By Alice Waugh
A pair of musicians and their friends are hot on the trail—the Bay Circuit Trail, to be precise—on a 16-day walking trek in eastern Massachusetts that will bring them to Lincoln for a free concert on Friday, June 27.
This is the fifth year that Mark Mandeville and Raianne Richards of Webster have done the Massachusetts Walking Tour, a non-profit bipedal concert tour of Massachusetts in support of arts and culture. The tour aims to organize local artists together with community-based organizations such as land conservation groups, food share programs and local cultural councils to support for arts events sponsored at the local level, according to the tour’s website.
Each day of the tour, Mandeville and Richards, along with Berklee School of Music alumni Amy Alvey and Mark Kilianski, tote their own instruments for eight to 13 miles and then play a concert in the evening. Richards is carrying a ukulele, tin whistle and clarinet and Mandeville carries a banjo, while Alvey and Kilianski have a guitar and a fiddle.
The Massachusetts Walking Tour began on June 17 in Newbury and will cover segments of the Bay Circuit Trail in Rowley, Boxford, North Andover, Andover, Lowell, Acton, Concord, Lincoln, Wayland, Framingham, Hanson and Kingston. The tour’s website includes dates and information about each concert along the way, along with a detailed walking itinerary.
The Lincoln portion of the hike will center around Walden Pond (see map), with a concert on June 27 at 6 p.m. at the Thoreau Institute (44 Baker Farm Rd.). Local residents are welcome to hike and camp with the group at any point on the tour, though they should call 508-981-6245 in advance.
The annual event got its start five years ago after Richards and Mandeville had just released a new album and wanted to do something special to mark the occasion. “Some friends of ours did a human-powered tour from Buffalo to New York City and a bike tour from Buffalo to Chicago,” Richards said. “That kind of inspired us and got us thinking about what we could do here in Massachusetts.”
At each local concert, the group has invited local musicians to perform a set. The Walden Woods show will Lincoln feature singer/songwriter John Maclean as well as Dan Blakeslee of Boston.
When they’re home, Richards, 28, and Mandeville, 34, give music lessons and do community organizing, “but we spend as much time as we possibly can doing music,” playing their own folk/country-style music in coffee houses and town commons all over New England and as far away as Arizona, Richard said. The couple’s musical influences include Emmylou Harris, Graham Parsons, Neil Young, Hank Williams, and Ian and Sylvia, she said.