After 27 years of teaching, Dan Berggren has become one of Fredonia’s most beloved professors from the Communication department, touching many lives of students and staff. He is known for his award winning folk music, founding the audio major and our present day radio station, and his warm heart.
EARLY LIFE
Berggren was born in Brooklyn, NY, and after having spent every summer on a family farm in the Adirondacks, he moved there permanently at the age of twelve. His love for singing and performing started early. Dan and his older brother sang in a boys' choir in Brooklyn. “It was pretty serious training, attending rehearsals three times a week,” Berggren said. “I was just as serious about playing guitar in my teen years, attempting folk songs as well as popular songs from records and the radio.”
Dan listened to distant stations from Boston, Chicago, Buffalo and West Virginia; absorbing not only the music but a style of presentation and connecting with a community. All through high school, radio and tape recorders played a big role in his life. When he attended St. Lawrence University, he joined the campus radio station, worked in theater, sang with the select chorus, and worked hard to become a better writer – all while majoring in sociology. He believes that this liberal arts approach to his education contributed significantly to who he has become and what he has accomplished.
At the peak of the Vietnam War, Berggren received a low draft number during his junior year of college, and was drafted after graduation. “I took an audition to become a broadcaster in the army, passed it, enlisted, and worked for the world's largest radio network; the American Forces Network - Europe, spending eight hours a day writing, announcing, and producing radio.” This experience helped Berggren get a graduate assistantship at Syracuse University and his master's degree there prepared him for teaching at SUNY Fredonia.
CHANGING THE CAMPUS MEDIA
When Berggren arrived on campus in the fall of 1977, WCVF-AM (now WDVL) was a very healthy, student-run campus radio station – one of the oldest in the SUNY system. A plan was in the works for a new 10-watt WCVF-FM and he helped execute that plan.
Berggren said that “Ever since the FM went on the air September 1978, the greatest challenge has been for it to serve multiple masters: the FCC, the SUNY Board of Trustees who holds the license, the student government, and the dual-listenership of community and campus. There are endless opportunities for FRS students of every major, and there is no limit to what they can accomplish.”
PERFORMING
Dan has entertained audiences throughout New York State, from Vermont to Kentucky and Texas, and overseas in the British Isles, Eastern Europe and Central Africa. Some of his songs have been symphonically arranged, giving Dan the opportunity to perform with orchestras in Fredonia, Ithaca, Syracuse, West Virginia and Indiana. His original music has been featured nationally on public radio and television, earning praise from near and far.
“Every time you "leave home" your perspective is broadened. You learn about yourself and what you're capable of when challenged by a new situation. You gain a better understanding that your way is not the only way, and that the human race has more similarities than differences.”
Berggren has had many stories and experiences abroad, but one in particular has stuck with him. At the end of a Bulgarian radio station tour, he handed the general manager a CD as a gift. Not one to miss a live broadcast opportunity, she quickly put Berggren on the air, asking the host to interview him on the spot.
“He asked me a great question - one I had never considered: How is folk music different from country music? I told him that there are those who work for publishers eight hours a day writing songs with the goal of it becoming a hit for a country recording artist. Folk songs, on the other hand, are created any time or place when circumstances in life cause a person to express a concern, a joy, a sorrow, a celebration. If that expression is honest, genuine, and authentic it might get shared and sometimes adapted or personalized; and while it might become popular, that was not the original reason for writing the song. A Bulgarian broadcaster forced me to confront my own music and I'm grateful that he did.”
After thousands of performances through the years it's hard for Berggren to isolate a "most memorable" performance.
From huge festival crowds to an audience of two or three in someone's kitchen, each connection through song is important at the moment and remembered fondly. Berggren has sung in concert halls alone on stage, and with orchestras; in coffeehouses, libraries, churches, fire halls and elementary school classrooms. One annual experience, however, truly “rises to the top”. For the past decade, Berggren has been spending an evening with 12 college students who live in the woods for a semester studying the environment. He puts his banjo and guitar in a canoe and paddle to the site where they live in yurts, taking turns cooking for one another, as their professors take turns visiting them once a week. After dinner they would sit by a wood stove and he would tell stories and sing songs about the environment of the Adirondacks, the six-million acre park where private land exists side by side with public wilderness. These are among the most rewarding evenings he has experienced.
“Experiencing both city and country life gave me an appreciation for living in the mountains in the midst of wilderness,” Berggren said. “As I get older I better understand the heritage of being the fifth generation to live on that land. That's where my roots are and my songs are the fruit.”
His most recent work, “Tongues in Trees,” is a CD he released in April of 2013 celebrating his 40 years of songwriting and performing.
Although he spends his days in the Adirondacks, Berggren has touched many lives at Fredonia, and is still beloved by all his students and colleagues. To them, he says: “I hope that those with whom I've spent time in a classroom or a concert will inherit the attitude that life is precious; that they will reflect this in their behavior, finding ways in their daily lives to appreciate and use wisely every part of this interdependent web of existence we call life.”
