Sugar Maple alumni Chirps Smith and Dot Kent will be back again this year to play and call for the Friday night Old-Time Dance. This year, they will be joined by Tracy Schwarz.

Schwarz first came to love country music from radio broadcasts of the late ’40s, which inspired him to learn the banjo and guitar. While in college, Schwarz also mastered the mandolin and the bass fiddle. He soon began playing in assorted bluegrass bands around Washington, D.C. During the early ’60s, Schwarz enlisted in the Army for two years and during that time learned to play the fiddle. He began working with the New Lost City Ramblers as a replacement for Tom Paley in 1962, and eventually became a full-time member for ten years; his involvement in the band later tapered off as he became more interested in spending time on his Pennsylvania farm. He continued to appear with other bands, most notably the Strange Creek Singers through the 1970s. He continues to perform and explore new areas of traditional music, most notably with Ginny Hawker.

Chirps Smith is a veteran of fiddle contests and playing for dances, at which he frequently plays backup to the fiddle on the mandolin and related mandolin family instruments, as well as four and five string banjos. While a part of the band Indian Creek Delta Boys, named after a stream in his native Illinois, Smith earned the nickname “Chirps” due to the “chirping” quality to his mandolin style. Chirps enjoys playing many types of tunes, from hoedowns/reels and waltzes to schottisches, polkas, two-steps, and perhaps one or two mazurkas or hambos. At dances, he is commonly joined by his wife and clog-dancer Dot Kent, also a veteran dance caller.