Press-Citizen Community Music column September 1, 2018

by Jean Littlejohn

The Family Folk Machine has begun rehearsals for our fall program, “Stand by Me: Songs of Friendship.” We’re learning arrangements of well-known songs like Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender” and our title song, “Stand by Me,” along with lesser-known songs that reflect on friendship from a variety of angles. The program is a mix of rock songs, traditional folk songs, contemporary folk songs, and original songs.

Being able to present original songs highlights an area of growth for the Family Folk Machine. Last fall we welcomed Nicole Upchurch as associate director, and she has started a songwriting curriculum with the FFM kids. Last spring the kids split into five groups and created five completely original songs; they were able to perform these songs on the Family Stage at the Iowa Arts Festival and at an event for Take a Kid outdoors.

“Autumn Wind,” one of the songs written by FFM kids last spring, will be featured on this fall’s concert in an arrangement for the full choir. The song reflects on the change from summer to fall. The songwriters met with Nicole, local songwriter Gayla Drake, and me to complete final touches on the song before adapting it for the full FFM ensemble, and the result is a beautiful song about how a friend can help you weather life’s changes.

There will be two FFM songwriting projects during the month of September. The younger FFM kids will be writing a song about friendship under Nicole’s guidance, and Gayla will be teaching a songwriting class to a group of teens and adults. Part of the mission of the Folk Machine is to foster individual musical growth, and it’s fantastic to have these new opportunities for individuals to increase their musicianship and hone their creative abilities.

Expanding our leadership has been possible in part due to a new organizational structure. Last spring, the Family Folk Machine became an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Our previous five years of existence had been under the umbrella of the Iowa City/Johnson County Senior Center. The Senior Center supported and nurtured us from an idea into a robust reality, and we are happy to be maintaining a close working relationship with the Center and its staff. Meanwhile, Nicole and I and our new board are learning about budgets and best practices and record-keeping—definitely an area of individual growth for me.

The FFM will present “Stand by Me: Songs of Friendship” in two concerts this November in intimate spaces: Sunday, November 11, at 3 p.m. at the Senior Center; and Saturday, November 17, at 3 p.m. at the Old Capitol’s Senate Chamber. As I’ve been working on the song arrangements, I’ve realized that these concerts are going to be very special because of the unusually personal and reflective nature of these friendship-themed songs. I hope you can be there!

This Saturday, June 2, the FFM kids will take the Family Stage at 2 p.m. They are going to perform several of the songs they wrote this spring, and you won’t want to miss them! FFM Associate Director had the kids divide into groups for songwriting–words, tunes, chords, and everything–and the results were fantastic. Saturday’s set includes a song about autumn, one about walking in Hickory Hill park, a lullaby to the moon, and a song that considers the everyday problem of having your pickax break when you’re down in a cave.
Here’s an ArtsFest map to help you find the Family Stage:
https://summerofthearts.org/wp-content/uploads/2018ProgramMap.pdf
See you there!

Press-Citizen article published May 5 about the upcoming Family Folk Machine concert

by Jean Littlejohn

The Family Folk Machine, Iowa City’s intergenerational choir, is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a concert at the Englert Theatre on Saturday, May 12, at 3 p.m. We are excited to bring back some of our favorite songs from the past five years for this concert.
In putting together a program of favorite past songs, we wanted to represent certain themes that have been important to the Machine. We included a song by Woody Guthrie (“Deportee”), a song associated with Pete Seeger and the Weavers (the Weavers’ arrangement of “When the Saints Go Marching In”), and a couple of songs with Iowa City roots (including Greg Brown’s “Wash My Eyes”). We are following the Louis Armstrong tradition of using social justice verses in “When the Saints Go Marching In,” with new words written by my sister, Rebecca Littlejohn.
One of our Iowa City songs is “Unsteady Youth,” by Alexis Stevens. The song was Stevens’ contribution to the Iowa City Song Project, a 2012 Englert commission, and it’s full of Iowa City references (“We’ll go for a walk out in spite of the cold, where the sidewalks are paved in words over gold…and the sweet angel face that’s turned black as a crow…”). We first performed this song in the spring of 2013, when the song and our choir were both brand new. It’s been rewarding for us to learn this beautiful song again this spring, with lots of new singers.
Another song that’s been a favorite for singers and for listeners is “Loon,” by Boston songwriter Oen Kennedy. A joyful wilderness encounter with loons brings Kennedy to ask “Will I keep my heart open?” The song inspired a beautiful monotype by artist and FFM member Amy Dobrian. Thanks to Amy’s generosity, we’ve been able to use her image of loons under the starry sky on our concert posters. Amy framed and donated the original piece for a raffle—it is now on display at the Senior Center, and you can purchase raffle tickets there or at our May 12 concert.
We will feature one brand-new song on our concert, a song that was written for the Folk Machine by Jeffrey Capps. Inspired by the iconic image of Woody Guthrie’s guitar, with its “This machine kills fascists” inscription, Jeff’s song states “This machine wages peace.” You may see some photos floating around Facebook of Folk Machine members with a special This Machine guitar. We’re loving Jeff’s new song. From its second verse: “Fight the fight with a lyric and a light ‘til you find the harmony/Fight the fight ‘til the darkness dies/All in all, just takes something pretty small to rock this big ol’ world.”
We hope you can come sing along with us on May 12!

Please join us May 12th at 3:00 PM at the Englert Theatre for a program of old and recent favorites from the past five years, and help us celebrate the Family Folk Machine’s fifth anniversary!

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.”