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The Maine Arts Commission Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Awardees- Fiscal Year 2006
Erica Brown, Lewiston
Erica is a native of Lewiston. As a child, Erica listened to her Pepere (grandfather) play French Canadian jigs and reels on his harmonica and accordion, and she began taking fiddle lessons at the age of six, and at the age of seven, was competing in fiddle contests with students twice her age. She studied under two of Maine’s best known fiddle masters, Greg Boardman and Don Roy. She apprenticed with Roy, and performed in his band, The Maine French Fiddlers. The band performed French Canadian jigs and reels throughout New England, Canada, and Louisiana.
Erica has produced and released three CD’s; Bowing the Strings, recorded in 1999, when she was fifteen; Just Taking Notes, a recording of bluegrass tunes released in 2001; and Imagine That, which features both fiddle tunes and vocals. Erica leads her own bluegrass band, Erica Brown and the Bluegrass Connection. She also performs Franco tunes with pianist Bob Choiniere throughout New England. She considers the Franco music part of her heritage and conducts workshops in schools to ensure its survival.
 Aron Griffith, Houlton
Aron is a member of the Houlton Band of Mailiseet Natives. He lives in Houlton, where he works with birchbark, creating sculptures, rattles, and basketry. He learned his art watching elders in the tribe, and has been working with birchbark for thirteen years.
Cynthia Larock, Lewiston
Cindy is a “Franco-Yankee” native of Lewiston, who has been a fixture in the traditional music and dance scene in Maine for over 25 years. She considers it her mission to, “get men out on the dance floor.” Cindy apprenticed with master Quebecois step dancer Benoit Bourque. Bourque is a member of the award-winning music group Le Vent du Nord. She has also studied with Quebecois artists Pierre Chartrand, Normand Legault, and Yvan Gagne.
A theatre graduate of Bates College, with a masters degree in speech arts and theatre education from Adelphi University, Cindy served on the adjunct faculty of the Bates College physical education department from the mid 1980’s until 2001 as an instructor of both ballroom and folk dance. She also taught as course titled, New England Folk Dance: The French Connection, at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College, where she served for many years on the advisory board of the Franco-American collection. She was a founding member and director of the Maine-based troupe, la Plume de Ma Tante Franco-New England Folk dancers, who performed throughout the state in the 1980’s, and she regularly leads dance workshops in schools and at Maine’s DownEast Country Dance Festival. Four years ago she founded the hour folk dance ensemble, Les Pieds Rigolant (Giggling Feet), which she continues to direct and coach in performances throughout Maine.
 Lucie Ouellette, Fort Kent
Lucie is a native of the St. John Valley. Some of her earliest musical memories are of her mother Rachel, singing or playing fiddle and piano. Lucie felt from an early age that she was destined to be a singer—so much so that she used to line up her mother’s collection of record albums around the living room wall, and pretend they were an audience. Lucie is very close to her mother, and was close to her maternal grandmother as well. Her grandmother lived with the family for most of Lucie’s childhood, and Lucie remembers her rocking and singing her grandfather’s songs.
French and French-Canadian popular songs are also well-represented, particularly the sentimental and moralizing parlor ballad varieties, all hearts and flowers, orphans, dewy-eyed fiancés and Lucie is heir to a rich repertory of traditional French-language songs. The pre-18th century French repertory is well-represented, with its cast of imprisoned princesses, messenger nightingales, watering Jews, cuckolded husbands, drunkards and scolding wives, martyred saints, and less-than-saintly priests, soldiers, and shepherds, to name but a few. Nineteenth century and early twentieth century French and inconsolable widows, cruel seductors and their fair victims, fearless French soldiers and patriotic child martyrs from Alsace. The twentieth-century Acadian renaissance songs of André-Thadée Bourque and French-Canadian Abbé Charles-Emiles Gadbois’ PG-rated Cahiers de la bonne chanson are also part of her stock-in-trade. In addition, she also knows some locally composed songs, including complaintes (obituary songs which eulogize victims of untimely death while offering comfort to the bereaved family), social satires, and honorific odes.
Lucie has lived in the Ft. Kent, Maine region for over a decade. She holds a BS degree in Social Sciences, and currently works at a local hospital. Since 1994, she has sung in a well-known band, Undercover, performing a wide range of French and Englishlanguage country-and-western, country rock, and rock n’ roll songs.
 Doug Protsik, Woolwich
Doug began playing the piano at five years old. After moving to Maine in 1971, he began studying and playing traditional music from New England, adding fiddle, accordion, piano, and country-dance calling to his repertoire. With bands like Old Grey Goose, he has performed throughout the United States at various folk festivals, concerts, and dances. Doug has traveled and performed in Europe, Cuba, and Central Asia. In 1990, he toured the world, learning and exploring the traditional music in Indonesia, Thailand, and Nepal. Doug has a B.A. degree from the University of Maine and a solo musical career as well.. He composes, performs and records old-time piano scores for silent movies, and provides educations program to schools and summer camps. As a silent movie accompanist, Doug has created a silent movie series near his local community in Brunswick for the last five years. He has recorded ten original piano solo scores for Turner Classic Movies.
Doug is Director of the Maine Fiddle Camp. As director of the Maine Fiddle Camp, Doug has brought together many fiddlers and traditional musicians from Maine and Canada. Doug lives in Woolwich.
 Brian Theriault, Fort Kent
Brian has lived most of his life in the St. John Valley. His father, Edmund, is descended from both Acadians and Native Americans, and is an accomplished hunter, trapper, and woodsman, who passed his skills to Brian. Brian worked in the lumber industry, and later as a jack-of-all-trades, earning his livelihood from a variety of sources.
Brian has been making snowshoes for almost thirty years. He began learning with his father, who decided to learn for himself, because there was no money to buy snowshoes for his eleven children. Edmund picked up rudiments of snowshoe making from older snowshoe makers, then began to experiment with how to make them better. For two decades Brian and his father, Edmond have turned out hundreds of pairs of snowshoes. They tan, scrape and prepare the cowhide leather for the harnesses and rawhide for webbing. They split and bend the black ash, using molds which they have refined for almost thirty years. They have worked on improving the webbing and have created some original patterns based on older local models.
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