Kim Chase is an atheist, but she considers Franco-American music sacred. In her first year teaching at Lyman C. Hunt Middle School in Burlington, when she tried to lead the class in French folk songs, a student began singing "Kumbaya," Chase recalled. Incensed at the mockery, she immediately returned her guitar to its case and ended the lesson. Chase, who's of French Canadian descent, went on to teach middle schoolers for 20 years, but she never attempted to share French folk songs with her students again. "I'm not taking something that's very dear to me," she said, "and sharing it with people who're at a developmental stage where they're just going to mock it." It's been difficult finding people who share her passion for Franco-American music, said Chase, 56. But soon she may have a more receptive audience. Since last winter, Chase has been part of an educational outreach project called "Revitalizing Franco-American Song in the Champlain Valley of Vermont." Led by the Vermont Folklife Center and Young Tradition Vermont, it aims to record and facilitate the sharing of French-language songs. The organizations received a grant of $5,000 from the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership to provide materials for a series of singing classes that will begin in the fall, open to middle schoolers, older students and adults. From roughly 1840 to 1930, French-speaking Québécois migrated across the border to farm and to work in the mills and stone quarries of central Vermont. Towns known as p'tits Canadas include Barre, Burlington and Winooski. Chase's maternal grandmother moved from Cap-Santé, Qué., between 1905 and 1910 to Winooski, where her mother was born. Growing up in Massachusetts, Chase spent every summer with her grandparents in Winooski, and her family moved permanently to Vermont in 1970. Like other immigrant groups, later generations of Franco-Americans assimilated into the dominant culture of the English-speaking Yankees. The repertoire of Franco-American songs hasn't been considered part of the corpus of folk music in Vermont in the way that English-language songs are, said Andy Kolovos, director of archives and research at the Vermont Folklife Center, because, for many families of French Canadian extraction, "that strong connection isn't there." For such descendants, "that 'Frenchness' is a last name and a grandmother," added Kolovos. He hopes the project will rekindle these people's interest in their background. Mark Sustic of Young Tradition Vermont, a nonprofit devoted to teaching traditional music…
Kim Chase is an atheist, but she considers Franco-American music sacred. In her first year teaching at Lyman C. Hunt Middle School in Burlington, when she tried to lead the class in French folk songs, a student began singing "Kumbaya," Chase recalled. Incensed at the mockery, she immediately returned her guitar to its case and ended the lesson. Chase, who's of French Canadian descent, went on to teach middle schoolers for 20 years, but she never attempted to share French folk songs with her students again. "I'm not taking something that's very dear to me," she said, "and sharing it with people who're at a developmental stage where they're just going to mock it." It's been difficult finding people who share her passion for Franco-American music, said Chase, 56. But soon she may have a more receptive audience. Since last winter, Chase has been part of an educational outreach project called "Revitalizing Franco-American Song in the Champlain Valley of Vermont." Led by the Vermont Folklife Center and Young Tradition Vermont, it aims to record and facilitate the sharing of French-language songs. The organizations received a grant of $5,000 from the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership to provide materials for a series of singing classes that will begin in the fall, open to middle schoolers, older students and adults. From roughly 1840 to 1930, French-speaking Québécois migrated across the border to farm and to work in the mills and stone quarries of central Vermont. Towns known as p'tits Canadas include Barre, Burlington and Winooski. Chase's maternal grandmother moved from Cap-Santé, Qué., between 1905 and 1910 to Winooski, where her mother was born. Growing up in Massachusetts, Chase spent every summer with her grandparents in Winooski, and her family moved permanently to Vermont in 1970. Like other immigrant groups, later generations of Franco-Americans assimilated into the dominant culture of the English-speaking Yankees. The repertoire of Franco-American songs hasn't been considered part of the corpus of folk music in Vermont in the way that English-language songs are, said Andy Kolovos, director of archives and research at the Vermont Folklife Center, because, for many families of French Canadian extraction, "that strong connection isn't there." For such descendants, "that 'Frenchness' is a last name and a grandmother," added Kolovos. He hopes the project will rekindle these people's interest in their background. Mark Sustic of Young Tradition Vermont, a nonprofit devoted to teaching traditional music…