History:

It was 1969, and the Black family were vacationing at Singing Brook Farm in the hill town of Hawley, where the Parker family hosted summer guests, many of them New York musicians. Encouraged by Alice, that winter Arnie wrote the minister of the church, Hank Bartlett, a lanky retired Army chaplain and a music lover.

In 1970, there was no chamber music venue in these hill towns or in the Pioneer Valley.  Bartlett was enthusiastic and ran interference with the church trustees. He reported that they “were not unsympathetic” to the idea of concerts in the church, if they were not quite sympathetic yet either.

Cartoonist Bob Blechman met Black and produced the Indian head logo which still identifies MTC.

In 1974, at a Nonesuch Record party in New York City, Black heard Bill Bolcolm playing rags and Gershwin on a piano. Would he come up to play for MTC?  Bolcolm brought along his then girlfriend, soprano Joan Morris, and they performed popular songs of the Victorian era such as “Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.” Boston Globe critic Michael Steinberg happened to be in the audience and wrote the first critical rave about the duo, who returned as married Bolcolm and Morris, performing cabaret music and American musical theater pieces with their own brand of wit and brilliance for decades.

In 1989, the youthful Leningrad Quartet called from a Moscow airport days in advance of their scheduled MTC concert: the crumbling Soviet state would not let their instruments out of the Soviet Union. Penniless and with few clothes, they performed on borrowed instruments to a standing ovation, and returned later as the now-renowned St. Petersburg Quartet.

When Arnold Black died in 2000, Ruth Black stepped in as Artistic Director, a role easily assumed by one who had been intimately involved from the beginning in every aspect of Mohawk Trail Concerts’ operation. Her lilting English accent replaced Arnie’s quips introducing the concerts. As a thank you to the town and people of Charlemont, she added to the summer calendar a free jazz concert on the banks of the Deerfield River, or at the Federated Church in inclement weather.

The 2014 season ended with the retirement and 2015 death of the beloved Ruth Black, and Mohawk Trail Concerts looks forward to an exciting future under the directorship of cellist Mark Fraser, founding member of the Adaskin String Trio, who lives in nearby Montague.