New Bedford Guide Your Guide to New Bedford and South Coast, MA
No one personifies New Bedford’s music scene like Art Tebbetts. He is the city’s troubadour. Where there’s music, you can find him playing, emceeing, or both. He has been the master of ceremonies at New Bedford Folk Festival (formerly Summerfest) for 18 years. He has been hosting Thursday night open mics in downtown New Bedford’s Café Arpeggio for eight-and-a-half years. His roots in the local community go back to his college days, when he played music with a band at SMU, long before it was called UMass Dartmouth.
For a man who plays hundreds of gigs a year, little things like the variety of performances at open mics and the intimacy of coffeehouses still bring him a lot of pleasure as a musician.
“I like the audiences,” Tebbetts says. “They pay attention and they listen. I can talk and be myself.”
While he is a performer by trade, it is his spoken words and personality that have helped make Tebbetts such a fixture in the New Bedford music scene. His open mics at Café Arpeggio have become a destination for musicians of every level of experience. “We’ve been doing open mics for 425 weeks. I’ve got log books for every performer,” Tebbetts says. While many open mic performers are amateurs tentatively breaking out instruments in public for the first time, the talent on display on Thursday nights can often catch Tebbetts by surprise. “The local music scene is as big now as it’s ever been,” Tebbetts says. “There are so many levels to it.”
The New Bedford Folk Festival’s aim is to provide a showcase for one of those levels. It’s a showcase that Tebbetts is quite familiar with. At the first festival in 1995, Alan Korolenko, who runs the festival with his wife Helene, approached Tebbetts, asking him to introduce the next act on the main stage. Tebbetts agreed, and ended up introducing several bands that day. “He then asked me if I could come back the next day,” Tebbetts says. “That’s how I became host of the main stage. I’ve been doing that for 18 years.”
Tebbetts emcees with his trademark conversational style. As the host, he relishes in the possibility of introducing previously unknown talent, giving them their first boost on the road to wider success. “There’s as ‘unknown’ factor at the festival, where someone new comes in and blows everyone away. There’s a band called Eddie From Ohio, that in 2001 opened for the main performer. The next year they were the main performer,” he says. “The year after that, we couldn’t afford them anymore,” he adds, chuckling.
This year, the festival will feature a wide variety of major talent in the international folk music world. Music is such a prominent aspect of the festival that it will be called the New Bedford Folk Festival for the first time this year. That growth of the music scene, with both local artists and non-local artists who are drawn to New Bedford, is something Tebbetts has witnessed first hand. He can recall a time when music was just part of Summerfest, and not the main attraction.
“It took a lot of years before the music became the main draw. There used to be a carnival with rides, and it was down on the waterfront. But music is what attracts people, and then they go to the merchants and the shops.”
This year is the first that the Zeiterion Theatre will operate as the main stage, but as in years past there will be stages scattered throughout downtown New Bedford where local artists can ply their trade. “For a couple of years the locals have had their own stage,” says Tebbetts. “Along the way, they’ve gotten nicer stages and better equipment. It’s cool that our locals get the chance to show their stuff.”
For Tebbetts, the festival is the grand event for a city he loves. He has watched the city change in recent years, slowly and, he feels, for the better, calling the spread of new restaurants and bars in the downtown area a “rebirth”. “They’ve been talking about it for thirty years, and it feels like it’s finally happening. It’s not just hard drinking places for sailors anymore. I’ve been waiting for decades for that to happen.”
Regardless of what the future holds for downtown New Bedford, Tebbetts will be there, reliably performing hundreds of shows a year, always showing up at Café Arpeggio on Thursday nights, and always, reliably there to welcome us to the folk festival when it rolls around in July. For many New Bedfordians, he is the face of the festival. “People come to me saying they want to play at the festival,” Tebbetts says. “I tell them ‘I don’t organize it, I don’t run it, I’m your host.'”
