VOORHEESVILLE — After four decades at the helm of Old Songs Inc., Andy Spence has decided, at 81, to rest.

“I’m in my 81st year and, I’m thinking, I need to take a break,” she quipped.

Earlier this month, Joy Bennett, the former director of contracts for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, became executive director of the not-for-profit organization with a mission of promoting traditional, or folk, music and dance through festivals, concerts, dances, and educational programs.

“I’ve been coming to the festival for 27 years; I’ve performed at it,” Bennett said, when asked why she took the job. “I’ve been talking to Andy for years about the festival, and its future. So, why did I take the position? I want to see the festival continue to grow and flourish.”

On Sunday, Sept. 23, an all-day mini-folk festival at the Old Songs building in Voorheesville, will triple as a 70th birthday celebration for Donna Hébert, an Amherst, Massachusetts-based fiddler, music educator, and author; a tribute to the retiring Spence; and as a fundraiser for Old Songs Inc.

With 40 years of institutional memory, Spence will work part-time to ensure a smooth transition for Bennett. She’ll serve as executive director emeritus and as adviser to the board of directors and to Bennett.

“I know that somebody has to carry on, but I’d rather have them carry on while I’m still able to help guide them along a bit,” Spence said.

“I’m not the kind of person that comes into an organization and make wholesale changes first,” Bennett said. “I want to see how it will run … And what value I can add to the various programs ... How they can be expanded, but that takes time — it’s not going to happen overnight.”

Bennett is a co-founder of The Johnson Girls, a women’s acapella group that sings sea shanties. “I don’t know if it’s still the only female sea-shanty group, but we’re certainly the one that’s been around the longest,” she said. “And, we’ve toured all over the world.”

Bennett has long supported and performed at the Old Songs Festival. She’s been on the Board of the Folk Music Society of New York Inc. for 20 years, half of that time as president. And she co-directs Co-Director of the Traditional Music and Dance Camp, known as TradMaD, held for a week each August at Pinewoods Camp in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Spence worked long past the age when most people would have retired, she said, “because I loved what I did, and because I felt it was important — it was nice to be part of the community and bring traditional folk music to this area, and to keep it going.”

Spence and her husband, Bill, moved to Voorheesville in 1965, when he got a job at the University at Albany. The couple grew up in Iowa; the Army had moved them east, and Far East: New Jersey, Newburgh, Pakistan, and Virgina, before they settled in Voorheesville 50 years ago.

“So, when we moved here, we got involved in a festival called Fox Hollow,” she said. The festival was held in Petersburg in Rensselaer County.

The Spences weren’t hippies or Bohemians; they enjoyed folk music. “Our social life revolved around it,” Spence said. “It’s the people that make it so much fun.”

The couple was involved with a local folk group, the Picking and Singing Gathering, as well as the folk scene at Caffè Lena, in Saratoga Springs, founded in 1960, perhaps the oldest continuously operating folk music venue in the United States.

Bill Spence played the banjo and guitar; Andy Spence said that she played piano and liked to sing. “But frankly, over these 40 years, it’s taken up all my time to just keep moving it forward,” she said of folk music.

“Although I got a ukulele recently,” she went on, adding that it’s big fad right now.

The Fox Hollow festival ended in 1980, Spence said, and, in 1981, Old Songs Inc. held its first festival, at Tawasentha Park in Guilderland.

In 1982, the festival moved to the Altamont fairgrounds. “It’s a three-day festival,” Spence said. “It’s an immersion into folk and traditional music, and is also very cultural; we hire artists from around the world.”

Asked her greatest accomplishment in her time at Old Songs, Spence answered: “I guess … is to know that we can still do what we do and people still like it … When we first came here, this area was not that active with traditional music, and now you see some of the bigger groups at The Egg and the Troy Music Hall … We try to keep the music going.”

Folk music has endured, Spence said, because it’s a grassroots form of art; it has always been music that people make at home for their own enjoyment. “The performance end of it has merely been a chance for people to come and see somebody better than themselves,” she quipped.

Bennett said that folk music is “an extremely accessible type of music.”

She loves its inclusivity.

“For me, it’s the coming together of, in some cases performer and audience, in some cases it’s people sitting around and making music,” Bennett said. “I mean sometimes you just fall in love with the genre.”

Asked her favorite folk musician, Spence couldn’t answer.

“Oh, I can’t say really,” she said. “I like all of them and I have great respect for all of them.”

“I’ll tell you, it takes a lot of chutzpah,” Spence said of making a living as a folk musician. “Many of them travel long distances all the time; and travel and travel — it’s just crazy.”

“They are wonderful folks,” she said. These are musicians who are not well paid, Spence said, nor do they have record-company connections that employ the type of people who “have an idea about what you should do, whether you want to do it or not.”

But, in her estimation, that’s not necessarily a bad thing — sacrificing commercial success to make the music you love. “You know, once you do that,” Spence said, “you sell your soul.”

Never a hippie, the spirit of the ’60s endures.