Music on the Veranda    

On July 12 Park-McCullough will reprise the popular program Music on the Veranda, a community success in its early days more than two decades ago. The first of these informal concerts will feature Tony and Judy Seeger, folk musicians from Hancock, Vermont, and well received veterans of the original program, along with local musician Tom Fels. This free event begins at 4 PM on the front verandah at Park-McCullough. Refreshments will be served.

Judy and tony seeger taken at the annual Pete Seeger Memorial Concert in Hancock, Vermont, August 2025.

Tony and Judy Seeger have been playing folk music together for more than fifty years. They learned to play banjo and guitar as campers at Killooleet, the renowned summer camp in Hancock, Vermont, run by Tony’s parents. Years later they moved on to Harvard College, and carried on the camp’s robust musical tradition, strongly influenced by Tony’s uncle Pete Seeger.

Married shortly after college, the Seegers followed Tony’s career in enthnomusicology, spending a decade in Brazil studying music and cosmology among the Indigenous group Suyá (now called Khisêtjê). In later years Tony became founding curator and director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and taught for two decades in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. Adapting to their time in the Washington area in the 1990s led to Judy’s long career on the faculty of St. John’s College in Annapolis, a unique institution devoted to the study of great books.

Tom Fels, a curator and writer, and producer of many local musical and cultural events over the years, is a former board member of Park-McCullough, and a longtime friend and sometime accompanist of the Seegers, a friendship that goes back to their high school years.

Park-McCullough welcomes back the Seegers and their family traditions, as well as the tradition of Music on the Veranda itself.