Conrad is talking absolute drivel! He contradicts himself time and again.

Like Peter the Hermit, he's on a Crusade. And he's just as barking mad at Peter was!

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This is not for Conrad. He's much too thick, and far too dedicated to crawling up his own tailpipe to understand it. It's a modest suggestion for those who genuinely want to reach out to new audiences and present folk music in interesting and educational ways, without lecturing, preaching, or boring the crap out of them.

And as for passing out song sheets, which, in many performance situations, is neither appropriate nor necessary. I've seen Pete Seeger get a whole audience singing like a trained chorus by just lining out the songs. Phenomenal!

It's much better to inspire people to become acquainted with the vast collection of books available and learn the songs—and learn about the songs—that way. This was one of the main themes of the "Ballads and Books" television series, funded by the Seattle Public Library. They had (and still have) shelf after shelf of song collections and books about song and ballad research, along with a vast number of recordings.

One of the best ways of broadening interest in folk music is to reach out to people who have not heard much folk music and who would not ordinarily encounter it or seek it out. Or those who remember "folk music" as a pop music fad back in the Sixties. A very good way is to find a situation where you can "piggy-back" on some other interest as a way of sneakily introducing folk music to audiences who are not especially interested in it and would probably never have any interest in going to a folk venue, free or otherwise.

Case in point:    Jana Harris (pronounced "YAH-nah"), in addition to teaching at the University of Washington, is a novelist, essayist, and poet. She has a number of books of poetry out. She draws much of her inspiration from reading the journals and diaries of the pioneers, particularly women, who came west and settled in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming). These people led a pretty hard life, and Jana's poetry collections bear titles like The Dust of Everyday Life and subtitles like The Voices of Pioneer Women. A lot of her poetry is tough, gritty stuff!

Jana does a lot of poetry readings, particularly in book stores, frankly, to promote her books.

I've known Nancy Quensé for years. I first met her when she walked into a coffeehouse in 1961 carrying a hard-shell guitar case containing her Goya G-20 classical guitar. She was eighteen, tall and slender, and with her long, dark hair, she looked very much like a young Audrey Hepburn (think "Breakfast at Tiffany's").

I don't know how she and Jana met, but five or six years ago, Nancy called my wife Barbara and me to ask us if we would be interested in working with she and Jana. Her idea was to put together a presentation of Jana's pioneer poetry that would include showing slides of the many old photographs that Jana had collected along with "incidental music" comprised of folk songs and other music that fit the whole theme.

Nancy sings to the guitar and the 5-string banjo, I, of course, sing, accompanying myself on the guitar, and Barbara plays the piano and the organ. She has a very old portable "camp organ" that folds up to about the size of a foot locker. It's a reed pump organ (activated with pedals, sort of like riding a tricycle while playing it), and many of them came west in covered wagons. They were frequently used in early improvised churches and at camp meetings (you've never heard "A Mighty Fortress is our God" until you've heard it wheezed out on this thing!). And Nancy also recruited Isla Ross, a young woman who plays the violin, and who can fiddle up a storm.

We (Nancy, actually) put together a show that consisted of Jana reading her poetry, with others of us reading some of it (I was assigned to read what Jana called "the guy poems"), and Isla, despite the fact that she is "all growed up," has a sort of "little girl" speaking voice. She does a beautiful, touching job of reading a poem supposedly spoken by a young girl anticipating all the wonderful toys they could buy (". . . maybe even a ball!") with the money that comes in "When Daddy Sells the Horses!" Both Nancy and Barbara also read poems.

While the reading was going on, the slides of the old photographs were projected on a screen, Nancy and I played guitar softly behind the readings, and between poems, we sang the songs (mostly folk songs) that Nancy had researched.

With the readings, the slides of old photos, the music and the songs, the presentations were somewhat reminiscent of a Ken Burns television series, like "The Civil War."

Over a period of a couple of years, Jana Harris and the group "Miscellany" (consisting of Nancy, Barbara, Isla, and me) gave this presentation at book stores, schools and colleges, and libraries all over the Western Washington area. Most people were interested in Jana's poetry, which, of course, was the point of the whole thing and why they came in the first place. But after each presentation, many people asked us about the songs we had sung, where they had come from, and how and where we had found them.

Folk songs. Mostly folk songs. Plus a couple of old hymns, and a few other songs of the period (such as Stephen Fosters' "Hard Times, Come Again No More"). Quite a number of people commented that they had never really thought of folk songs in their actual historical context before! It was an eye-opener for a lot of people.

And here's the kicker:   some of these people started showing up when one or the other of us sang in other venues because they wanted to hear more of the songs. Songs that had some real meat to them! Folk songs.

By the way:   these presentations were free of charge to the audiences, and although we were perfectly willing to do this for free, Jana not only insisted that we be paid, several times she and her husband took us all out to nice restaurants for dinner.

So—if you want to spread interest in folk music, simply offering free access—and free beer—isn't enough.

There are lots of possibilities. Use your imagination!

Don Firth

P. S. And Conrad, as I said, these presentations we did with Jana were free of charge to the audience. And when we took the presentation out of town, we didn't travel by jet, nor did we stay in luxury hotels. We drove. And if we had to stay over night, we usually stayed in a Motel 6 or similar discount motel. No swimming pool and usually no TV. Just a place to lay the bod.