The URI Theatre Department will hold an eight-show production of the modern-day cult classic “Ride the Cyclone” beginning April 17 in the Will Theatre in the URI Fine Arts Center. (URI Photo/Seth Jacobson)
We’re familiar with cult
classics, such as “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” which have
earned passionate fanbases for 50 years. Such unique artistic endeavors are
defined by their transgressive or strange nature, leading to a niche following
that keeps the story alive through rediscovery and admiration.
“Ride the Cyclone,” by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell,
entered the scene in 2009. It has emerged as the Gen Z musical theatre cult
classic of today. Originally available as a bootleg on YouTube and later on
TikTok, the musical earned millions of views. This online fame sparked strong
demand for productions in high schools, universities, and community theatres in
the United States, Canada, and Europe.
The University of Rhode Island Theatre Department’s production of the
musical opens an eight-show run on Friday, April 17, in the Robert
E. Will Theatre in the URI Fine Arts Center, 105 Upper College Road, on the
Kingston Campus. The play follows six teenagers from the St. Cassian High
School chamber choir in Uranium City, Saskatchewan, who died on a faulty roller
coaster called The Cyclone.
The other day I listened to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’
1996 recording of “Knoxville Girl,” a traditional ballad about a girl from my
hometown who got pummeled to death with a stick by her lover and dumped into
the Tennessee River. The lyrics are typical of many a handed-down English folk
song in that it features the violent murder of a sweet, young, not-so-innocent
thing.
Scots-Irish and English immigrants (settlers who may have been
indentured servants, religious and economic refugees, colonizers, possibly all
of the above) brought the seeds of this song to the US and then unto
Appalachia. Besides Nick Cave, the Louvin Brothers, Lemon Drops, BR549,
Outlaws, and many others have covered “Knoxville Girl.”
I suspect some don’t
even think twice about singing from the point of view of the murderer who is
sitting in jail feeling sorry for himself. Perhaps this song was once meant to
scare young people off from fooling around before wedlock, but it often come
across, at least to me, as more sympathetic to a man grieving for the loss of
his freedom rather than the loss of a young woman’s life. Perspective means
everything. Anyway the words are at the bottom of this post so see for
yourself.
Although I grew up hearing a lot of folk music, I only
really learned about the lineage of murder ballads my first year back in the
States, when I spent my second semester at Friends World College doing an
apprenticeship and self-guided study on urban Appalachians, migration, and
culture. My advisor was an ethnomusicologist who supported my investigations of
country music on juke boxes in downtown Cincinnati dive bars. Grandma Bonnie
Blanton Vance kinda territory. I learned as much from the other patrons’ stories
as I did from the lyrics we sang along to over shots and beers.
For part of my apprenticeship at the Urban Appalachian
Council, I put to good use skills I had honed organizing punk shows helping out
with the musical and storytelling stages of the annual Appalachian Festival.
Because I was once again behind the scenes and not in the audience, I got to
meet the likes of the Dillards, Dry Branch Fire Squad, Rich Kirby, Sparky and
Rhonda Rucker, and Sheila Kay Adams, whose version of “Knoxville Girl” is one
of the best I’ve heard, sung in the true ol’ timey way.
I got to work with some
of the godfathers and godmothers of the Cincinnati hillbilly music scene, one
of whom invited me to his house after the festival to confess he had fallen in
love with me, a 22- year-old less than half his age. I went because a group of
us had been meeting there to plan the thing. After that, I withdrew and was
never involved with that group of people again.
A few years later, I went to grad school in Washington DC
and wasted hours that should have been dedicated to writing about the impact of
structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund on
poor people in poor countries, instead browsing the library stacks which held
rare books full of old songs collected by jobless artists dispatched by the
Works Progress Administration to the Third World hollers of Southern
Appalachia.
I formed a band and found my voice while working out harmonies and
writing lyrics that were basically revenge fantasies in which the fair maiden
gets revenge on the man who led her down the proverbial path in the woods to a
muddy, soon bloody riverbank.
My songs weren’t nearly as good as Hazel Dickens
and Alice Gerrard’s recordings of feminist folk songs from the 1960s and 70s,
but can be seen as stemming from that tradition, with the addition of the
electric guitars and distortion pedals of 1980s punk and 1990s shoegaze.
Changing culture takes decades of work over many generations.
I’ve often thought that by getting me out of Knoxville when
I was a jaded and angry 15-year-old punk, my parents steered me off a bad
trajectory. I was able to get a much better education and came to understand
the world in ways that I simply could not had I stayed in my hometown. I gained
perspectives that East Tennessee preachers and some of my schoolteachers tried
to shield me from, because such knowledge liberates one from the narrow
cultural, political, and religious grips in which they wanted to keep me and
the other Knoxville girls.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Cheryl and I have been friends for 30 years, meeting early on in her organizing career and staying in touch through the years. What Cheryl doesn't mention is her deep family ties to Rhode Island and that she has moved back to Rhode Island after a long organizing stint in California. - Will Collette
The University of Rhode Island Jazz Big Band will perform during the Voices in Jazz festival March 5 and will hold a special concert on April 25 where for the first time University alumni will take the stage with the band for an all-star show—all at the URI Fine Arts Center Concert Hall. (URI Photo/Nora Lewis)
The University of Rhode
Island Concert
Band and Wind Ensemble both intend to send audiences into unique
musical mindsets on Sunday, Feb. 22, at 3 p.m. to help kick
off the Music Department’s spring semester concert schedule.
The Wind Ensemble and Concert Band, under the direction of
URI Director of Bands Brian Cardany, will take the stage at the URI Fine Arts
Center Concert Hall, 105 Upper College Road, on the Kingston Campus. The Wind
Ensemble concert will center around the theme, “Atmospheres,” set to transport
audiences into an aesthetic world.
Pieces to be performed for “Atmospheres” are “Steampunk
Suite” by Erika Svanoe, “Diamond Tide” by Viet Cuong, “Catalyst” by Adrian
Sims, and “Wild Nights” by Frank Ticheli.
The Concert Band will perform “Liberty Bell” by John Philip
Sousa, “Mystery on Mena Mountain” by Julie Giroux, and Steven Reineke’s “Into
the Raging River.” Victor Sanchez, a URI graduate assistant, will conduct the
Concert Band’s rendition of David Holsinger’s “A Childhood Hymn.”
The Wind Ensemble and Concert Band will also perform live
on Sunday, April 26, at 3 p.m. at the Fine Arts Center.
Details of that show will be unveiled at a later date.
The annual Voices in Jazz festival will be kicked off by
the URI
Jazz Big Band, directed by URI Director of Jazz Studies Emmett Goods,
on Thursday, March 5, at 8 p.m. at the URI Concert Hall. This
year’s festival will welcome guest composer Le’Andra McPhatter, a jazz pianist
and organist who founded the Journey Music Academy and Journey Online
organizations to cultivate the next generation of musicians.
The descendants of former President John F. Kennedy
are denouncing Donald Trump’s order to shutter
the Kennedy Center and calling bullshit on his reasons for doing so.
On Sunday, Trump abruptly announced on Truth Social that
beginning on July 4, the performing arts center in Washington, DC, which he
recently renamed after himself, would shut down for two years for
“Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.”
Trump said the decision was based on input from a group of
“many Highly Respected experts,” who said the center was “tired, broken, and
dilapidated” and needed to be shut down for a facelift.
However, the family of the center’s namesake said it has
more to do with the recent pullout of talent in protest after it
became the “Trump-Kennedy Center” last year and the president began asserting
control over its programming, which included the world premiere of a hagiographic documentary about his
wife, First Lady Melania Trump, this weekend.
In a post on social media, JFK’s
niece, Maria Shriver, gave what she said was a “translation” of Trump’s
comments about the center’s sudden closure.
She suggested the president meant to say: “It has been
brought to my attention that due to the name change (but nobody’s telling me
it’s due to the name change), but it’s been brought to my attention that
entertainers are canceling left and right, and I have determined that since the
name change no one wants to perform there any longer.”
Speaking as Trump, she continued: “I’ve determined that due
to this change in schedule, it’s best for me to close this center down and
rebuild a new center that will bear my name, which will surely get everybody to
stop talking about the fact that everybody’s canceling... right?”
The HeartThrobs – Joe Parillo on piano, Ian Reyes on Bass,
Doc Wood on guitar and vocal, and introducing Paula Claire on vocals – will be
presenting songs of love both old and new, the familiar and the unfamiliar,
from the worlds of folk music and jazz.
At the library on Feb 13, 2026, 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Cross’ Mills Public Library, 4417 Old Post Rd, Charlestown, RI 02813-0909
Thank you, Senator Gu!
This week Senator Victoria Gu presented library director
Sarah Ornstein with a Senate Legislative Grant in the amount of $1000, to be
used to expand Cross’ Mills Library’s ebook collection.
Wide variety of
music genres From Bandapalooza to Duke Ellington’s 125th
By Kiera Wrage
URI’s Music Department has a full slate of performances scheduled throughout the fall. Among them are the department’s first- ever Bandapalooza presented by the URI Concert Band, Wind Ensemble and the community American Band on Nov. 2. (URI Photo/Nora Lewis)
First up: The Jazz Combos 1 performance is set forTuesday, Oct. 14, at 7:30 p.m. at the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall. The combos will perform a wide variety of jazz while focusing on traditional jazz improvisation techniques.
“We try to curate each performance to be unique,” said Associate Professor Emmett Goods, director of the jazz studies program. “Our young musicians are emerging professionals and take each performance and give it 110%.”
The University of Rhode
Island’s Music Department will host its first-ever Bandapalooza event on Sunday,Nov.
2, at 1 p.m.in theFine Arts Center
Concert Hall – one of many musical performances this fall concert season.
Bandapalooza, an afternoon jamboree of music for winds and
percussion, presented by the Concert Band, Wind Ensemble and the community
American Band. All three groups will be conducted by Professor Brian Cardany,
director of bands at URI.
The American Band, which also counts Cardany as its
principal conductor, is one of the oldest continuously active bands in the
United States. It is composed of over 50 adult musicians from Rhode Island and
nearby Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Cardany drew inspiration from Lollapalooza for the event, as
the three concert wind bands perform back-to-back, somewhat like a music
festival. The title came to him during a conversation with a colleague while
scheduling the collaborative event between the URI ensembles and The American
Band.
When: Saturday September 20, 2025| 11:00am-5:00pm (Free admission for those 12 and under.)
It’s that time of year again as planning is in motion for
our 8th Annual Statewide Rhode Island Calamari Festival. This
festival has now grown to be one of Narragansett’s biggest events, serving more
than 1,500 lbs. of calamari while drawing in thousands of people from across
Southern New England.
Live music from the URI Sea Shanty Singers
Delicious bites from Georges of Galilee, Coast Guard House, Ferry Wharf,
Dockside, Surf Shack, Dune Brothers and more as part of our cook-off with a new
category; Healthy Choice!
A special sampling tasting from Celeste
Cookies from Sugar Coated
The library’s 3D printer making squid mementos for kids
The Rhode Island Calamari Festival is held the shortly after
Labor Day each year at Veteran’s Park in Narragansett, which is across
from the Narragansett Beach and adjacent to the Towers. It is held
outdoors where you can not only enjoy some fresh ocean air, but also the scenic
view of our Narragansett coastline. Once called “America’s First Resort,”
because of the picturesque coastline, Narragansett is also home to the second
largest fishing fleet in New England. The squid that is brought in through the
Port of Galilee has an international reputation for its quality. For this
reason, we celebrate our “Official State Appetizer” each year while we kick
back and enjoy great food, music and historic Narragansett at the Rhode Island
Calamari Festival.
Come enjoy one of the last weekends of summer while having
the chance to sample calamari offerings as local restaurants battle for top
honors in three categories; Best Overall, Most Inventive, Healthiest Option and
Most Spirited Team.
Please note: While we love your furry friends as much as you do, animals and pets are not
permitted unless they are certified service animals.
Waking up to the dawn chorus of birds – one of the natural world’s greatest symphonies – is a joy like no other. It is not surprising that bird-watching has become an increasingly popular hobby.
A simple way to start bird-watching is to buy a feeder, a pair of binoculars and a field guide, and begin watching birds from your window.
However, one of the most rewarding ways to identify birds is to listen to them and learn to recognize their songs.
As an ornithologist and educator, I often introduce students to the intricacies of bird songs, and I have developed some tricks that can make birding by ear less daunting.
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