Calamity Mo: Mississippi Valley Creole Culture Aficionado

Old Mines friends take note! Music historian, author and clawhammer banjo player Calamity Mo collects and currently specializes in the French- Creole songs of Missouri and Illinois. Calamity Mo is in the region to join in Prairie du Rocher’s Guiannée, the old French folk song still sung yearly for New Year’s Eve. For us, she’ll be playing mainly an Appalachian Old Time set, salted with some of her favorite curiosities from field recordings such as a California ballad from 1906, a Wisconsin-Belgian ditty, and, among other Illinois/Missouri Creole Songs, the end of the 18 th  century “Chanson de l’année du coup” narrating the 1780 Battle of St Louis. Backing her on fiddle, Stefan Santiago, a young fixture of the Carbondale folk scene. Calamity Mo’s main bands are The Cuckoo Sisters, The Hog’s Trotters, and square dance band Carambolage. In the States, apart from the Prairie du Rocher Singers, she has joined the Capitol Hillbillies in DC.