As a teenager, Clifford Murphy’s parents warned him to stay away from Lowell, Massachusetts, because someone would steal his car. Despite their caution, however, when Murphy learned in 1987 that the National Council for the Traditional Arts was producing a festival, now known as the Lowell Folk Festival, that featured some bands he wanted to see, he decided to crank his car and make the hour-long drive from his New Hampshire home anyway.
“They were performing music I liked … so I went, and it got me into downtown Lowell, which is a post-industrial factory town,” Murphy, now the director for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., told the Mississippi Free Press.
Experiencing the city and the music he encountered that day left a lasting impression on Murphy…