Dan Berggren brings deep Adirondack roots to the Lena stage on April 23rd

Count the tree rings since Dan Berggren first played Caffe Lena, and you’d reach a big number. 

Only an old-growth oak has deeper Adirondack roots.

Berggren sings of the land where his Irish immigrant great-great grandparents bought land with earnings from a Troy iron foundry, where his great-grandfather built the home and barns where grandfather Harry Wilson raised sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, and work horses and also pioneered rural mail delivery more than a century ago.

Geography and genealogy shaped Berggren’s tunes, so did Caffe Lena, where he plays his 80-something-th show on April 23; and so did north country community choir singing and, more surprisingly, the US Army and Air Canada.

This journey – Adirondacks, Germany, western New York, Adirondacks – has produced consistently deeply-rooted melodic music that recently earned Berggren Eddies nominations for both Folk/Traditional Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year.  The Eddies will be presented April 30 at Proctors in Schenectady.

These mark only his most recent appreciations. 

The late, great guitarist and music writer David Malachowski hailed him as “old-school folk in the best of ways, simple, solid and sure.” Environmentalist Bill McKibben calls Berggren “a throwback to the old role of the folk singer  . . . he’s articulating things that need to be said right now.”

Berggren started saying things, musically, with his family.

“Everyone sang,” said Berggren, “My mother and sister played piano, and my brother John played guitar. I learned my first chords from him.”

John also brought home records from the library in the Adirondacks hamlet of Minerva, folk and blues music of the Weavers, Pete Seeger, and Leadbelly. Late-night radio delivered modern folk from Boston’s WBZ. “Tom Rush inspired me the most,” he said. “I got to thank him one evening in Burlington when I got to open for him at the Champlain Valley Folk Festival.”

Apart from his brother’s informal guitar chord instruction and library records, Berggren had no formal music instruction until his teen years. Choral Director Helen Barnes at Minerva Central School urged him to learn Irish tunes, including “Praties” mourning the potato famine. Alice Schwitzer directed him in the Minerva Community Chorus – “first as a soprano, then when my voice changed, a bass.”

After college,  a low draft number inspired Berggren to enlist in the U.S. Army; this offered training and assignment options.

In uniform, Berggren trained in print journalism, television and radio broadcasting and foreign policy. Stationed in Germany, he produced brief interview segments with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, and other groups. Then, he spun records as morning DJ at NATO headquarters in Belgium, where he became chief announcer. He also started performing in a trio, singing songs by Doc Watson, Ian and Sylvia, and Gordon Lightfoot. Their renditions of Canadian songs by the latter may have encouraged Air Canada to hire Berggren and Army buddy Jim Kirby for a marketing campaign.

“Flying Germans to Calgary, Alberta, for the annual Stampede each July was big business,” Berggren recalled. Air Canada wanted more of it. Westerns inspired “cowboy clubs” where Germans in cowboy hats, boots and chaps rode horses. Air Canada urged travel agents to steer cowboy tourists to Calgary, offering steak dinners, open bars, slide shows of the Calgary Stampede and live music by Berggren and Kirby. “At that time, I didn’t know any Adirondack music,” said Berggren. “The most requested songs on that tour were ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ and ‘You Are My Sunshine’!”

“I returned home to the Adirondacks in 1975,” said Berggren, “bought a PA system and continued writing and performing songs about northern New York experiences and environmental issues.”

While playing anywhere he could, he was also “writing songs about home and the region in general.” He’d actually started this exploration while still in Germany. Homesick there, he wrote “Harry” about farmer-grandfather Harry Wilson. Its chorus: “He always did the best that he could. He never forgot: the earth was good.” 

Berggren at first avoided singing it for others: “It was so personal.” But he soon found the power of its respectful recollections. “People would tell me it reminded them of one of their parents or neighbors.” Music he‘d considered too private to share, music specific to a particular place and people, connected powerfully with others.

He searched for homeland songs everywhere, including in Essex County’s one-time historian Marjorie Lansing Porter’s collection of Adirondack folk music. She recorded some songs right in Minerva. Its Adirondack-based tunes inspired Pete Seeger to record “Champlain Valley Songs” in 1960, half Vermont songs and half from the Adirondacks.

Widening his search, Berggren wandered, “visiting old-timers on my grandfather Harry’s mail route.” He recorded 89-year-old Cecil Butler playing fiddle tunes and searched out “The Tune the Cow Died On,” a favorite of both Butler and grandfather Harry.

Berggren’s dedication to the tunes of farms and families in small towns around home only deepened after a restaurant owner who’d hired, then un-hired him asked for more country music. “I decided that wasn’t for me,” Berggren said, re-doubling his research into North Country music.

Teaching audio/radio studies at SUNY Fredonia (1977 to 2004) allowed weekend gigs and summer-long tours around the Adirondacks. He found like-minded colleagues: fellow Fredonia students John Kirk and Dan Duggan in the late 1970s and Peggy Lynn a decade later.  Prepping for a show together in Old Forge, he and Lynn “traded cassettes, learned a couple of each other’s songs, and have been singing together ever since.” Berggren also joined the Roots & Branches workshop program at Great Camp Sagamore; he, Kirk, Duggan, Lynn, Trish Miller, Sara Milonovich and others teach younger musicians about Adirondack music, stories and traditions.

In 1985, he passed a key career-building audition at Caffe Lena. He drove an hour south from home in Olmstedville for an open mic at the Caffe. Just one late-evening slot was open. “I thought, ‘There’ll be no one here but Lena and me by the time I sing!’” He sang three songs, including “Pat Malone Forgot That He Was Dead,” and handed Lena a copy of his first album, “Adirondack Green.” She was pleased to see “Pat Malone” on the album and asked, “Would you like to come back in the fall?”

“I was ecstatic,” said Berggren, who recorded Lena’s introduction on his return.

Since then, he’s played Caffe Lena “maybe 80 times, sometimes solo, sometimes with the Newton Street Irregulars (named for the Fredonia street where they all lived), and sometimes with Dan Duggan and Peggy Lynn as the Jamcrackers.” Arguably the most dangerous work in the Adirondacks, jam crackers broke up log jams in wild-river timber drives. The Jamcrackers next perform at the Caffe on August 4.

Berggren recently performed at the Caffe’s memorial for Bill Staines and contributed his new song “Free to Read” to the Caffe’s Banned Book Week in September.

He’s also part of the Caffe’s expanding educational programming. “Oona Grady, James Gascoyne, and I have been doing a weekly half-hour show for pre-schoolers (called Folk Club Kids),” he said; it’s available both in person and via live-stream and YouTube. 

Like a tree ring, Berggren’s association with the Caffe has been circular. His first album, “Adirondack Green,” helped earn him a performing spot there, “Dan Berggren In Concert,” his latest of 13 albums (plus a compilation), was recorded live on that same stage.

On April 23, in his 50th anniversary as a performer and a special Earth Day celebration, Berggren will perform solo. Like singer/song-leader Pete Seeger, he seldom sings solo for long.

“My goal in every concert,” Berggren said, “is to have the audience become the choir that sings on all the choruses.”

Sunday, April 23, 7 p.m. $22.50, general; $20.35 members, $11.75 students and children. 518-583-0022. www.caffelena.org.

Links (or, tree rings):

• Berggren’s song “Harry” https://danberggren.bandcamp.com/track/harry
• Another song honoring Harry: https://danberggren.bandcamp.com/track/when-harry-carried-the-mail
• The fiddle tune Berggren recorded on song-research rambles over his grandfather’s mail route: https://danberggren.bandcamp.com/track/irishtown-breakdown
• Another song-search find: https://danberggren.bandcamp.com/track/the-tune-the-cow-died-on
• The song that caught Caffe Lena impresario Lena Spencer’s ear: https://danberggren.bandcamp.com/track/pat-malone
• The album he handed Lena at his open mic audition: https://danberggren.bandcamp.com/album/adirondack-green
• The voice of Lena Spencer introducing Berggren in his first solo show: https://danberggren.bandcamp.com/track/lena-spencers-introduction-1985-save-your-money
• The Sagamore program where Berggren and others teach younger musicians about Adirondack music and lore: https://www.sagamore.org/programs/roots-and-branches-2023
• The song Berggren wrote and recorded for Caffe Lena’s Banned Books event: https://danberggren.bandcamp.com/track/free-to-read
• Another recent Berggren composition: https://danberggren.bandcamp.com/track/imagine-that