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!
On Sunday evening, September 25, some of the members of the Family Folk Machine will join other community singers to present the Iowa City iteration of the Concert across America to End Gun Violence. The concert is at 6:30 p.m. in the Parish Hall at Trinity Episcopal Church, 320 E. College Street. It’s designed to be a bit under an hour long and entirely kid-friendly.
Something special happens when we take our FFM songs out and sing them at community events. The songs are meaningful when we sing them as part of a concert program. But singing them at an event with a specific purpose gives them extra meaning. Sometimes it’s very simple: it’s fun to sing about vegetables when you’re standing across from a Farmers’ Market stand full of September bounty. Last night at our rehearsal, I could tell that for me at least it was very powerful to bring some of these songs we already knew into a context where the focus is on supporting victims of gun violence and people in cities that have been ripped apart by gun violence. The songs Avila and We’ve Been Down this Road Before always come to my mind when I hear about unrest in our cities. Last night Wash my Eyes seemed particularly beautiful in this context; not just in asking forgiveness for our complicity with a violence-crazed society, forgiveness so that we can enjoy simple joys like the return of spring and our children sleeping in peace, but perhaps also washing our eyes and our ears through which we consume with fascination and horror the stream of alarming reports about violence without knowing how to integrate this knowledge into our lives in a way that keeps us whole and healthy.
It’s my understanding that more than 350 concerts are being performed on September 25 as part of this nationwide event. It will be good to think of so many people on the same day turning their thoughts to peace and to working together to curb gun violence. At our Iowa City event, representatives of the local chapter of Moms Demand Action will have information about how communities can work to prevent gun violence.
Here’s the link to the Facebook event for our concert: Concert Across America to End Gun Violence. It is free and open to the public.
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.
The end of summer is approaching, at least if you measure by School Time. Savor some late-summer singing this Saturday! We’ll meet at Uptown Bill’s from 3:00 to 4:30 for our monthly all-request sing-along. Bring instruments, friends, neighbors, and children. We’ll use the Rise Again songbooks (provided by the Senior Center). Refreshing drinks and snacks will be available for purchase!
Consider making a donation to Uptown Bill’s to keep the music playing at this wonderful venue for folk music.
There’s free parking evenings and weekends in the UI lot across the street from Uptown Bill’s.
Community Folk Sings are hosted by the Family Folk Machine (a Senior Center group) and Uptown Bill’s on the second Saturday of each month.
The Family Folk Machine and the Senior Center were just awarded a large grant from the Iowa Arts Council to undertake a songwriting project, “Wasn’t That a Time?” with the Awful Purdies during the 2016-17 program year. The project will begin with a lecture/performance by the Awful Purdies on August 28 at the Johnson County Historical Society. The Purdies will present an introduction to songwriting and demonstrate how to conduct Story Circles. The FFM will host Story Circles in September and October, and in January and February the Awful Purdies will lead the FFM in a series of songwriting workshops. The project will culminate in a joint FFM-Awful Purdies concert on the main stage at the June 2017 Iowa Arts Festival. We can’t wait to get started!
Everyone is welcome to join us for the last session of Sing, People, Sing! where we have been getting to know the new sing-along book “Rise Again.” This Sunday we’ll be focusing on the end of the book, with chapters called Seas and Sailors, Sing People Sing!, Struggle, Surfin’ USA, Time and Changes, Travelin’, and Work. We’ll meet at the Senior Center this Sunday, June 26, from 3:00 to 5:00. I’ve been collecting song information from all our sessions to help put together a good song list for our fall Family Folk Machine program.
Hope to see you this Sunday! All singers and instruments are welcome.
