Album Notes

Listen as Curtis & Loretta celebrate the vibrant music that helped shape Minnesota!! This radiant album is made up entirely of songs Curtis & Loretta's ancestors would have been singing in their native Minnesota in 1858, when it was a brand new state. These traditional musical gems highlight the married couple’s old world charm as never before. The duo make history come alive, as their tight vocal harmonies resonate on such poignant songs as “The Farmer is the Man,” the tragic lumber-era ballad “The Jam on Gerry’s Rocks,” and “Lincoln and Liberty,” which was Abraham Lincoln’s campaign song. This song helped make Lincoln the first-ever President to earn the electoral votes of the new state of Minnesota! Curtis & Loretta's vocal harmonies intertwine seamlessly with instruments one would have heard in Minnesota in the mid-1800s, including folk harp, mandocello, clawhammer banjo, celeste (a charming music-box sounding antique keyboard), harmonica, and more.

This superb recording grew out of a project created for the Minnesota Sesquicentennial in 2008. The Friends of Fort Snelling and Bob Waltz, with a grant from the Sesquicentennial Commission, published “The Minnesota Heritage Songbook,” a collection of folk songs either collected in or illustrating the history of Minnesota. Curtis & Loretta recorded 13 of the songs on the accompanying CD (the book was sent to schools and state parks across the state). The duo performed these songs at the Minnesota Heritage Songbook “book release” concert at Fort Snelling, and at the Sesquicentennial Bigtop Chautauqua Tent at the State Fair.

Now, these 13 songs, along with two 1800s sea shanties, are being released on Curtis & Loretta’s own album “Our Heritage in Song.” “Inside Bluegrass” (MBOTMA’s monthly magazine) says, “This is truly an album like no other...... This will probably be the only recording of its kind - at least until Minnesota turns two hundred.”