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Landen Fields (Announcer): On January 29th 1861 Kansas was admitted into the Union. One-hundred and fifty-nine years later, JCCC celebrated Kansas Day by having Kansas based folk musicians Tricia Spencer and Howard Rains play at the Polsky Theater and in the CoLab. Here’s professor Tai Edwards on these festivities.
Tai Edwards: So I am the Kansas studies institute director at JCCC. So Kansas Day is a big day for me. So we do programming every year for Kansas Day. So Kansas Day is the day that Kansas became a state. So that’s 1861 so it’s our 159th birthday. And I try to always do something at noon in the CoLab on Kansas Day. So this year we focused on doing collaboration with the Carlsen Center. And we did programming all day for children. Area fourth graders came and did music history learning and then Spencer and Rains preformed here for the CoLab for the JCCC audience and so we wanted to make sure we had programming like that for anyone who wanted to stop by in the CoLab today. So they work on preserving the history of folk music and folk art and so they were teaching us about that.
Announcer: Preserving these pieces of history is something of upmost importance for Edwards, as well as musician Tricia Spencer.
Tricia Spencer: There’s a huge importance because nobody preserved it before me. And because I’ve been doing for such a long time and I have kids coming up who are doing it. I kind of want to give them information so they know where it came from and where the tunes came from and who played it. And like I said nobody’s done any of that preservation in Kansas. They’ve done it in other states, like Missouri has a big preservation society for fiddling. But nobody’s done it in Kansas. And so because there’s generations behind me and because I’m actually out and about, teaching this music and preforming it I want to know more about what happened in our state and where the music came from.
Announcer: You can find more information about Spencer and Rains on their website – SpencerandRains.com. For The Campus Ledger, I’m Landen Fields.