Many people remember the good old days of Peter Paul & Mary, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger. But many younger people have only heard about them. People sang together and felt a real sense that their generation was going to do something big. And they did! All of those dreams live on in the great folk songs of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.
Today, we live in a very different environment. But new folk songs, just as powerful, are still being written today. Hundreds of musicians are writing and singing songs that speak to our common values, struggles, history, landscape and customs. The challenge is how to get these songs heard. How do we write songs that speak not just to one side of a political argument or to one ethnic community but to a wide group of everyday people? How do we share the wonders of this music with new generations of people who didn’t grow up listening to this genre or singing with their families in their living rooms?
Spook Handy gained a lot of insight about this by singing alongside Pete Seeger more than fifty times at concerts and festivals over a ten-year period. And he’s discovered a bunch of new ideas from his own experiences performing over 3000 concerts in which he shares old familiar songs together with new originals.
Spook’s Keynote Concert “The Power of Folk Songs – Then and Now” looks at why some of the old folk songs gained so much popularity and how new songs today can still reach people of all ages, colors and backgrounds.