MOSES LAKE - Hank Cramer brings folk songs laced with a touch of history to the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center Thursday.

Humanities Washington, a Seattle-based organization promoting humanities-based programs throughout the state, awarded Cramer, who lives in Winthrop, its 2011 Humanities Washington Award celebrating achievement in public humanities.

He believes he won the award for expanding access to humanities events in Eastern Washington, he said.

"The great majority of (their) presentations were all centered around King County, Seattle and Pierce County and Tacoma and Thurston County and Olympia, and there were some counties in Eastern Washington that had never had a single Humanities Washington program," he says

As an Eastern Washington resident, Cramer took it upon himself to bring his own show east of the mountains. He has performed several times at the MAC, as well as every public library in Whitman County, he said.

"I've been expanding Humanities Washington out into the Eastern Washington counties and I think that's part of why they honored me, was that I said, hey, this isn't just Seattle anymore. We're taking this show on the road."

Cramer has a particular affinity for songs from the American west, and plans to emphasize songs from cowboys, steamboat men, railroaders and miners in his performance.

He considers himself a storyteller as well as a musician and weaves in stories about the origin of the songs he sings at his performances.

Cramer plays all over the country, performing cowboy music in Arizona and New Mexico, and nautical sea shanty music in Baltimore, Boston and the Great Lakes, he says.

The two styles of music have a lot in common, he says.

"A lot of the music has the same roots to it," he says. "Cowboy music and sea shanties, both of them have a large proportion of Irish influence and Black influence in them ... We kind of romanticize the cowboy life and we romanticize going to sea in a big sailing ship, but 100 to 200 years ago, the men who did that stuff were on the fringe of society. You weren't a cowboy because you came from a wealthy family and you had a lot of money and you thought it'd be an adventure ... with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt," he adds with a laugh.

Folk music is all about people passing their stories on from generation to generation, he says.

"There's a number of examples where an old Irish ballad or even an Irish sea shanty has become a popular American cowboy song," he says. "And that's how folk music works. Somebody learns a melody and learns some words and they have a different set of experiences and they write new words to go with the old melody. It happens all the time in folk music."

Cramer plays 7 p.m. Thursday at the MAC, 228 W. Third Ave. in Moses Lake.

For more information, call 509-764-3830.