About The Editors: Sue and Clyde

Sue Songer

Sue Songer has been a contra dancer and dance musician for 30 years. She plays both back-up piano and fiddle, beginning in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, and eventually performing all across the States. Her specialty is piano accompaniment, which she has provided for a great many fiddlers and a number of contra dance bands.

Sue also is deeply involved with community (all-comer) contra dance bands. She has organized and directed the 75-member Portland Megaband since 1996. She has worked with smaller open bands in many different contexts and locations, sometimes conducing intensive weekend workshops aimed at coalescing the sound of these groups of disparate musicians and also expanding their repertoire.

Sue, along with Clyde Curley, complied the 3 volumes of The Portland Collection: Contra Dance Music in the Pacific Northwest. Together these volumes comprise nearly 1000 fiddle tunes, all in the contra dance repertoire. The Portland Collections are widely used in the States and in the United Kingdom. The Country Dance and Song Society selected Sue to be the recipient of its Lifetime Contribution Award in 2019. That same year, her alma mater Whitman College chose her for its annual alumni Lifelong Achievement Award for her contributions to the little-known, yet wide-spread domain of contra dance music

Sue’s Bands:
Joyride
The Portland Megaband
The Stage Crew

Clyde Curley

Clyde Curley has been playing folk music since high school, but his passion for fiddle tunes was first sparked by exposure to string band music in his San Francisco college days in the 1960s. After moving to Oregon in 1970 to begin his high school teaching career, he played in a number of bands that focused on a variety of musical styles. It wasn’t until he arrived in Portland in 1986 and took up the mandolin with Jigsaw and the fiddle with the Rose City Aces that he pursued playing for contra dances in earnest. Since then, he has appeared on stages at local dances all over the Pacific Northwest and at festivals and camps beyond. An experienced teacher of this music, he has taught fiddle, mandolin and guitar workshops in multiple stints at venues as varied as the Bay Area Country Dance Society’s Family Week, Port Townsend’s Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, Coeur d’Alene’s Lady of the Lake Dance Camp—and many more.  In addition to his Portland Collection recordings and an album with the Jigsaw band, he produced a mandolin-centered CD, Clyde Curley and the Oxymorons, as well putting in appearances on other recording projects. Clyde retired from high school English teaching in 2001 and moved to Bellingham, Washington, where—musically—he devotes his energies to exploring mysteries of old-time and French Canadian fiddle styles and—literarily—constructs the murder mysteries confronting Detective Matthews Toussaint in a series of detective novels set in Portland. (For more on Raggedy Man and A Cup of Hemlock, go to: www.clydecurley.com ) His longest and closest musical alliance continues to be with his piano-playing wife Susan, with whom he plays waltzes, Swedish music, and the occasional contra dance.

Clyde’s Bands:
The Noodles
Toad Mountain Ramblers
Group du Jour
The AlphaBeats