Les Sampou performs Saturday. Reserve your campsite now for the 27th Annual Spring Gulch Folk Festival. A weekend-long event of excellent music, sing-a-long campfires, workshops, dancing, and crafts. The 2013 Folk Festival will run for four days, Thursday through Sunday
More information here.
Dar Williams with Special Guest Catie Curtis
A benefit concert for Americans United for Separation of Church and State
Friday, February 5th at 7:30pm
Tickets and More Info: Click Here
“Dar Williams is a songwriter of immense talent” – Telegraph UK
Williams growth as an individual over her almost two-decade-long career has gone hand-in-hand with her evolution as an artist. Raised in Chappaqua, N.Y., and educated at Wesleyan University, Williams spent 10 years living in the thriving artistic community of Northampton, Mass., where she began to make the rounds on the coffeehouse circuit. Joan Baez, an early fan of her music, took Williams out on the road and recorded several of her songs.
Every new album from Dar Williams represents her thoughts and feelings about both her own life and larger forces in the world. But her ninth studio record, Emerald, marks a particularly dramatic confluence between her experiences and broader contemporary culture—and what it means to be a songwriter at this moment in history.
“I’m now experiencing the fruits of the alternative culture I was part of in the ‘90s,” she says. “I think I’ve made choices about how I lived my life, outside of the world that was going to fit me among the mainstream norms, and I chose to stay with my friends, to stay with my culture. That turns out to have been the sturdiest structure I could have built for myself. And that’s in my songs, it’s in my teaching. I’m a believer in what can happen when we make music together.” – Dar Williams
Special Guest Catie Curtis
Catie Curtis is a veteran on the singer/songwriter folk scene. She’s performed at the White House, two Presidential Inaugural Balls, with Lilith Fair, and at Carnegie Hall. Winner of several Boston Music Awards, she also took the Grand Prize in the 2006 International Songwriting Competition (out of 15,000 entries). The New Yorker called Catie a “folk-rock goddess.”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State is a nonpartisan organization that lobbies, educates and litigates in order to preserve the constitutional principle of church-state separation as the only way to ensure religious freedom for all Americans.
Tickets and More Info: Click Here
The Kennedys, Songwriting duo Pete and Maura Kennedy make a strong return to the studio and stage after three years of weekly live-streamed lockdown-era concerts. They took the opportunity to explore classic songwriting in-depth, performing over a thousand songs during the pandemic. That vast overview strengthened and refined their own writing and laid the foundation for this new collection of original, socially-conscious songs.
“After such a deep dive into American roots music, we felt like we had a new set of writing tools. We were ready to create this body of work, and there’s just SO much to write about,” says Maura. “During our five-year hiatus from writing and recording, America changed in massive ways, divisive ways that have shaken our whole foundation. That has to be addressed by creative artists, those of us who have a voice to speak for others. Our love of the great things about this country, things that are under threat, is the reason we decided to make “Headwinds” the title track of the CD. Political and social headwinds are making it hard to get back “home’ to our greatness as a nation. We want to push back in a positive way against those winds.”
In addition to singing and writing, Pete and Maura are multi-instrumentalists. The thirteen songs are cast in a soundscape that draws from the classic canon of American roots, in keeping with the theme of getting back “home” as a nation. Acoustic and electric guitars, a vintage steel guitar, a gospel-inflected piano/organ mix, and even a slide ukulele all add colors to a song bag of sounds that have drawn us together during hard times. Pete and Maura believe that those sounds still have the power to pull us through again.
The Kennedys began their writing and touring life three decades ago as members of Nanci Griffith’s Blue Moon Orchestra, developing their own sound as a frequent support act on Nanci’s tours across America, Ireland, Scotland and England. Collaborations with Nanci continued, culminating in Pete and Maura producing her final album, “Intersections.” Along the way, they hosted a nationwide radio program, “The Dharma Cafe” on Sirius/XM, wrote and released sixteen CDs of original music, and have been core artists on folk radio, expanding their audience further with the inception of the AAA and Americana formats.
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Danielle Miraglia comes armed with a strong steady thumb on an old Gibson and an infectious stomp-box rhythm with tunes ranging from heart-felt to socially conscious that will move both your heart and hips. Her latest “Bright Shining Stars” debuted at #15 on the Billboard Blues Charts. Cascade Blues Association calls it “… tough as rawhide, but smooth as blended whiskey.” Released Oct 2020 with Vizztone Label Group, it’s a solo acoustic folk/blues record that highlights the one-woman-band live sound she’s honed over the years, featuring guest appearances by talented friends Laurence Scudder, Peter Parcek and Richard “Rosy” Rosenblatt. It includes originals as well as a collection of songs she covers at live shows, paying homage to influences like Big Bill Broonzy, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and more, plus the title track “Bright Shining Stars,” written by her husband, Tom Bianchi.
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