Since I last posted, I’ve been to WoMaMu (Women Making Music) and FAR-West Folk Alliance. I’ll report on the Folk Alliance Regional West Conference first, while it’s fresh in my mind. It’s a conference on folk and acoustic music as a profession, with workshops during the day and showcases nearly all night. The juried showcases run from 6:45 p.m. to 10:30, the guerilla showcases run till 2 a.m. and then the jamming starts. Actually, there was jamming in the halls most of the time. The YouTube workshop turned out to be for PC, not Mac, so it was only moderately useful, and I missed the one on Appalachian music, but I really enjoyed the one where two friends who had never written a song with each other before, and with no preplanning, collaborated on writing a song before our very eyes. They noodled around and let ideas for music and words float to the surface and caught the ones they liked and fit them together, re-shuffled, re-wrote, and came up with a song. I suppose that’s the way I work inside my head on lyrics, but then I send them semi-finished to a tune-writing friend and we work together usually by email to adjust lyrics and tune to each other. They were doing it all at once and in public.

 

 

 

 

Faith’s is not just a place where you try out your new licks and your new songs, it’s a place where you meet people who change your life. It happened to me. I went to a house concert Guy Carawan was giving at Faith’s house around 1974. Guy heard I was telling stories and he said I should come down to Highlander, where he lived and worked, and go with him and his family to Jonesboro, farther east in Tennessee, to the National Storytelling Festival. I accepted. And at that festival, the scales fell from my eyes, and I knew that I was not meant to be a librarian telling stories, but a storyteller. I came home, quit my job, bought a van and hit the road. We might have had that conversation in a concert hall or a club, but it was more likely at Faith’s.

 

I wrote a song for Faith’s birthday, I think it was her 75th, but I didn’t date the lead sheet. The last line of each verse repeats, so please join in.

 

She has a heart as big as a house and a house that’s bigger than most.

So fill up your glass with whatever you like and prepare to drink a toast

To the Faith that keeps us going, we hope for a long, long time,

And the love she gives with cups of tea and hugs and rhythm and rhyme.

 

She’s got a house and a dog and a cat and a bed and a pretty good car.

She’s got some records and a record machine and of course she’s got a guitar,

So she told us not to bring presents, and I don’t want to do it wrong,

But I didn’t think she’d yell and scream too much if I gave her a pretty good song

 

By the time of Faith’s 90th birthday, so many people had written songs about her that Laurie Vela put together a whole CD of them. Just goes to show how many lives Faith has affected, and how deeply. . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s Marianne’s photo of the mist lying in the valley. In the distance, the mountain (Mt. St. Helena) I used to lead campers up when I was a counselor at Kilowana Camp Fire Girls camp back in 1953-54.

 

We enjoyed this scene from the porch of the dining hall each morning when we lined up to go in to breakfast. The Dutch apple pancake the last morning was outstanding. If you are a woman and enjoy music, consider joining us. Doesn’t matter if you make music or not, you’ll love camp.

 

 

 

 

 

*duck tape

 

©2009 by Nancy Schimmel