We’re so excited to share Dreaming Iowa with you this Sunday at 3 pm at the Englert Theatre! The concert is free and open to all, with an opportunity to make a donation to support our work.
Here’s a note that will appear in the program about the performance:
Thank you for joining us today for the first installment of Dreaming Iowa, our year-long look into Iowa’s past and toward our future. What sort of place is Iowa, and what sort of place has it been through its history of statehood? Starting in 2019, a group of Folk Machinists started considering Iowa’s history through traces of our musical past, and what we found was a rich legacy of multiculturalism. We touch the tip of this iceberg in today’s program with nods to the history of Mexican immigration to Iowa (which started in the 1840s), and the waves of Czech and German immigration. We pull in the long history of prosperous Black communities in Iowa with the Black string-band favorite “John Henry,” and we celebrate Iowa heroes like the Bily family in Spillville and Emma Big Bear. We are especially honored to present a song by FFMer Svitlana Volkogon that tells the story of her family’s recent journey from Ukraine to Iowa. We’re already looking forward to the second part of Dreaming Iowa on Sunday, May 3!
We are grateful to the librarians, archivists, and historians who have helped us with this project, including David Muhlena at the National Czech and Slovak Museum & Library, the German American Heritage Center and Museum in Davenport, Felicite Wolfe at the African American Museum of Iowa, Mary Bennett and the State Historical Society of Iowa, the Migration is Beautiful/Barrios Project from the Iowa Women’s Archives, Marty Boller’s “Our Iowa Heritage” site, the Rita Benton Music Library at the University of Iowa, and Special Collections at the University of Iowa.
