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Skipjack News
| From Bridge to Boardwalk - A CD Project Like No Other |
by Marilyn Buerkle
"The road to market for an innovative product can be long and bumpy, but with the right combination of smarts and serendipity, potholes can be successfully navigated. A newly released audio tour of the Eastern Shore produced by the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation had some jolts and stalls, but it has arrived at a marvelous conclusion. The attractively packaged, two-CD set of oral histories and music is ready for distribution. (See audio samples, inset.) The package includes a 75-page companion booklet with essays, photographs, and a map.
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Nearly five years ago the foundation began its Delmarva Folklife Project with a mission to "document, preserve, promote and develop the traditional cultural resources of the Delmarva Peninsula." As experts, volunteers, community leaders, and others gathered together for painstaking discussion and consensus building, one of the project ideas took an unusual form. The expedition to create From Bridge to Boardwalk: An Audio Journey Across Maryland's Eastern Shore had begun.
"They knew what they wanted to do and were struggling to get off the ground," says Project Manager Douglas Manger. He helped steer the group, worked to narrow its focus, joined in assembling a talented team of subcontractors, and roughed out a production schedule.
Luck played some part. Who knew conga drums would be a connection? The Maryland State Arts Council was a major contributor to the project, and when the council's public sector folklorist, Rory Turner, was introduced to a young woman who shared his love for playing conga drums, From Bridge to Boardwalk took a giant leap forward. "It actually was just really, really lucky," says Turner.
Tatiana Irvine was an aspiring freelance audio producer in 2002 when she met Turner at a folklore convention in Rochester NY. She had just finished graduate school and had already cut her teeth gathering oral histories for Smithsonian-financed projects in India and Africa. Her credentials, her enthusiasm, and her willingness to work within a non-profit's meager budget made her an ideal candidate to join the team.
"Her skill set combines an interest in folklore and the ability to carry out a high quality audio production," Manger says. Looking back, he also admits "nobody in their right mind would have done this for what we paid her."
Early in 2003, Irvine set up a field office in Denton MD which she would call home for nearly a year. Her first task was to listen to the hours of interviews fieldworkers had already collected. She determined that while the characters those field tapes revealed were indeed memorable, the audio quality -- or lack thereof -- rendered them unusable.
While she began re-interviewing and re-recording the "best of the best" Eastern Shore voices, a five-person steering committee was meeting monthly to coordinate how those oral histories would ultimately be presented.
In addition to Manger, Turner, and Irvine, the committee included Elaine Eff and Alan Cooper. Eff represented another major funder, the Maryland Historical Trust. She is an oral historian, folklorist, museum curator and film maker who heads the trust's Cultural Conservation Program. Cooper, the executive director of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation served as the committee's realist, keeping one eye on the product and the other on the budget.
The foundation provided the management services for the project. The National Endowment for the Arts was another major contributor. Additional support came from the Tourism Division of the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development and the Rural Development Center at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
Eff, Turner, Cooper, Irvine, and Manger developed a collective vision for From Bridge to Boardwalk, eventually deciding the final product would have multiple dimensions. A booklet of entertaining essays, compelling archival and contemporary photographs, and user-friendly reference material accompanies more than two hours of interviews and music on CD.
"It was such a rich and wide ranging project. I thought it was important to get it to the public," says Eff. She didn't want all that discussion, research, and field work to be "something that nobody ever looks at."
The team also believed the more ways the product was embellished visually and graphically, the more likely it would sell. After all, unless the product was attractive enough to be purchased and brought into people's homes and cars, the mission of encouraging people to appreciate and preserve Delmarva's unique heritage would fail. A fold-out map and spiral binding were added to encourage travelers to use the book to tour the Shore while listening to the CDs.
Wendell Brooks of the gospel group the Zionaires sings his message of faith. Photo by Douglas Manger, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation |  | Click on titles below to sample audio segments:
(requires Windows Media Player or RealPlayer) |
"Smith Island Waterman" (1.5 MB)
Jennings Evans describes growing up on Smith Island, a tiny community in the Chesapeake Bay.
"Bay Bridge Opens" (820 KB)
Nick Hoxter was there when the very first car crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1952.
"Sing Amen" (2.4 MB)
Listen to the gospel harmony of the Zionaires from Princess Anne, Maryland.
"Record Breaking Chicken makes New York Debut" (3 MB)
Lady Eglantine from Caroline County MD laid enough eggs to make headlines. Peggy Lewis Smith tells her story. |
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The Matapeake Ferry was the only way for Eastern Shore residents to travel to Baltimore and beyond before the construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1952. Photo from the H. Robins Hollyday Collection, Historical Society of Talbot County, Easton MD |
1960's era watermen dredge for oysters
aboard a skipjack.
Photo credit: Robert de Gast,
Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum Collection |
With agreement on the product dimensions, the final leg of the production journey kicked into high gear. There were writers to be recruited, copy to be edited, audio field tapes to be digitally mastered, historical archives and museum collections to be searched, copyrights to be negotiated, a first class graphic designer, a printing company and a CD creator to find, and photographs to take and to prepare for printing. Perhaps most importantly, deadlines needed to be set (and occasionally, re-set).
Manger cautions that the graphic design process alone for such an ambitious project can take as many as three months. But when all tweaking was done and final color proofs arrived from the Silver Spring MD office of graphic designer, Scott Severson, "I was stunned, absolutely stunned at the beauty of it," says Manger. Eff says, "I'm still ecstatic. I love sharing it." Confident that buyers of From Beach to Boardwalk will be satisfied, the foundation's challenge shifts now to marketing.
The first phase of the marketing plan relies on what's called "free media." Press releases and media kits will be distributed to newspapers, magazines, and broadcast stations throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Because the bulk of the project's budget was spent on producing the CDs and book, much of the marketing effort will rely on phone calls and personal interaction.
A distributor remains to be hired; it will be his or her job to get From Bridge to Boardwalk into gift shops, book stores, and other venues in the region. Meanwhile, copies are available through the foundation's website. At this writing, 150 copies have been sold. "We've been very lucky, there's a lot of word-of-mouth. It's a very unique product," says Karen Newell, marketing and communications officer at the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She has some of her own ideas about prospective buyers. She's contacting Eastern Shore real estate agents to suggest the CD set as the perfect house-closing gift for clients. She plans to suggest to major employers on Delmarva that they consider From Bridge to Boardwalk as a holiday gift for their employees and clients.
The budget for the project only permitted one thousand units to be produced on the first production run. At a retail purchase price of $19.95 each, it will be impossible to recoup the production costs. The printing bill alone was $10,000. If demand indicates a second production run is needed, there will have to be more fundraising to pay for it.
Some people believe the project costs are an investment in the local economy. "Heritage really does sell. There are a lot of statistics out there that prove the heritage/cultural traveler spends more money and stays longer…than a regular tourist," says Lisa Challenger, Director of Worcester County Tourism and one of the community representatives involved with the Delmarva Folklife Project. "These are the folks we're going after. It will help bring people into our smaller, inland communities, visiting our sites, staying in the B & B's, and having an impact on the local economies."
Marilyn Buerkle teaches communication courses and supervises the operation of the student radio station for the Department of English and Modern Languages at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. She is a veteran broadcast journalist, having reported, anchored, and produced news programs and managed newsroom staffs in Salisbury MD and Washington DC. She lives with her husband, Gary, an Eastern Shore native, in Salisbury. She can be reached at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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Links
Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation
http://www.midatlanticarts.org/home.html
Maryland Historical Trust
http://www.marylandhistoricaltrust.net/index.html
Maryland State Arts Council
http://www.msac.org/
National Endowment for the Arts
http://arts.endow.gov/
To order From Bridge to Boardwalk
http://www.midatlanticarts.org/programs_traditionalarts_delmarva_audiotour.html
Some of the vendors:
CD production
Music City Optical Media
http://www.mcominc.com/
Printing
Schneidereith & Sons
http://Schneidereith.com |
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