Where is Fremont?


The Wiggin family hailed from Fremont, a small rural town in southern New Hampshire with a population under 4,000. In the 1960s, people in Fremont worked at the Exeter textile mill or built barrels at the Spaulding & Frost Cooperage. Some raised dairy cows. For fun, townspeople attended square dances, an a nnual carnival, and hung out at the barber shop and poolroom.


Austin Wiggin was struggling to raise a family of seven on a mill hand’s salary. Instruments and music lessons were an extravagant xpense, but he never stopped pushing his irls to develop their musical talent.


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“Fremont, New Hampshire is a town that has missed out on most everything.


…When the Shaggs were growing up, there were ham‐and‐bean suppers, boxing matches, dog shows, and spelling bees at the town hall. The hall is an unadorned box of a building, but its performance hall is actually quite grand. It isn’t used anymore, and someone has made off with the red velvet curtain, but it still has a sombre dark stage and high‐ backed chairs, and the gravid air of a place where things might happen. In a quiet community like Fremont, in the ull hours between barn dances, a stage ike tha


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t might give you big ideas.”


— Susan Orlean, ‘Meet the Shaggs’ The New Yorker, 1997.


Discussion Topic


Can you think of any ‘rags to riches’ success stories from today’s music industry? What are the similarities and differences between those stories and that of the Shaggs? Why do you think the ‘rags to riches’ narrative is so widespread in popular culture?


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