Episode 3 - Fits

Witch Hunt - history told in music, sound, and story

During the extremely cold winter of 1692 an intense frustration has been building in Salem Village, a small farming community up the road from the more prosperous and worldly port city of Salem Town. Many factors are coalescing into a perfect storm: the repressive nature of the Calvinistic Puritan church, the limited prospects for girls and young women, the village resistance to the conservative and overbearing minister Samuel Parris, and a terrifying new war that is breaking out with the French in Canada and their Native allies. During the months of January and February several young girls in the households of Minister Parris and his close ally Thomas Putnam begin to exhibit extremely wild and disturbing behavior. They contort their bodies, go mute and stiff, run about the house wildly, and scream obscenities. The girls are not the first to act in this way, just a few years before in nearby Boston the children of the Goodwin household acted in the same manner, resulting in a neighboring Irish servant woman being put to death as an accused witch. The fits of the girls in Salem Village are determined to be the results of witchcraft and three women are accused, including Minister Parris's slave Tituba.
All music written by Brian O'Connell except "Cambridge Short Tune - Psalm 70" adapted from the Bay Psalm Book, 1698.
Episode 3 Parts:
Part I - Village and Town
Part II - Fear of God (Cambridge Short Tune - Psalm 70)
Part III - King William's War
Part IV - The Fits
Part V - (Cambridge Short Tune reprise)
Brian O'Connell - voice, piano, upright bass, acoustic 12-string guitar, electric guitar, bri-lo, drum, percussion
Rachel Koppelman - accordion
Milo - screaming
Recorded at Studio Vinniechops
Sources
"Diares of Samuel Sewall" by Samuel Sewall, 1672-1729
"More Wonders of the Invisible World: or the Wonders of the Invisible World Displayed in Five Parts" by Robert Calef, 1700
"A brief and true narrative of some remarkable passages relating to sundry persons afflicted by witchcraft, in Salem Village: which happened from the nineteenth of March, to the fifth of April, 1692" by Deodat Lawson, 1692
"A Modest Inquiry Into The Nature Of Witchcraft" by John Hale, 1702
"Memorable Providences, Relating To Witchcrafts And Possessions" by Cotton Mather, 1689
"A Storm of Witchcraft - The Salem Witch Trials and the American Experience“ by Emerson W. Baker, Oxford University Press, 2015
"In the Devil's Snare - The Salem Witchcraft Crisis" by Mary Beth Norton, Vintage Books, 2002

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