So here I sit in my studio on a hot afternoon in Cleveland, manifestly NOT down at the harbor watching the Great Lakes Tall Ships Challenge (prolly has some trademark or something I'm supposed to use) "Parade of Sail" into the Port of Cleveland.

I'm disgusted and a fair bit wroth at the long list of lacks this situation has, but mostly, that there are no singers of traditional sailing songs of any stripe (I don't credit a Jimmy Buffet tribute band as traditional enough for me, though I'm sure there are sailors who might think he is, but he's naught to do with nautical on the Great Lakes)

In past Tall Ships series in the Great Lakes, there have been more stops, more ships, more publicity and more traditional performers. Further along on this Challenge, a Michigan city much smaller than Cleveland, will host a sea/lakes songs festival which looks to be wonderfully diverse. There are performers who work hard at keeping the Great Lakes song tradition alive, particularly Lee Murdock. I know Chicago has a sea song fest. Why is Cleveland so indifferent to it?

I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, but the lack of support for traditonal folk music seems to go hand in hand with a lack of regard for our waterfront as an important part of our city's history and tremendous asset for the future. Our former steamship museum the William S. Mather - a ship similar to the Edmund Fitzgerald, who even the hoi poloi have heard of - was so disdained by the city powers that be that it barely escaped banshisment entire. Instead, it has a less dignified kind of banishment by being given to the Science Museum and being shown as a generic "steam ship." Only technology is featured, not the history of shipping and the impact of that on the city's history.

Is the lack of traditonal music the equivalent of the canary in the coal mine for our heritage?

Joanne in Cleveland, the city that always apologizes for itself, south of Lake Erie.