The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum presents a music history double feature on Sunday afternoon, September 27, 2026 with a talk by musicologist Poe M. Allphin on the musical histories at Forty Acres and in the PPH collection, followed by a concert with Grammy-nominated ethnomusicologist, experimentalist, and legend in folk music, Tim Eriksen.

Poe M. Allphin’s talk, featuring music by Tim Eriksen, will be held in the Corn Barn at 1 p.m., and Tim Eriksen’s concert will take place in the Sunken Garden at 3 p.m. The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum is located at 130 River Drive, Route 47, Hadley, MA 01035. The talk is free, and concert admission is $12 for adults, $2 for children 16 and under. The museum and its grounds are a smoke-free site. For further information please call (413) 584-4699 or view www.pphmuseum.org.

This double feature combines scholarship and performance to explore the region’s music history, unearthing sonic cultures of the Connecticut River Valley and New England through the material collections at PPH, as well as through popular secular and sacred tunes of the past and present. From the psalm tunes sung by Elizabeth Porter Phelps as a young woman and still sung today at local shape note sings, to the history of the “guitar” played by three generations and on view at Forty Acres today, Eriksen and Allphin’s performance and research reveals the integral role of music in everyday life in the region, in the past as in the present.

Poe M. Allphin is a Research Fellow at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, where he is working on a multigenerational history of music in the Porter-Phelps-Huntington family and at Forty Acres. He received his PhD in historical musicology from the CUNY Graduate Center. Allphin’s scholarship, which appears in Resonance and Contemporary Music Review, has previously been supported by the New England Research Fellowship Consortium and the Center for the Humanities at CUNY.

Tim Eriksen’s music springs from fierce curiosity and radical exploration, and he is best known as a pioneer of post punk American folk song. He received a PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in 2015 and has published related work on early New England music in connection with 19th-century Abolitionism, apocalyptic religion, technology, and the birth of science fiction. He has crafted his own distinctive, hardcore Americana sound that combines thrilling vocals, banjo, fiddle, guitar, and bajo sexto–a Mexican acoustic bass. Using this sound, Eriksen has transformed the American folk tradition with his unmatched interpretations of love songs, ballads, shape-note gospel, and dance tunes from both New England and Southern Appalachia. Along with his extensive performance career, Eriksen is a prolific educator and regularly teaches workshops on American music history, shape-note harmony, ballad singing, and instrumental accompaniment. Eriksen is also the founder of the world’s largest Sacred Harp singing convention in Northampton, MA: the Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Convention. Above all, Eriksen’s work, in both performance and education, is an investigation into the human experience and an unapologetic expression of its truths.

The Porter-Phelps Huntington Museum sits on ancestral Nonotuck lands. The House was built in 1752 by Moses and Elizabeth Porter and was central to the 600-acre farmstead known as “Forty Acres.” Today, the 114 acre property is “Forty Acres and Its Skirts”, a National Register of Historic Places district that includes the PPH museum and homestead, and neighboring Phelps farm, surrounded by protected farmland, forest, and river frontage. The Museum contains a collection of the belongings of seven generations of one extended Hadley family, and portrays the activities of family members, enslaved people, artisans, household servants, and farm laborers who made "Forty Acres" an important social and commercial link in local, regional and national cultural and economic networks. The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Family Papers, one of the largest collections of family papers in the country, are now housed at Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum is located at 130 River Drive, Hadley, MA, on Route 47 just two miles north of the junction of Routes 9 and 47 North in Hadley. (413) 584-4699 www.pphmuseum.org .