Family Folk Machine

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.

The Family Folk Machine is pleased to participate in this year’s Front Porch Music Festival. The festival has lined up a spectacular variety of musical acts for several porches scattered throughout the Longfellow neighborhood. It will be a great day to stroll through the streets. The FFM will sing some of our best group numbers from this spring’s concert from 2:00 to 2:30 p.m. at the porch at 604 Grant Street. If you’d like to check out the whole schedule, look here:

Schedule of Events

Here’s a Little Village article from last summer about last year’s festival, if you want to get a sense of the inspiration behind the event:

Front Porch Music Festival to serenade Iowa City neighborhood

Hope to see you there!

Saturday, June 11, we will gather at Uptown Bill’s (where it will be COOL) to sing together from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. This is the fourth of five sing-alongs moving sequentially through our new songbook, Rise Again. This session will focus on these chapters: Musicals, Old-Timey & Bluegrass, Outdoors, Peace, Play, Pub Songs, Rich & Poor, and Rock Around the Clock. Bring instruments! Come enjoy a cool soda or milkshake! Hope to see you Saturday.

The Press-Citizen ran this column on Thursday, May 19. Hope to see you at the concert!

by Jean Littlejohn

The Family Folk Machine presents a free concert this Saturday, May 21, at 2 p.m. at the Englert Theatre with the Senior Center’s Voices of Experience. We’re calling the concert “Hard Times Come Again No More: Songs of Struggle and Hope,” and the program features songs about social justice in order to present a community angle on the University’s “Just Living” theme semester.
The notion that songs can help further the cause of social justice is an old idea, even if it’s not a straightforward one. Even though you can’t scientifically prove that songs can move the cause of justice forward, many people agree that they have played a powerful role in social movements—things like helping slaves maintain their dignity and spreading secret messages about the Underground Railroad, giving workers the courage to organize into a union, galvanizing the African American community to fight racist policies in the deep South in the 1960s, and cleaning up the polluted Hudson river. Some of our concert songs honor past struggles for human rights, and others call us to action.
The concert will be framed by the rhetorical device of the hammer as the means of action in the world. We’ll sing the classic Pete Seeger/Lee Hays song, “If I Had a Hammer,” where the tools for working for a better world are the “hammer of justice,” the “bell of freedom,” and the “song about the love between my brothers and my sisters.” The concert ends with the recent Steve Earle tribute to Seeger, “Steve’s Hammer (For Pete),” where we imagine laying the hammer down once peace and justice are achieved. In between, we’ll sing “John Henry,” which seems to have begun as a true story about this heroic steel-drivin’ man who beat the steam drill with his hammer and then came to represent the dignity of human work.
One recurrent problem in the struggle for social justice is the feeling that the world’s problems are large and systemic and that individual actions can never prevail against them. But past struggles teach us that, as we’ll sing on Saturday, “step by step the longest march can be won”—by working together: “Many stones can form an arch; singly, none.” When Patti Smith performs her song “People Have the Power,” she often ends with the entreaty, “Use your voice!” If you’re ready to use your voice, you can believe her words: “People have the power to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools.”
The Family Folk Machine is pleased to be sharing the Englert stage with the Voices of Experience for this concert, swelling our numbers to around 80 singers of all ages. The concert is free and open to all, and we try to make it easy for the audience to sing along on many of the song choruses. After the concert, there will be time to gather and socialize at a reception at the Senior Center celebrating the Center’s 35th anniversary.

“Free to Be” is the one song on our FFM spring concert program that the FFM has performed before–the kids sang it at our very first concert, in May of 2013. I’m happy for the kids who have joined us since that time to get to know this optimistic and affirming song. From a programming perspective, Free to Be has taken on a new shade of meaning for me as a result of putting it in a social justice context. It’s easy to bring to mind examples of kids who are not free to express who they really are, not free to be their best and truest selves either due to political or economic hardships or due to social norms. Imagine the kind of world we could have if all these kids were free to be themselves.

The FFM kids are also singing the African American spiritual “O Mary, Don’t You Weep.” When my daughter Claire first learned this song with the Newton Family Singers (http://www.newtonfamilysingers.org), I remember her asking over and over to hear the story about the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt (for one summary from a non-religious viewpoint, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Red_Sea).

The text of this song is a rich mixture of various passages from the Bible; the chorus references the sorrow of Mary of Bethany over the death of her brother, Lazarus, as well as Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. The song includes memorable verses like “If I could, I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood,” and “Moses stood on the Red Sea shore, smotin’ the water with a two by four,” and “God gave Noah the rainbow sign: no more water but fire next time.” (The part about the fire isn’t in the Noah story, but can be found in places like II Peter 3:6-7: “By the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished [as in the flood]. But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless.”]

The song dates from before the Civil War, and the themes of hope and deliverance would have had a clear appeal to the slaves who first sang the song. Like quite a number of spirituals, this one gained new life during the Civil Rights movement. The FFM kids are singing and playing clarinets and string instruments using the minor-mode version of the tune, but there’s also a major-mode version. In the 1960s, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee made new words for this song to refer to the bus boycotts: “If you miss me from the back of the bus, and you can’t find me nowhere, Come on up to the front of the bus, I’ll be ridin’ up there” :