Kaity Newell sits in her music room at home in Damariscotta with her dog, Bruce. A local music teacher in the area for 40 years, she has started or been a founding member of long-lived music institutions Maine Country Dance Orchestra, Oyster Creek Fiddlers, Maine Fiddle Camp, Seacoast Community Orchestra, local contra dances, and the strings program at Great Salt Bay Community School. (Elizabeth Walztoni photo)
Kaity Newell has spent her adult life teaching, organizing, and promoting community folk music and country dances, building connections in the county and around the state with her fiddle in hand. The Damariscotta resident brought to life local institutions including the Great Salt Bay Community School strings program, the Seacoast Community Orchestra, Maine Fiddle Camp, and the Maine Country Dance Orchestra over the years while teaching countless students and raising a family at home.
She grew up in Nottingham, England and attended its public school system, which gave her a quality education and introduced her to music.
“That’s where I really started to love music, with my music teachers over there, learning to sing and play the trumpet,” she said. “Along with the education came a lot of opportunities, and that was the system. If they saw you were working hard, they would say, ‘Why don’t you try out for this and this?’”
Newell credits music and the school system with offering her opportunities she would not have had otherwise.
“That’s why I wanted to get into the system here. That’s why I created the strings program at Great Salt Bay, because I always wanted to try and give it back,” she said. “You think, ‘Well, that was so helpful to me. I want to try and do it for other kids.’”
Newell became serious about English folk music as a teenager in the 1970s and got a hold of a violin to play it on with the help of a music teacher. Attending a barn dance with the Girl Scouts in her youth also left an impression of the lighthearted community experience and the music that went with it.
“That started me on the journey of exploring the folk music and the dance music, the contra dance music, and ever since I’ve been really, really into that,” she said.
She did not start out with plans to be a music teacher, however. Newell attended the University of Wales in Swansea for a degree in English literature. Still, she said she has been like a music major ever since, always learning new things.
Newell was involved in the university’s folk club, where she met her former husband and moved to Maine with him in 1979.
In early years, the family lived in South Bristol and Newcastle before building a house in Damariscotta on the site where she has now lived for 40 years. They chose the town for GSB, which their four children attended.
“When I first moved here, there were a lot of young people who were, I supposed you’d say, coming back to the land,” she said. “A lot of us were really interested in organic gardening and farming and traditional, meaning more like a simpler, lifestyle. The music goes along with that lifestyle.”
Her interest in the back-to-the-land movement and history introduced her to contra dances, community folk dancing with rotating partners and a live caller teaching the steps. The style has Maine roots going back to colonial days. By the 1980s, the original old-time country dances were beginning to die out with a new generation and the advent of television, according to Newell, and young people wanted to bring them back.
“You’d like the music, and then you realize that it goes with this cool community dancing thing,” she said. “It was the building of community thing, I think, that attracted a lot of us … to want not recreate it, just maybe rebuild it.”
She enjoys all kinds of folk music, with particular affection for the Maine style’s blend of Irish, Scots Irish, and French Canadian influences, along with Irish songs and the English folk songs of her homeland with their historical connections.
The family played music across the state for years with friends as the Maine Country Dance Orchestra. Newell remembers the kids coming along with their sleeping bags behind the piano on their travels.
They also cofounded Maine Fiddle Camp, a weeklong family gathering where players learn traditionally: by ear.
“It was a cool time,” Newell said. “We were all young, a lot of energy.”
Though music took them traveling, Newell’s teaching career started at home.
After having her first child, she was looking for a job that would allow her to stay home when a friend asked if she could teach his children to play the fiddle. She had been taking night classes at the University of Southern Maine toward a teaching degree, but in the end learned through doing.
“I started just teaching in the kitchen,” she said. “So many people start their careers like, OK, baby’s in the playpen, or someone’s rocking the baby and teaching their kids to play violin.”
Her lessons grew by word of mouth – Newell has never advertised – and today she has over 20 private students.
She teaches fiddling with a blend of the Suzuki method, which gives students the ability to play orchestra music and folk music. The Suzuki style teaches with an emphasis on learning through listening, a central piece of being a musician from Newell’s perspective.
“It’s another family-oriented thing, unity-oriented thing. There are group lessons. We play together a lot,” she said. “It’s not like the old isolated, you get dropped off at your violin teacher and you see your friends once a year at a recital.”
Her students play contra dances and events as the Oyster Creek Fiddlers, which took a pause during the pandemic but are back at the Damariscotta Baptist Church from 6:30-8:30 p.m. on the second Friday of the month and the Willing Workers Hall in Bristol from 3-5 p.m. on last Sundays.
In 2004, when her youngest daughter was in kindergarten at GSB, Newell started a pilot program of a strings class there. She had expected to teach six fourth graders during recess, but 24 signed up. Today, the strings program is an elective class with over 80 students.
She cofounded the Seacoast Youth Orchestra in 1994 and the Seacoast Community Orchestra in 1997, a symphonic orchestra that currently rehearses at GSB. Newell has also been the classroom music teacher at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb for 30 years.
These decades of community connections came together for her in return in 2020 when her home burned from an electrical fire, likely caused by a squirrel chewing wires in the wall.
Two of the only items to survive were a trumpet she had bought in Swansea and a fiddle, which she was captured on video playing for comfort as the house burned.
A GoFundMe organized by friends raised over $77,000 from 822 donations. With the help of community, insurance, and local friend and builder Mike Lewis, a new house was constructed on the same spot that she moved into that May.
She still teaches, gardens, raises chickens, and lives with her dog, Bruce, on the same plot of land.
“I think I’m a person who likes to have roots,” Newell said, expressing deep gratitude for her community and especially their help after the fire.
She returned to England to visit her daughter recently and realized she felt homesick, but decided to stay in Maine while visiting when she could.
“I thought, no, you know, you bloom where you’re rooted or you’re planted, right? This is my home,” she said. “This is my community, and my family lives here, and I’m not leaving.”
Outside of music, she has always enjoyed drawing and painting. She has four children and six grandchildren with whom she often plays music, and also knows the viola, cello, and banjo.
“I really believe in community,” Newell said. “You’re never going to regret the hours you do that stuff.”
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