PORTLAND — New England Celtic Arts will present Canadian old-time troubadours

“Sheesham and Lotus” Tuesday, May 7, at St. Lawrence Arts in Portland and Wednesday, May 8, at Skye Theatre Performing Arts Center in South Carthage. Curtain is 7 p.m. A jam session will start one hour before curtain at Skye Theatre.

An important moment of reckoning between Lotus Wight and Sheesham Crow was when they realized that they had the common experience as children brushing their teeth to the fiddle tune “Turkey in the Straw” using the shape of their mouths to manipulate the melody of the tune. It was this kind of idle, yet innate musicality which followed them as youngsters.

Sheesham and Lotus came together in 1998 as Teilhard Frost and Sam Allison, playing as the rhythm section in a fiddle band called Flapjack. Together for the next seven years they were on the road throughout Canada and the United States playing dances, concerts and workshops.

It was during this time that both Frost and Allison took a keen interest in the folk traditions of North America, particularly the American south. Both became enthusiastic historians of old-time fiddle and banjo music, learning from the old masters across the regions south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Through personal instruction, perseverance and osmosis they learned harmonica, jaw-harp, flatfoot and song. Crow and Wight play fiddle and banjo respectively, with an additional array of homemade curiosities of noise-makery. Sheesham is a maker of gourd banjos and fiddles, and Lotus plays an invention called the contra-bass harmoniphoneum, which is a self-contained bass-harmonica and euphonium horn which can be used while plucking a banjo. Indeed it is a well-documented fact that Sheesham and Lotus use horns for singing, harmonicas, jaw-harps and more.

Tickets are $15 at the door. For the performance at St. Lawrence Arts, 76 Congress St., Portland, tickets are available through Bullmoose and Brown Paper Tickets, 207-775-5568 or www.stlawrencearts.org. For reservations at Skye, Winter Hill Rd., South Carthage, call 207-562-4445.

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