The life of New England contra dance musician and traditional music composer Bob McQuillen will be celebrated with a festival in Peterborough Saturday, July 1.
Running from 1 to 11 p.m., KwackFest commemorates the 100th birthday of McQuillen. a National Heritage Fellow who died in 2014. A longtime resident of Dublin and Peterborough and a fixture at contra dances throughout the Northeast and in Washington state, McQuillen drove to dances in a Jeep with a license plate reading “KWACK.” McQuillen was a contra dance musician, ConVal High School shop teacher and weightlifting coach, along with serving as a mentor to many. The Town of Peterborough recently proclaimed June 27, McQuillen’s 100th birthday, as “Bob McQuillen Day.”
The festival will be held in the Peterborough Town House and the adjacent grounds of the Guernsey Building and the Monadnock Center for History and Culture. It will feature dancing, music, stories of McQuillen , films about McQuillen, food trucks and more. Admission is free. For a complete schedule, go to kwackfest100.com.
KwackFest is sponsored by the Monadnock Folklore Society and supported in part by a grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, along with the Country Dance and Song Society. An Indiegogo campaign is raising additional funds for the event and also to cover costs of printing McQuillen’s 16th and final tunebook, “Bob’s Book of New Hampshire Tunes,” which features tunes he wrote for each town in the state.