Album Notes

Mark Alan Lovewell comes from Martha's Vineyard, an Island off the coast of Massachusetts. He is a sea chantey singer, musician, storyteller, writer and photographer. If there is but one glue connecting all those skills together, it is his exuberant love for the sea and its lore. Mark is a renaissance man of the sea.

He started performing on stage as a child, singing, playing a guitar, banjo and harmonica. He comes from a musical Vineyard family with a whaling heritage. While going through college and working at the South Street Seaport Museum as a writer, he was one of the top performers at the Bicentennial celebration Parade of Sail in New York City. After college, he returned to the Vineyard and started working as a reporter for the award winning weekly newspaper Vineyard Gazette, a newspaper with readership in 50 states and over 12 foreign countries. Mark spends most of his time writing about the waterfront.

His vocation and avocation have taken him out on extended trips on fishing boats and oceanographic research vessels from New Bedford out to Georges Bank and into Cape Cod Bay. In fact he has been on just about every kind of vessel there is, from freighter to tall ship, from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea; sometimes singing, sometimes carrying a notebook and camera.

His work has been published in books, magazines and he has received environmental awards for his writings on fisheries. He has researched his family history, collected sea songs and stories of his community from out of print books, newspaper articles and ship logs. In 2002 he came out with a CD, a collection of songs: Sea Songs of Martha's Vineyard for the young and the young at heart. The CD was reissued in 2004.

In March and April of 2004 Mr. Lovewell went to Hawaii and Alaska and returned to Massachusetts sharing his stories and songs at museums, elementary schools, high schools and colleges; under a federally funded education grant The Education through Cultural and Historical Organizations (known informally as ECHO).

In that four week trip he represented the New Bedford Whaling Museum and joined storytellers from the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage and the The Iñupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska. Together, they retold the stories of their whaling heritage and performed for hundreds of young people.

This year, Mr. Lovewell is performing again, closer to home. Concerts are being planned for here on Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and the mainland.