Music Page: Maggi Smith-Dalton

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Would you like to learn to play guitar, mandolin, mandocello, banjo, Renaissance lute, bouzouki...or other instruments?

About the Artists

Jim and Maggi Dalton perform music of popular/vernacular, folk and cultivated traditions, covering time periods from the Middle Ages to the present, focusing largely on American, Celtic and British Isles repertoire. They specialize in music of the 19th and 20th centuries. Instrumentation: mostly plucked strings and voices.

Concerts and programs contain commentary designed to place the music performed in historical context for the audience. Programs reflect the continual and ongoing research in which the two delight. They also perform original songs and compositions.

Jim and Maggi have released two recordings to date, and have designed a full spectrum of programs which they present nationwide. They have been featured often on radio and television.(PBS,ABC,NBC, CBS affiliates, Cable Networks; NPR stations,NewsRadio, interview programs across the USA; feature stories in newspapers and magazines, i.e., The Philadelphia Inquirer & Courier-Post) They have performed at nationally-known venues (i.e., Colonial Williamsburg, Seneca Falls, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House) and countless local and regional venues nationwide.

They have served as artists-in-residence at various colleges, public history sites, community and educational centers, presenting series addressing American history and other topics in the humanities, using music as the core of each session.

Previous audiences and sponsors have said: "engaging, scholarly, delightful, warm, intelligent, flexible, humorous, talented, versatile, enthusiastic, personable, joyful ..."

“Simply put, Jim and Maggi Dalton are a national treasure.”

Multi-instrumentalist Jim Dalton is an educator, conductor and award-winning composer and arranger. As a performer, he specializes in historical and ethnic playing styles on a variety of plucked string instruments including guitar, Renaissance lute, mandolin, banjo, mandocello, bouzouki etc. He also plays piano, organ, recorder and tin whistle. His compositions have been performed across the U.S. and Canada and in Europe. His choral composition, “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” won first prize in the 1997 Toronto Camerata Competition. Two of his pieces for carillon have been published in anthologies by Fenwick Parva and the Friends of the Albany Carillon. Jim teaches in the Music Theory and Composition Department of The Boston Conservatory and is Director of Music at North Parish (UU) of North Andover, Mass. He also maintains a private teaching studio in North Andover. He has written articles for Blues Revue magazine and is the author of Mandolin for Beginners, published by Workshop Arts, Inc./Alfred Publishing. He is a frequent guest lecturer on topics such as composition, choral arranging and Irish traditional music.

Maggi Smith-Dalton has sung as a soloist with choirs and choruses both here and abroad, acted and sung in professional theater productions and participated/performed in radio and television projects and programs. She is a frequent guest lecturer -- on the integration of humanities and the arts, on folklore, and on American music and history, to name a few topics. In addition to an active performing career, she authored a prize-winning short story and writes often for newspapers and magazines. Maggi produced a cable TV series and programmed and hosted musical theater, arts interview, and classical music shows for community and NPR public radio stations. A former Chairperson of the Haverhill Cultural Council, Maggi served as Musical Theater Director at Hill House (a community Arts Center) in Boston's Beacon Hill; as Director of "Adventures in Art,"a summer arts program; and as a director of children's choirs, among other activities. She now works with children on producing original musical theater works under the auspices of her own production company. With a background in teaching multiply-handicapped children, Maggi continues interest in and study of music therapy. She is currently co-authoring a book on historical ritual music with her husband; a children's book; and is always working on cultural-and-heritage-tourism writing projects.