordings made by the Lomaxes … for the Library of Congress in the late 30s. So, I found this one singer on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. And she sang with a lot of clarity, but the texts that she was singing, they were really dark, like murder ballads,” Piotr told The Newtown Bee.

He was “struck,” he said, by the balance of “briskness and heavy subject matter.” By the time he wanted to do more research and had an appointment at the Library of Congress scheduled, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and shut the world down.

His research then began at home, which he described as a “blessing.” As he continued to research this singer, he got in touch with her last living daughter, who was only alive for about ten months after Piotr connected with her.

“This woman reminded me so much of my grandmother that I ended up buying this on eBay,” he said, grabbing his recorder on the table. “I went down to Elk Park to visit her.”

Even with her health issues, which made her more susceptible to COVID and related complications, he said she took her mask off and sang for him. He realized that he could do this work in a more formal way now that he was armed with a proper recorder.

“It signified to me that I could do this work in a pretty compassionate way and preserve people’s memories,” Piotr said. He added that the woman he met with had cousins who were related to famous banjo players. He said he found himself “in a very rich cross-section of Appalachia.”

Then, in 2021, Piotr went to Britain. He noted that folk songs in Appalachia came from Britain and wondered how many were left in Britain. By the end of summer in 2022, he had over 208 recordings from his time in Elk Park and Britain.

He promised himself if he had gotten to a “clean number, like 100 or 200,” that he would try to donate the recordings, either to the Library of Congress or somewhere else. Piotr said he found the process of donating the work “prohibitive,” however, so he launched his own website.

At the time of this publication, Piotr now has 1,400 recordings — and is looking for more.

His mission is “to prove that oral tradition persists in the age of TikTok and iPads, I mean, that’s really important to me.” He typically asks people to perform the songs unaccompanied, but welcomes the fiddle players and the pipers, and even those who consider themselves experts at playing the “spoons.”

During his studying and documenting, he realized Connecticut is not represented as well as other areas in Appalachia, so he began to focus on Connecticut. He has found Tamil songs, Albanian songs, Romanian songs, Haitian songs, and all kinds of “small and somewhat uncommon folk songs that people just happen to remember.” He added that he thinks people “overlook” how diverse Connecticut is.

Piotr’s Program At Booth Library

On Tuesday, August 19, at 6 pm, Piotr will be on Zoom to walk people through his website, fieldwork-archive.com, and include interested patrons in his work. Piotr invites anyone with folksongs or songs they heard in childhood to attend the event and come forward.

“I really hope people will come forward with songs, no matter how small,” Piotr said. He added that people will be “glad they participated … in five years.”

Piotr added, “Any fragment of a song, anything half-remembered, it’d be amazing to get a song about Newtown. Please come forward with your silly little songs that no one wants to hear because I want to hear them. And more people want to hear them than you think.”

Registration is requested for Piotor’s 75-minute program, which will be conducted via Zoom. Visit chboothlibrary.org or call 203-426-4533 to register or for additional information.

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Reporter Sam Cross can be reached at sam@thebee.com.