We are very excited to welcome several local organizations to our Calling Me Home concerts. Rather than just singing about our feelings about home, we’re happy to offer our audience a chance to see some of the good work that’s going on in our community to help with issues of affordable housing and homelessness. We’re so pleased to welcome the Iowa River Valley chapter of Habitat for Humanity, Iowa City’s Shelter House, and Trail of Johnson County to offer information and a chance for conversation before and after our concerts and during intermission. We’ll also have information available from the City of Iowa City about their affordable housing initiatives.

Singing all these songs about home have made us think about how much our homes mean to us, and we are happy to be able to expand this thinking to include our whole community.

The Family Folk Machine is very excited to present our fall program in two concerts:

Friday, November 17 at 7 p.m. at the Senior Center
Sunday, November 19 at 3 p.m. at the Old Capitol Senate Chamber

Come and sing along with us! The concerts feature songs by contemporary folk and pop singers and classics from Woody Guthrie, Gram Parsons, and the Velvet Underground. The concerts are free and open to the public. We are pleased to host representatives from community housing organizations at our concerts to share information on local housing issues.

Join us for an all-request sing-along at Uptown Bill’s on Saturday, Nov. 11. We get started about 3 p.m. and sing until 4:30. It’s a fun, low-key way to sing and make connections with neighbors, friends, and acquaintances, and everyone is welcome. We enjoy rediscovering old songs and learning some new ones. Uptown Bill’s is a welcoming and comfortable place to hang out, and you can park in the University lot across the street for free on weekends. Hope to see you there!

The Fall 2017 Family Folk Machine session begins with rehearsal on Sunday, August 20, from 3 to 5 at the Senior Center. Get in touch for more info, or just show up! We will be singing about Home, and our concerts will be November 17 at the Senior Center and November 19th at the Old Capital Senate Chamber. Check out our Facebook page for times: Family Folk Machine Facebook

The Family Folk Machine will sing at Arts Fest this June, and we are thrilled and honored to perform with our friends the Awful Purdies. You can catch our joint performance on the Main Stage at 1 p.m. June 3.

How do you merge a 60-voice intergenerational choir with a band of five women playing instruments and singing in rich harmonies? Very carefully! We’ll be singing eight of the songs the Family Folk Machine wrote in groups under the guidance of the Awful Purdies this winter. The songs cover a wide range of mood and tone, and the Awful Purdies’ musical versatility allows them to bring a customized instrumentation to each song. Their instrumental forces will be augmented by two regulars from the FFM band: professional fiddler Tara McGovern and talented multi-instrumentalist Craig Klocke. A couple of the songs will feature FFM kid instrumentalists as well.

Along with the new songs from our grant-funded songwriting project, we’ll perform three songs from the Awful Purdies’ catalog of originals, with added parts for the choir. These songs really fit the Folk Machine ethos of caring community and active social engagement, and choir members have loved learning them.

“The Most,” by Sarah Cram, sets beautiful words to haunting music: “The most beautiful thing in this world, the most gracious thing in my life, the most noble deed of this time is to know you care, and it will be all right.”

“Let Her Learn,” by Nicole Upchurch, presents a vision of warm community relationships with friends and family of different generations: “I’m grateful for my family/linked not by blood, but by unity.”

And “Lament to Apathy,” by Marcy Rosenbaum and Rose Madrone, is a call to put aside our fears, embrace hope and “join the chorus” to work for justice.

Looking back, the good folks at Senior Center Television have posted videos of the songs from last November’s Family Folk Machine concert at the Old Capitol on the University of Iowa campus. You can find these videos and many others by looking for the Family Folk Machine on YouTube or by checking out the SCTV YouTube channel.

And looking forward, our fall FFM rehearsals will begin on Aug. 20. We’ll start our work on a program of songs with the theme of home. The Family Folk Machine welcomes new and returning singers of all ages with any level of musical experience.

After the glow of Arts Fest has subsided, be sure to check out the Longfellow neighborhood’s Front Porch Music Festival on June 10. The festival features all sorts and kinds of musicians playing outdoors, and the variety is exhilarating. The FFM will host our monthly sing-along at the festival from 3 to 4:30 p.m. on someone’s porch (or, possibly, yard), and we’ll also have a short FFM performance set. You can also check out girls’ trio the Skipperlings, a Folk Machine offshoot.

Hope you can join the Family Folk Machine at Arts Fest for the culmination of our songwriting project!

I ran into these words from Bob Dylan in an article about his Nobel prize in the January 2017 issue of the magazine Sojourners (thanks to my mom). These quotes are taken from a speech Dylan gave when accepting a MusiCares Person of the Year Award in 2015:

“I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. For three or four years…I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere…If you sang John Henry as many times as me…you’d have written “How many roads must a man walk down?” too. …If you’d listened to Robert Johnson singing, “Better come in my kitchen, ’cause it’s gonna be raining outdoors” as many times as I listened to it, sometime later you just might write A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”

It’s a new year and a new session for the Family Folk Machine! Rehearsals begin Sunday, January 8, at 3 p.m. at the Senior Center. If you’ve been thinking about joining us, come check it out!

This column ran in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

The public is invited to participate in an afternoon of Story Circles with the Family Folk Machine on Sunday, September 25, at 3:00 p.m. at the Iowa City/Johnson County Senior Center. The story circles are part of the Folk Machine’s 2016–17 project, Wasn’t That a Time?, supported by a grant from the Iowa Arts Council.

The story circle is a technique for gathering stories, themes, and ideas from a group. In 2014, the Iowa City band The Awful Purdies held story circles with farmers, food workers, and other community members to learn about people’s experiences with food. They took the stories they gathered and created songs for the musical play “All Recipes Are Home,” which they performed with Working Group Theatre. A few weeks ago, the Awful Purdies did a performance presentation for the Family Folk Machine to share their experiences with story circles to help us prepare to lead some of our own.

Our purpose in gathering community stories is to use them as seeds for songwriting. In January and February, as part of the Wasn’t That a Time? project, the Awful Purdies will lead a series of songwriting workshops with the FFM. Listening to stories from our friends and neighbors will give us material to work with when we begin the songwriting process.
On September 25, we will do a little writing and a little sharing in our story circles. Some of our questions and prompts will be asking about life experiences, positive and negative, that have directed our paths. Some of our questions have to do with the role of music in our lives. The event is free and open to the public of all ages (kids most definitely included). After our time of story circle sharing, we’ll linger over refreshments.

Aside from the socially oriented story circles, we will also be gathering stories in written form. This fall, we plan to use boxes stationed around the Senior Center where people can submit written stories or answers to some of our questions. Soon we will have a website for Wasn’t That a Time? with a process for submitting typed stories and ideas. We will be transcribing some of the story circle results for publication on our website along with some of the written responses we receive.

We’re dreaming of writing songs in January and February, but at the same time the Family Folk Machine is working up a fun program of songs for our concerts this fall. We’ll perform “Rise Up and Sing! A Celebration of Community Singing” on November 13, 3 p.m. at the Senior Center, and on November 20, 3 p.m. in the Senate Chamber of the Old Capitol. Our program this fall features songs from the new group-singing book, “Rise Again,” a follow-up to the classic “Rise Up Singing.” We’re working on a nice variety of songs, from Sesame Street to Emmylou Harris to Harry Belafonte to Jean Ritchie. Save the dates!

For more information about the Family Folk Machine or Wasn’t That a Time?, please send an e-mail to jean@familyfolkmachine.org.

It’s almost time to rev up the Machine! We’ll meet on Sunday, August 21 for rehearsal at 3 p.m. Everyone should come at 3 this first week so that adults can get registered. We’ll learn a few of our songs for the fall, we’ll do some introductions, and we’ll also film our part of the Center’s 35th anniversary video–Celebration! Carrot costumes optional.

For more info or to inquire about joining, e-mail Jean using the “Contact” link.