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The Front Porch has hosted a slew of musicians over the past few years. Tonight on the show, we're going to hear some of our favorite in-studio performances by our guests. We'll hear from local folks like Seacoast musicians Laurel Brauns, Jon Nolan and The Molenes. We'll also hear songs by artists who were traveling through the state and stopped by our studio.

In the two decades before the Civil War, Milford, New Hampshire’s Hutchinson Family Singers went from backwoods, church-trained musicians…to international superstars. Their harmonic music was cutting edge for its time borrowing from church hymns and minstrel songs, but they were even better known for leading and furthering the causes of their day from temperance to woman's suffrage to the growing abolitionist movement. A new biography tells the story of probably the biggest New Hampshire musical group that you've never heard of.

Guest

• Scott Gac, visiting professor of American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and author of "Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform"

Special thanks today to NHPR friend Martin Gross, who played the role of music producer, loaning us his Hutchinson Family Singers album...Thanks Martin!