Simple, Conrad.

You obviously have a computer and you have access to the internet. Pull up "google" and put in "house concerts," followed by the name of your locality.

I did that just a few moments ago:   "'house concerts'" and "seattle" and I came up with pages and pages of stuff. To give you an idea, here's a LIST of folk music venues in and around Seattle. At some of these, there is no admission charge or cover, and all it would cost you is the price of a beer. An easy further search revealed that there are more house concerts in this area than I had ever dreamed! Dozens every month! Sometimes three or four on the same day!

And they all have web sites. That's the network whereby they make their announcements. It saves having to have fliers printed up, then wandering up and down the streets stapling them to telephone poles (along with the notices about lost cats).

Yes, they do require that you make a reservation ahead of time for reasons already explained. If the comfortable capacity of their living room or rec room is, say forty-five people, they don't want to have to turn away and disappoint a couple of hundred people lined up expectantly outside. So—it only makes sense to specify "reservations only."

This is NOT secretive, exclusive, or elitist. It's just common sense.

And, yes, there is an admission charge. This household is providing an opportunity to see and hear this performer in a comfortable, intimate setting rather than in a large and austere theater or auditorium, with you sitting in the fourteenth row and the performer up on a stage a quarter of a block away. And often the host provides refreshments. Sometimes there is a potluck before or after the concert. And rather than getting rich off sponsoring house concerts, it gives the host (usually a folk music aficianado, not the bloated capitalist you seem to think) a chance to meet the performer and hear them up close. More often than not, ALL of the proceeds are given to the performer, and if the host keeps any of it, it's only to cover whatever expenses they may have incurred in putting on the concert.

And your remark about the performer "double dipping"—doing a big concert, then following it with one or more house concerts in the same locality—that simply doesn't happen. Often the performer is a local person who is not well-known enough to draw a crowd to a large theater and this is their only opportunity to sing. Or—the performer is on tour, doing a series of house concerts. In this area, for example, Bellingham on Saturday evening, Everett the following afternoon, Seattle on the next Friday evening, followed by Sunday afternoon in Tacoma, then Portland, Oregon on the next Friday, and on down the Pacific Coast.

It is the admission fees given to the performer that make this kind of touring possible, giving many people a chance to hear them and become acquainted with them up close, and gradually allowing them to build an audience for themselves. Nobody gets rich off house concerts. Most of what the traveling performer receives goes to pay his or her traveling expenses.

Richard Dyer-Bennet polished his performances by singing in a night club (The Village Vanguard) early on, then hired New York's Town Hall and gave a concert there. World famous impresario Sol Hurok heard him there and took him on as a client. That was a huge gamble on Dyer-Bennet's part (have you tried to rent New York's Town Hall recently?), but it paid off. Not every aspiring performer can do that.

A house concert can be an end in itself. I've done dozens of them, and enjoy doing them very much. Even so, I've not become rich by doing them. And it is a way for a relatively new performer to gain experience and build an audience. Or for an older performer such as myself who wishes to give an occasional concert and prefers a smaller, more intimate venue.

####

If you don't care about the performance aspect of folk music and you just want to sing yourself and hear other people sing, then that should be idiot simple to do.

Invite a few singers to you home of an evening and sit around and sing for each other.

The first folk music events I ever went to were what we called "hootenannies."

The word got pre-empted by commercial interests later on, but in the 1950s, here in Seattle, there was a "hoot" almost every weekend. Some were in places like community centers, some were held at the University Friends (Quakers) Meeting House, but most were held in private homes. We would gather on a Friday or Saturday evening and there were no formalities. Grab a seat on a chair, sofa, or sit cross-legged on the floor. When a number of people had gathered, we'd all tune up (guitars, banjos, whatever), and someone would start singing. There was no special organization. The singing was in no specified order. We didn't go around in a circle or anything like that (although you could—around here, that came later when the Seattle Song Circle was organized, but we'd been "hooting" for decades before that). The main protocol merely said "Don't hog the show." Sing a song, then let someone else sing. Sing solo or sing together. Sometimes we'd rock the place with group songs such as sea chanteys. Any and all combinations. But have some consideration for the neighbors.

Jazz musicians would probably call something like this a "jam session." Same general idea.

It was this sort of thing that allowed me to grow from a green-around-the-gills neophyte who knew three songs and an equal number of guitar chords to someone who felt confident in singing solo for larger groups, and eventually into doing long-term gigs in cooffeehouses and clubs, then concerts, TV, and such. Warm plunge!

This might be right up your alley, Conrad. If you're hung up on politically oriented songs, go for it! If someone sings "We Shall Overcome" or "Union Maid," there's nothing to stop you from singing "The Horst Wessel Song." Go for it!

Total cost for such an event? Nuthin! If you're feeling generous, you could always supply a case of beer or a gallon jug of cheap wine and some paper cups, maybe some chips and dip. But that's strictly local option. You could specify BYOB.

So if you want a free venue and you want to be free to sing whatever you want, stop whining, get off your butt, and get to it!

Don't pollute! GIVE A HOOT!!

Don Firth

P. S. By the way, I was not aware of this until I read Pete Seeger's The Incomplete Folksinger, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1992. Pete says that the word "hootenanny" in relation to an informal gathering of folk singers apparently originated in Seattle, probably sometime in the 1930s. He and Woody Guthrie first heard the word in this context in Seattle in 1941. They took the word back to New York and started calling their Saturday song fests at Almanac House "hootenannies," and the term caught on. See The Incompleat Folksinger, page 327