On a dark and frigid Friday evening, Josten Library’s mezzanine transformed into a cozy performance space as it filled with Micah Walter and Laurie Tupper’s melodic, harmonizing voices. Walter and Tupper, a married couple, comprise the traditional vocal duo Dawn Watch, which specializes in folk songs often accompanied by Walter’s banjo or fiddle.
Performing in their second show for the “JostenLive!” series, Dawn Watch opened their Nov. 21 set list with the traditional song “Morning come and Maria’s gone,” originally popularized by Jean Ritchie. The song seemed to embody dawn itself, repeating the phrase “morning come,” and relying only on Tupper and Walter’s voices.
JostenLive! provides its performers with an intimate setting to share their music. In her introduction to Dawn Watch, Josten’s access services coordinator Janet Sponberg called the space a “temporary living room.” For Walter and Tupper, Josten was the catalyst that encouraged them to start sharing their music publicly. Walter, a web services librarian for Smith, began working at Smith in 2019 as a circulation associate in Josten. After Walter’s colleagues learned about the couple’s music making ventures, they encouraged them to participate in JostenLive! and hold their performance debut in the library in December of 2023.
At the time, however, Walter and Tupper weren’t calling themselves Dawn Watch and had only just begun to consider what their music would look like outside of the personal context it was born out of. Walter and Tupper met at a contra dance in 2017 and immediately realized that they shared a unique taste in music and voices that worked well together, singing together in the car on their way home from the event. Their idea of creating a musical duo evolved from there.
“When we would sing together in the car, we’d enjoy the way we sing…and we would keep saying things like, ‘we should make an album,’ or ‘we should put that on our album’ and then we just decided to make it happen…(the first Josten performance) really got us to put that last little bit of effort into turning what we do on a regular basis into something in a performance context,” Walter said.
The pair continued their frequent car-singing and performed again at the New England Folk Festival in April, the first time they used the name Dawn Watch.
“Dawn Watch is — it’s in a quiet part of the day. Dawn is quiet. Dawn is hopeful. It’s a little dark, but it’s also hopeful,” Walter said.
After performing “Morning come and Maria’s gone,” Tupper began to introduce the second song, identifying it as a zipper song with many repeating parts, and encouraging the audience to join in on the repetition. This practice of participatory singing is at the core of Dawn Watch’s music.
“Dawn Watch seeks to bring that way of relating to music to other people by putting it in a bit more of a performance setting,” Walter said.
Josten’s small and unique environment provided a perfect venue for this style of singing.
“It feels like simultaneously a space you can perform in, and a space that you could plausibly just be together with people in, singing,” Tupper said.
In addition to their emphasis on participatory singing, Dawn Watch seeks to blur the line between inherited traditional songs and newly written ones.
“We sing a lot of songs that Laurie wrote, we call them ‘performance songs’ from the living tradition, because the idea is we sing some songs that are old and also some songs that are new and you can’t necessarily (tell them apart),” Walter explained. “And so Dawn Watch is a way to combine the old with something that was written for us and for this present moment that we have to share with the present moment.”
One old tradition in particular stood out during the couple’s performance: their incorporation of a “crankie.” Crankies are elaborate pieces of visual art created specifically to be paired with music — an “analog music video,” and “the ultimate anti-capitalist art form,” as Walter calls them. They are drawn onto a roll of paper or cloth and put into a device that is cranked, displaying the drawing as a long moving panorama.
During Walter’s performance of a song from the Sacred Harp, a tradition of American Protestant hymns sung in community settings, Tupper cranked her own hand-drawn crankie, a beautiful array of floral drawings she created over the course of a few years.
“I think of my artistic style as very folk in nature…I’m not formally trained at all, and I think that matches with the song tradition that you’re coming out of with things like garden hymn, the Sacred Harp, like many of those arrangements and tunes are written by known people, but they’re designed as social songs,” she said. “And so having a folk art to go with a folk hymn, I think is really nice and the imagery in that song is so lovely and so evocative and it really lends itself to these kinds of transforming images that crankies are really built for.”
In addition to their incorporation of the crankie, Dawn Watch conflated the old and new by singing the traditional song, “Which side are you on?” about a miner who decided to support his worker’s union. Walter, a member of the Smith College Libraries Workers Union, introduced the song by announcing that the union had signed a ratified contract with the college earlier that day — a proclamation that was met with cheers throughout the room. Each time the song’s repeating chorus asked, “which side are you on?” the audience joined in loudly and passionately.
The communal and informal fuels the music Dawn Watch makes. Both Walter and Tupper cited their various experiences with social music making and dancing as major sources of inspiration.
“The real musical influences (are) the…moments of making music together at Pinewoods dance camp or some other collaborative music environment where there might be people there who are professional musicians as well as people who are not professional musicians, and we’re just making music together, and the collective sound and feeling that we make in that moment is so powerful that’s the inspiration,” Walter said.
Within their broader musical community, Walter and Tupper also provide each other with support and inspiration. Tupper ended the set list with a humorous song she had written about being an introvert and desperately wanting to go home at parties. Following the performance, she reflected on how being in a musical duo with the person she is married to provides encouragement as she navigates music-making as an introvert.
“Something that Micah and I have always shared is music and being able to sing together, and so being able to just have that as part of the set of things that we do in our shared life is really lovely. Micah is super supportive about my songwriting and about getting my songs out in the world, which, as an introvert, can be challenging,” Tupper said.
For Walter, working with Tupper is critical to Dawn Watch’s music and Walter’s individual musical work. “I think it helps the creative process, and it helps to refine our music making into something maybe a little bit more sophisticated than either one of us would do,” Walter said.
It’s clear that all of their collaborative influences shine through in Dawn Watch’s music. For Evelyn Gomez ‘27, who watched the show while working as a student employee in Josten, the impact of the audience’s singing was tangible. “I think any sort of communal music-making, which is what this was, brings community together in a space where art and music are existing. I think that’s just really beautiful,” she said.
