Schooner Fare

Schooner Fare sustains the maritime tradition through energetic live shows and recordings while broadening its palette across more than thirty years. The Maine ensemble mixes folk material, pop standards, and self-penned pieces such as “We the People,” “Portland Town,” and “Leviathan.” Its 1987 holiday collection Home for the Holidays presents seasonal fare in Hebrew, French, German, and Spanish. A decade afterward the children’s album SchoonerKids introduced younger listeners to “Bonnie Heeland Laddie,” “The Rattlin’ Bog,” and “A Cat Named Patrick Finnegan.”

Guitarists and singers Chuck and Steve Romanoff first formed the act as a duo during an impromptu backstage session; the addition of Tom Rowe on electric bass, pennywhistle, and vocals soon created a trio. Regular appearances at Portland’s Holy Mackerel and at Northeast folk venues helped refine the group’s sound. Its first LP, Day of the Clipper, appeared in 1978. The third release, the 1983 concert document Alive, brought wider notice by preserving the trio’s stage energy. Two years later We the People confirmed Schooner Fare’s status as a nationally touring folk attraction.

Marking a decade together, the 1986 live set The First Ten Years was captured at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia. The following year Classic Schooner Fare assembled signature numbers in arrangements by Michael Braz, supported by a small orchestra. Although 1990’s Signs of Home was judged by some listeners to be the group’s least compelling effort, the 1983 album For the Times restored momentum with six new compositions, among them “Too Funky for the Folkies (But Too Folksy for the Time)” and “The Broome o’ the Cowdenknowes.”

Finnegan’s Wake, issued in 1995, deliberately revisited the traditional songs that had launched the band two decades earlier. After twenty-nine years as a trio, Tom Rowe succumbed to cancer in 2004. Unable to envision a substitute, the Romanoff brothers carried on as a duo, issuing And Both Shall Row in 2005 and Roots and Wings in 2010.