If you’re not familiar with Sacred Harp (a/k/a shape note) singing, it’s a form of community a capella choral music that is based on songbooks—including one called The Sacred Harp—that use a series of shapes and syllables to represent the notes on the musical scale. The singers sit in a hollow square, with each of the four parts (treble, alto, tenor, and bass) on one of the sides. The leader stands in the middle and beats the rhythm with a swinging arm.

There’s a lot of information available about the form and the tradition—a quick search on Sacred Harp will turn up a very thorough Wikipedia entry, a site called fasola.org, an Atlas Obscura story, and more. My goal here is to focus specifically on the Atlanta connection.

In the Little Free Library

Several years before I got involved with AAFFM, this showed up in a Little Free Library on my morning walk. I knew about Sacred Harp singing, so curiosity led me to bring it home.

I subscribed to an Atlanta Singing email list, but didn’t get to an event until much later (more on that below). Fast forward to 2026…

John Plunkett

As I looked through back issues of AAFFM newsletters and saw a regular column on singing events in the Atlanta area, I thought it would be fun to do a Sacred Harp story for Atlanta Folk. That led me to John Plunkett, who is a cornerstone of the Sacred Harp community in Atlanta and beyond. We sat down at the Marlay House, with a World Cup game in the background, and had a delightful conversation.

A Little History

I asked him how he got started on this path. John told me that he was raised Southern Baptist and grew up singing in that tradition, which meant he already knew a handful of Sacred Harp tunes without knowing that’s what they were. In 1970, as a teenager at the Georgia Baptist Music camp in Toccoa, they sang a tune called Northfield—still one of the most popular songs in the Sacred Harp book, and one that newcomers tend to pick up early. He didn’t know it was a Sacred Harp song at the time. He just knew it was one of his favorites that year.

Almost a decade later, John was singing with a community choir in Atlanta called Schola Nova, whose repertoire came to include Sacred Harp music along with Renaissance and medieval material.

Oh, my goodness. This led to a whole side trail on Kelly Morris’s Seed and Feed Theatre, which was the origin of Schola Nova, Schola Cantorum, and the Seed & Feed Marching Abominable. John recalls that Kelly had picked up Sacred Harp in Vermont and brought it into the group’s repertoire.

Then, in the early 1990s, John was singing at Oakhurst Baptist Church when a fellow choir member recruited five or six of them to come out to a Friday night singing at Big Creek Primitive Baptist Church in Alpharetta.

John remembers his first drive out to Big Creek clearly: it was dark, and the area—now some of the most built-up real estate in North Fulton—was still farmland. GA 400 hadn’t been finished yet. The older singers at Big Creek were, by and large, his parents’ generation: men who’d served in World War II or Korea, people who’d farmed the land Alpharetta now sits on.

The Sacred Harp tradition has deep roots in Georgia’s rural churches. I’ll share a little more of that history below; here’s a video from a 1982 Sacred Harp convention at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church, one of the long-time gathering places.

John kept singing through the ‘90s while still active in his church choir. Then in 2000, the church’s ministers of music and organist all left within the same stretch, and he decided to take a break and just sing Sacred Harp for a year. He never went back. “If pressed, I would say this is my church, in large part,” he told me.

Over time, John has become one of the principal points of contact for people interested in Sacred Harp in the Atlanta area. He’s also chairman of the board of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company, the nonprofit that publishes and distributes the book.

A Living Tradition

The informal rule of thumb for these songbooks is a revision every 25 to 30 years. John’s rationale for the periodic refresh is straightforward: “You want to keep the book fresh and connected to the singing community,” he said, “so that a singer can look at a tune and say, I know the person who wrote this.”

The last edition had been published in 1991, and John was on the board when the conversation about a new edition began in 2014. The process got started in 2018. David Ivey, from a longtime singing family in northeast Alabama, chaired the revision committee, mixing lifelong singers with newer, highly active ones.

Here’s an interesting article about the update of the book and some of the people involved.

The committee received roughly 1,200 song submissions and selected about 113 for the new edition. Although they dropped some songs, they were mostly able to expand the book without increasing its length by tightening the layout.

As it happens, the first singing I was able to attend took place at the First Existentialist Congregation in 2024. It was attended by many people who were participating in the creation of the new edition—they would go on to a weekend convention that involved singing and winnowing the contributions—and it was a mighty experience.

The new book was published in 2025. The hosts typically bring a box of books that participants can use, or you can buy your own copy.

Where to Sing

If you’re interested in trying it out, here’s where to get started:

• Atlanta Sacred Harp: Website with a list of upcoming singings.

• Sacred Harp Atlanta: Facebook group for discussion and sharing information.

• AtlantaSinging Google Group: Mailing list with a monthly newsletter plus periodic announcements.

There are several regular singings in the Atlanta area—please check this list for the most current information.

• First Thursdays of the month at Emory Presbyterian Church.

• Third Mondays of the month at The Barn behind St. John the Wonderworker in Grant Park.

• “Teenth Tuesday” of the month at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Athens.

There are also events that range from all-day singings to two- or three-day conventions. The full-day events typically include dinner on the grounds, which is a shared meal that provides nourishment and fellowship. John specifically mentioned a few big annual events that are coming up in September and October. I’ll include information about those in AAFFM announcement emails.

As you get started, think about coming to a smaller singing first. The tenor section (made up of both men and women) is where the melody sits—that might be a good place to start. If you grew up in a church-singing tradition, you’ll likely recognize a tune or two very quickly. Experienced participants are always happy to show you the ropes. And just feel free to sit back and listen—not as you would to a performance, but as a participant in the community and the tradition.

Coming Full Circle

As I was writing this story, I opened up my copy of the Sacred Harp, and folded in the back was this document. On the back, in tiny print, is a listing of singings taking place in Atlanta and other locations in 1996. It was put together by Doug Allison, who is a long-time contributor to the AAFFM community.

When I shared this with him, he said:

Oh, yeah. I remember that. I would update the list of singings every year. I used the smallest font I had available and I’d juggle the text so the whole thing would fit on one page. I got at least one complaint that it was too small to be read without glasses.

All this sort of info can now be readily found on the WWW. But we may have lost something in the process with the cessation of mailed newsletters. There was a National Sacred Harp Newsletter. And the Chicago singers put out a newsletter that was literate, creative and occasionally humorous. There were regional and specialist newsletters, such as for other songbooks. Usually, these newsletters required thoughtful writing, compiling and editing. There are always trade offs.

You may have noticed that the shape notes column in the AAFFM newsletter always began with a quote. I had fun digging for those and always kept an eye out for new ones. I had a file of them on my computer and would pick a new one every month. Two of my favorites cross my mind:

Hugh McGraw: “I wouldn’t cross the street to listen to this music but I’d cross the country to sing it.”

Kelly Morris: “It wouldn’t be August if I didn’t get lost trying to find Wilson’s Chapel.”

Thanks, Doug!

One more thing...I learned that a documentary on Sacred Harp by Matt & Erica Hinton was released in 2008, and has recently been revised and re-released. Here’s the trailer. If I hear of learn of any local screenings, I’ll get the word out on the AAFFM announcement list.

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One of my professional projects1 involves exploring the challenges encountered by various groups of people (for example, parents raising kids with disabilities)2 and applying tools and strategies for resilience. Just for fun, I started thinking about the challenges folk musicians might face. Here's what I came up with.

Challenge 1: Making a Life, Not Just a Living

For some folk musicians, music is a career. For others, it’s something they fit around a full-time job and family responsibilities. Most fall somewhere in between. Whatever the situation, there is an ongoing balancing act between earning a living and making the music that matters most. Finding a way to sustain both over the long haul takes intention, flexibility, and a willingness to define success on our own terms.

Challenge 2: Sustaining Community

Folk music has always been about more than performance. We gather in song circles, jams, festivals, house concerts, workshops, and kitchens. These communities don’t happen by accident. They require people to organize, volunteer, teach, welcome newcomers, and keep traditions alive while also making room for new ideas. Building and sustaining community is one of the most rewarding—and sometimes one of the most demanding—parts of being a folk musician.

Challenge 3: Finding an Audience

Getting our music in front of people isn’t always easy. Festivals have limited slots. Venues come and go. Social media changes the rules just when we think we’ve figured them out. Some musicians enjoy promoting themselves; others would rather just play. Whether we work within existing systems or create our own opportunities, finding listeners requires persistence as well as musicianship.

Challenge 4: Honoring Tradition While Continuing to Grow

Folk music connects us with songs, styles, and communities that stretch back through generations. At the same time, every musician brings something unique to the tradition. We are constantly making choices about balancing stewardship and innovation—deciding what to preserve, what to adapt, and what to create ourselves. Respecting the past while allowing the music to keep growing is part of the ongoing work.

Challenge 5: Keeping the Flame Alive

Most folk musicians don’t expect fame or fortune. Even so, it’s easy to become discouraged when audiences are small, opportunities are limited, or progress seems slow. Continuing to practice, learn, perform, and encourage others requires a steady sense of purpose that isn’t dependent on applause or recognition.

Challenge 6: Making Music in a Troubled World

Like everyone else, folk musicians live in a world shaped by conflict, injustice, environmental change, and uncertainty. Many of us feel called to respond through our music, our organizations, and our communities, yet it's easy to become discouraged or overwhelmed by problems that seem far larger than any one person—or one song—can address. How do we acknowledge painful realities without becoming overwhelmed by them? How do we keep hope alive without ignoring what's happening around us? Finding ways to keep making meaningful music without losing hope or perspective is both difficult and essential.

Building Resilience

So what do we do with all of this? I start with the belief that resilience is a verb, and that we all have a set of “muscles” we can use to work our way through challenges. Here’s a quick overview:

• Positivity: Looking for possibilities and hope instead of dwelling on setbacks.

• Confidence: Trusting that we can learn, adapt, and meet new challenges.

• Priorities: Focusing on what matters most and letting go of distractions.

• Creativity: Looking at situations from different perspectives and generating new possibilities.

• Connection: Building relationships and supporting one another in community.

• Structure: Developing habits and systems that help us make steady progress.

• Experimenting: Trying new things, taking small risks, and learning from experience.

We need physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy to fuel these muscles, so another element of resilience is making sure we keep our batteries charged. Musicians often give generously of ourselves—to performances, festivals, organizations, teaching, and one another. Taking care of our well-being isn’t self-indulgent; it’s what allows us to keep making music and contributing to the community over the long haul.

The best part is that the challenges we encounter in music become a practice field, helping build capabilities that serve us everywhere. Learning to work through disappointment, collaborate with others, adapt when plans change, try new approaches, and keep going when things get hard prepares us not only for the next gig or gathering, but for whatever else life sends our way. Perhaps that's one of the greatest gifts of being part of this community: we don't just make music together; we help one another become more resilient people.

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This week I pulled out the AAFFM newsletters from 1990. They were multi-page extravaganzas filled with event announcements from throughout the Southeast and more, including a large dose of country dancing, shape note singing, local concerts and festivals, and informal get-togethers at various private homes (along with a few listings of instruments for sale and band members wanted). The organization held monthly folding parties in the back meeting room at the Freight Room in Decatur.

Fiddler’s Green Coffeehouse

The 1990 Fiddler’s Green Coffeehouse concerts were held at the Garden Hills Recreation Center. Tickets were $3.

I’ve linked to Bandcamp or YouTube for as many of the artists as I could find. Happy to add more if you’re on the list and want to send me a link!

January 20

The Often Ensemble (Catherine Cash, Jerry Brunner, Elmo Cogburn) // Beth Heidelberg // Lisa Stevens

February 17

Carey Grubbs & Carl Imes // Buddy Allen & Friends // Roy Bauman

March 17

Phil Matteson & Chris Moser // George Hergen // Red Plum Jam (David Marcus & Friends)

April 21

Sandra Sparks // Garrett Factory // Joyce and Jacque

May 19

Jean Crepeau // Passages (Jem Moore & Ariane Lydon) // Carolyn Kaylor // Steve Key

June 16

Tom Wescoat with Jim O’Connor and Nick Pender // Playin’ Possum (Laeta & Don Smith, Ann Lawing, Pete Senkowski) // Diane Zelman // Nancy Bartlett and the Fine Line Straddlers (Noretta Essary, Pat Powers, Ken Snyder)

July 18

Cyndi Craven // John Grant

August 18

Chuck Larkin // Chuck Henderson // Thom Tollerson

September 15

Harp & Soul (Beth Heidelberg & Judy Austin) // Child’s Play (Nancy & Margie) // Dean & Twinkie

October 20

George Norman & Moira Nelligan with Edward Hunter // Michael Skinner

November 17

Gan Ainm (Rob Greenway & Henry Frantz) // Vyto Stoska

December 15

Comhaltas (Bernard Lane) // David Wolfe & Full Circle // Barbara Panter-Connah & Friends

The December concert was preceded by a jam session and potluck. Stay tuned! We’re working on doing that again this year.

Highlights from the Archives

Here are several gems I had fun exploring—AAFFM events and some other items that captured the world of folk music in Atlanta more than 30 years ago. How many names do you recognize (even if you weren’t around yet in 1990?!)

Patrick Sky & Betty Smith / Feb 24 / Mary Lin Auditorium / Co-presented with Irish Arts of Atlanta & Theatre Gael, and supported by the Georgia Humanities Council and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Here’s a story about this show from the AJC. According to the AAFFM newsletter article, a “song quilt” was presented to Bill and Betty Smith—each square was a visual representation of a well-loved ballad. Anyone have a picture of it to share?!

“New folk-rock singer Shawn Colvin,” winner of best new vocalist in the New York Music Awards, performed at the Variety Playhouse in April, presented by Windstorm Productions.

Shawn Colvin got her big break touring with Suzanne Vega in 1988, landing a recording contract with Columbia Records. Here’s a song from her 1989 debut studio album Steady On (in a later recording with Alison Krauss).

Ireland’s leading folk troubadour Christy Moore made his Southeast debut at Center Stage Theater in May.

From an Atlanta Journal story: “Twenty-five years into his career, why is the leading voice of Ireland’s folk-music revival just now getting to Atlanta? ‘Nobody ever asked me,’ Christy Moore says, laughing. ‘And it’s bad manners to turn up when you’re not asked.” “U2’s Bono says, ‘What Woody Guthrie was to America, Christy Moore is to Ireland.’”

AAFFM hosted a Spring Fling folk festival at Redwine, Chris Moser’s place in Lithonia, with camping, stage performances, informal picking, and shape-note singing.

The North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance was established to foster and promote multi-cultural, traditional, and contemporary folk music, dance, and related performing arts in the US and Canada through education, advocacy, networking, and professional and field development.

Now the Folk Alliance International, this organization is still going! AAFFM recently became an organizational member, and we’ll be sharing more news soon about benefits and discounts available to our members.

Before digital music, and at the dawn of the World Wide Web, building a music collection in 1990 involved knowing where to order vinyl and CDs. I found a newsletter list of mail order record sources. I’ve included links to web sites and news stories for as many as I could find.

• Andy’s Front Hall, Vorheesville, NY

• County Sales (Old Time & Bluegrass), Floyd, VA

• Down Home Music, El Cerrito, CA

• Elderly Instruments, Lansing, MI

• Kicking Mule Records, Alderpoint, CA

• Note-Ably Yours, New Carlisle, OH

• Record and Tape Depot, Boone, NC

• Roundup Records, North Cambridge, MA [this was the mail-order/retail side of Rounder Records]

• Shanachie Records (British Isles), Newton, NJ

• Sheppard Instruments, Greensboro, NC

• University of Missouri Press, c/o CUP Services, Ithaca, NY

The newsletter announced a new five-program series to be aired on PBS—American Patchwork, prepared and hosted by Alan Lomax.

Between 1978 and 1982, Alan Lomax traveled through the American South with a video camera, capturing the music of ordinary people; much of what we know about early American music comes from his efforts. Over 400 hours of footage were edited down for the PBS series. You can view one of these shows, Appalachian Journey, here; also, the Alan Lomax Archive channel on YouTube has a rich trove of his original videos.

Gordon Lightfoot and Peter, Paul & Mary both performed at Chastain Park.

In 1990, Gordon Lightfoot was already one of the “old guys.” A newspaper story about his Atlanta concert says, “Here is Gordon Lightfoot, one of the last of the true troubadors, still laying down fresh musical cuts when most of his 1960s compadres have slumped into the artistic Barcalounger of nostalgia racks.”

AAFFM co-sponsored English folk group The Watersons on Thanksgiving at the Variety Playhouse. According to the newsletter, they were performing their special Yuletide touring program “Singing the Seasons,” which “will bring us from the birth of the New Year through Pace Egging and Easter, May Day, Harbingers of Summer, Mell Suppers of Autumn, to the end of the year with Wassail bowls, Kissing Boughs and carols.

I managed to keep myself from going down the rabbit hole of exploring all these different seasons, although it was tempting. And here’s a video of The Watersons performing the May Day song Hal-An-Tow.

Wayne Daniel’s book Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia was released to very positive reviews.

This book (still available on most major book sites!) traces Atlanta’s emergence in the 1920s as a major force in country recording and radio broadcasting.

A review of Dirty Linen Magazine: The Journal of Folk, Electric Folk, Traditional and World Music.

Started in 1983 as Fairport Fanatics, a newsletter for fans of Fairport Convention, Dirty Linen (named after a traditional tune) grew into an internationally-distributed glossy color publication that covered a wide range of folk-related music until it closed in 2010.

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A Little Bit of Backstory

I asked the obvious question: Where did the name Mudcat come from?

Here’s the story Danny told:

His first guitar—a nylon-string Spanish guitar, he thinks—came from a friend when he was about 14. The first one he bought, on layaway at Sears, was a Takamine 12-string. “That was really dumb, you know, the first guitar, a 12-string. To this day, I can’t tune 6 strings.” He returned it and got an Ovation instead, which projected well on the street. “But don’t try to sit down with it,” he adds.

The blues, he says, snuck up on him rather than hitting him all at once. “It seemed to be in the root of everything that I really liked. I always like to find the root, go deeper as I can, go far back chronologically.” The notes that kept working for him turned out to be the pentatonic scale. “Like Lola said, the Blues chose me.”

Coming to Atlanta

He’d been traveling the country busking—San Antonio, New Orleans, Savannah, wherever a street corner and a willing crowd could be found. He ended up in Athens because a friend invited him, liked the scene, and then his van broke down and he was stuck. A friend from his school days back in Savannah was in Atlanta, studying at Georgia Tech, so Mudcat hitchhiked over, slept on his floor for a week, got a job at Greenpeace, and found himself a room in Home Park. He’s been here ever since.

Mudcat the Musician

Mudcat continued busking—festivals in Inman Park, Piedmont Park, the Dogwood Festival…anywhere people gathered. He’s philosophical about the economics of street playing: Little Five Points was great for making friends, less great for making money. “The time I tried to play in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert—it’s like, ‘oh yeah, here’s some acid. We love you, but zero money.’”

Getting the Band Together

His first band started to come together at an arts festival in the late 1980s. He noticed a guy in the crowd who stood out, even by festival standards: fur vest, no shirt, bright orange shorts and socks, big combat boots, funny sunglasses, a fur hat, sitting on a mini shopping cart with a couple of drums inside. They caught each other’s eye. “Had a friendly exchange, and I said, hey, come on and play. And just right away, clicked, just clicked.” That was Evan, and the beginning of a long musical partnership.

Multi-instrumentalist Snave came into the picture through Greenpeace—his wife worked there with Danny, they wound up at an after-work celebration in Oakland Cemetery, drinking Mad Dog 20/20—or maybe Thunderbird—and it clicked again. Snave brought a bass player friend, and the first Mudcat band was formed.

I found this photo of Mudcat busking at the Dogwood Festival in Piedmont Park with Snave, Evan, and Burke on Facebook.

Sylvia’s Atomic Cafe

From festivals and street corners, they moved into venues. Sylvia’s Atomic Cafe on what’s now the Flying Biscuit block in Candler Park was an early home—a space where art blended with poetry and live music. It was there that Mudcat began celebrating the birthday of Frank Edwards, a Georgia blues musician born in 1909 and a contemporary of Robert Johnson. Sylvia (Cross) made chicken and dumplings and a pie for Frank’s sweet tooth, and Mudcat invited other acts. “That became the model for a lot of the events I would do,” he says. “The Giving It Back Festival grew from those roots.”

Sylvia Cross, founder of the cafe, closed it in 1993 and now owns the Sycamore Place Gallery in Decatur, with art classes for children and adults.

Fat Matt’s

Fat Matt’s Rib Shack was his first regular gig. He still plays there occasionally, and gives credit to the owner for continuing to support the musicians. He talked about the art of “working the hat”—getting the crowd to put money in the jar. “We knew how to work it…I’d get the band going, and do the preachy thing—you know: ‘Money is evil. It is. It is, you know, people kill each other for money, some people are homeless, they can’t eat, all kind of terrible things…because of money. So we’re here to help you.’”

Northside Tavern

Ellyn Webb was weighing what to do with the Northside Tavern after her father passed away. He had booked music there in the 70s, but things had been quiet for a while. A blues club was one of her options. When she came to Fat Matt’s and saw Danny and Evan, she invited them over. They were running a weekly event—the Gumbo Ya Ya—with DJ John Otti spinning records and bartender Glynda Ray making real gumbo and rice for a dollar a bowl. “I thought I had an allergy to DJs, but this was a real cool scene.”

Ellyn asked Mudcat to play on the weekend, and to bring some friends in. When Frank Edwards’ birthday came around, they moved the celebration to Northside—bigger stage, more people, more acts.

Mudcat spent 25 years playing solo Wednesday nights at Northside Tavern. He watched a new crop of Georgia Tech students come through every year, and the two things he loved hearing most were: “You put us in the mood and we’re going”—and “I thought I didn’t like blues.”

He commissioned paintings for the Northside walls, each one representing an honoree from the Giving It Back Festival—one living, one passed. Eventually there were 20 of them. Some have since been stolen; some replaced. But the tradition of sitting in that chair on stage and reaching for a Curly Weaver song, or a Grady “Fats” Jackson tune, to connect the room to Georgia’s own blues lineage—that was the work Mudcat cared about most. “We were proving that blues isn’t a relic,” he says.

This 2022 indie documentary about the Northside Tavern (including a few vignettes from Mudcat) may only be free on YouTube for a limited time, so check it out and consider throwing a little love in the producers’ tip jar!

Giving it Back

Danny started the “Giving it Back” Blues Festival at the Northside Tavern in 1994 to pay tribute to Curley Weaver and other seminal figures in the Atlanta blues scene of the 1920s and ‘30s. The festivals operated on a principle he’s still proud of: the money went to the elder musicians—players like Eddie Tigner, Cora Mae Bryant, and Frank Edwards. This led to a connection with Tim Duffy, who had launched the Music Maker Relief Foundation to help older Southern blues/roots musicians, and the result has been a great benefit to the music community.

But he’s also clear that this is not a one-way street. He’s helping, but in return he gets to meet, hang out with, and play music with people he’s admired for years. “I’m meeting people like Cootie Stark, that Tim knew. He’s just up there in Greenville. Well, then he’s coming, staying at my house all the time. He’s off for the week, so he wants to come play. ‘Where are you playing?’ That’s when I was playing a lot, so he wants to come play at my gig. You know, so it’s like, you go to Mudcat, and you got Cootie Stark, too, oh my god!”

Music and the Land

There’s a thread running through Mudcat’s life that connects the music to the land. He and his wife Kathryn, Wildlife Director at the Chattahoochee Nature Center (and the one who does the canning!) practice regenerative agriculture on their property, still rebuilding soil that’s been under power lines and industrial use. When I ask him how the garden and the blues relate to each other, he started by talking about a 1999-2000 tour sponsored by RJ Reynolds Tobacco—the Winston Blues Revival—in support of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, which provides emergency financial assistance to aging blues (and other roots/traditional) musicians. Taj Mahal was the headliner, and elders like Beverly “Guitar” Watkins and Cootie Stark in the lineup.

Winston’s slogan was “Real Blues, Real People. Real Tobacco.” This got us on to the theme of “real.” “I don’t know,” he says…“probably the same desires that bring you to folk music bring you to wanting real food. You want real music, you want real food, you want your hands in the dirt.” He traces some of it back to a foster home where there was a garden out back. He could walk out and cut a bell pepper, put some vinegar on it, and eat it. “Whoa. It’s just right there, you know? Why be hungry about stuff you can’t afford? It’s all right there.”

Working for Greenpeace in those early Atlanta years sharpened his interest further—learning about agricultural chemicals, thinking about what food really was and where it came from. “That’s tied with regenerative agriculture,” he says. “And you can see I’m in an industrial-type zone, so there’s some regeneration that needs to happen.”

He hosts a podcast, The Piedmont Report, that serves as a platform to blend his interests. It’s subtitled Music and Agriculture in the Piedmont Region, blending music with tips for vegetable gardening and sustainable living.

Mudcat the Songwriter

Mudcat loves writing songs. He describes his approach as “children’s poems for adults”—accessible on the surface, reaching for something underneath. He got very good at blues double entendres for a while. Then 9/11 happened, right when he was touring Europe heavily, and the show pivoted toward its gospel side. “I try to learn the lesson myself,” he says. “Stuff I’m working out for myself. I’m sounding like I’m preaching, don’t use the devil—but I’m telling myself.”

One of his most-loved recent songs, “Spend Your Love on Me,” starts with a thrift-store metaphor that always lights up a room: “I met you at the thrift store, your lover didn’t want you no more.” He’s a little ambivalent about it—“I don’t usually write mean”—but audiences respond every time.

He has more than a dozen records, all of them on Bandcamp. After going through cancer treatment—“I beat it, I guess; seems weird to say that”—he recorded Flight School with producer Jeff Bakos, a collection of songs he’d been gathering for a while. The experience got him thinking about the current music landscape. “All you have to do is keep having something new. A CD doesn’t even matter anymore. Just put something out.” He and longtime collaborator Snave have since recorded two more EPs at home, and are now working on a full album. He finds that most people don’t even have a CD player any more, but says that vinyl is still selling.

He plays out six to ten times a month now, down from his peak of six gigs a week, with a regular gig at Virginia-Highland’s Blind Willie’s (named for Atlanta blues legend Willie McTell). He’s kept the band together and says they’re rehearsing more often these days. He still loves playing solo too. “I can do the same songs, but it’s two different animals.”

Blues in Atlanta Today

When I ask about the current state of Atlanta’s blues scene, Mudcat is a little wistful. There are good players—he mentions a number, including Skyler Saufley, Eddie 9V, Jackson Allen, Cannonball Red, and especially Jontavious Willis, who had just recently been in the garden helping him dig a bed. “He’s so deep that you just have to call it folk music,” Mudcat says. “You know, the boundaries are blurry.”

But he feels that the connective tissue is missing. “There are factions,” he says. “There’s not an umbrella.” The mainstay clubs, in his opinion, still play a role but have narrowed their range and are not as open to the broad range of blues as they used to be, perhaps because they are no longer run by the founders and some of the original vision has been lost.

When I asked about additional places to hear good blues, he points to the WRFG Community Sessions shows as a reliable destination. He also says, “Wild Heaven Brewery West End’s Garden Club has had some good bookings. Sandra Senn runs a jam at Napoleon’s on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays; Bill Sheffield and Spencer Kilpatrick do an acoustic session there every other Tuesday. Carrie’s Corner does house concerts. You kind of have to know. The network knows about it, but it doesn’t get listed everywhere.” “Yeah, we need a blues club…we need a roots club.”

He’s also noticed a tone in the national blues world that bothers him. “You look at the promo pictures, and they all want to kick your ass, or they’re gangster. Why has everybody got to be a badass?” “It shows up in the music,” he says. “Not everything—there’s great stuff out there—but as a current.”

Along the way, he confesses that he can be opinionated. “I run my mouth sometimes, I complain and everything, but I’m honest. I get mean when I get mad about stuff. You gotta treat people right.”

Words of Advice

I closed by asking what he would say to someone just starting out—metaphorically hitchhiking into Atlanta with a guitar.

“Try to find some consistency. A weekly opportunity to play somewhere. It could start at a jam session—you make a community out of a lot of jam sessions. The successful ones, communities come out of those.”

I asked if people can still make a living playing blues.

He thinks for a moment. “You gotta love it, or just keep it as a hobby.” And you have to be good. But also you have to know how to work the room. How to pass the hat. How to make people feel like they’re part of something. The techniques are different now; TikTok instead of a street corner, streaming instead of a CD in your lap. But something about it is the same. “We were playing on the street,” he says. “Now people are becoming stars on the internet. The dues are different. But you’ve still got to pay them.”

As it started to rain, we wrapped up the discussion and he offered me a tour of the garden.

Mudcat’s recordings are available on Bandcamp, there’s a lot of great stuff on his YouTube channel, and here’s his web site.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this installment of Atlanta Folk. More good stuff to come! If you’re interested in getting involved in AAFFM, writing for Atlanta Folk, or have a suggestion for an article, drop me a line.

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There’s no way to cover this topic in one post, so I decided to start with the annual IrishFest, which I’ve attended for a number of years; that quickly led me to Teresa Finley and a larger picture in which she plays a significant role. Here are some of the highlights of our conversation.

IrishFest Atlanta

IrishFest Atlanta is an annual two-day event that recently celebrated its 13th year (including a remote event during COVID that you can find on their YouTube channel). It combines workshops, concerts, performing stages, vendors, and impromptu sessions indoors and out. These images are from the last few years (some from Teresa and some from my files).

The Origin Story

Although there was a Celtic festival here a number of years ago (see the post on Chris Moser for more information), IrishFest Atlanta got its start because Teresa wanted her son to be surrounded by good musicians. Finley’s parents are both Irish-born—her mother (Mulligan) from Gurteen, County Sligo, her father (Dowling) from Tullamore, County Offaly. They met in Chicago, married, and raised their family there, eventually moving to Atlanta. Throughout her childhood Teresa participated in Irish step dancing and played the piano and other instruments. Her two brothers both play fiddle; her sister coaches singing.

She landed in Atlanta, got married, and had a son, Patrick. Her parents moved south too, and the musical DNA came along. “The music was always playing in the house. Patrick absorbed that.” They put a fiddle in his hands at four or five; when he was about six, Teresa enrolled him in the Atlanta Irish Music School run by Katherine Irwin Thomas, and found herself pulled into the local community.

She became the chair of Irish Traditions Atlanta, the local branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, an Irish cultural membership organization with roots going back to the 1950s. “I definitely got the organizing gene from my father,” she says with a laugh.

At that time, the chapter’s activities were focused primarily on adults. Teresa redirected the energy toward scholarships for young musicians and participation in competitions. Out of that grew IrishFest Atlanta. The festival’s mission was clear from the start: bring world-class traditional Irish musicians to Atlanta so the kids could learn from the masters.

“They did not have access to Liz Carroll, or Billy McComiskey, or John Doyle—so many national treasures,” she says. From her days in Chicago she knew many of these people personally, and was able to make the connections she needed. “We brought them in so they could have personal workshops. I encouraged all musicians to become a part of the community while they attend the festival; sitting down in a session with our youth became a highlight of the festival.”

In the early years, the lineup leaned on U.S.-based players; as the festival grew, they started bringing artists in from Ireland as well. And they made room for every local community group, dance school, and local performer who wanted to participate. They included additional activities for non-musicians—Irish language classes, whiskey-tasting, bread-baking, and more.

Phoenix Irish Arts

As IrishFest Atlanta grew, it outgrew its home inside the Comhaltas branch structure. Finley eventually separated the festival into its own 501(c)3, Phoenix Irish Arts of Atlanta.

The phoenix is the civic symbol of Tullamore, her father’s hometown. It’s also a symbol of Atlanta. The organization’s logo itself comes from a hand-embroidered phoenix on the dress Finley competed in as a girl, made by a friend of her aunt’s in Ireland.

The Phoenix School

When Katherine Irwin Thomas closed her music school in 2017, it was Patrick—then in high school—who pushed his mother not to let it die. Patrick had gone on to become a two-time All Ireland 15-18 Fiddle Champion and, in collaboration with a young musician named Sarah Ling, the Finleys established the Phoenix School of Irish Arts in 2020.

After college, Patrick moved to California and Teresa has kept the school running with a team of instructors including Sarah Ling and Kira Doppel. Her sister coaches singing at the school, with one student placing third in the All-Ireland competitions—a remarkable achievement for an American. Sharleen Doyle flies in regularly from Ireland to teach sean-nós and set dancing. Sean-nós dancing offers another way for all ages to participate in Irish dance without the focus on competition or expensive costumes, and the school has committed to it seriously.

The school has also partnered with Music by Tritone to expand their geographic reach, offering private lessons and ensemble instruction at several locations around the Atlanta area.

The Phoenix School, IrishFest Atlanta and an Irish language learning group all live under the nonprofit umbrella of Phoenix Irish Arts. This makes the administrative work more efficient. “What I’m trying to do is save everybody else from doing the books, filing the taxes.” It also allows the organization to apply for grants that support multiple efforts.

Irish Culture in Atlanta

As we talked, it became clear that Teresa is deeply connected to a network of other organizations in Atlanta that are part of a larger Irish culture ecosystem. Here are the key players she mentioned:

• The Irish Consul General for the Southeast, Frank Groome, has been a catalyst for the whole community, where he aims to engage with the Irish community and those of Irish heritage, and to strengthen the links between Ireland and the Southeast.

• The Irish Network Atlanta—focused primarily on the St. Patrick’s Day Parade—has reached out to a younger, professional cohort in their 30s and 40s. Finley sits on their advisory board.

• The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) runs youth sports programs and represents another pillar of Irish cultural life.

• The Hibernian Benevolent Society is, in her words, “really the historians of Atlanta”—maintaining sites like the Father O’Reilly memorial.

• The newly reinvigorated Irish Chamber of Commerce serves the business community.

Among additional local resources she also mentioned the Frank Hamilton School, four Irish step dance schools in the area, WRFG radio, Marc Gunn, local house concert hosts Bella Issakova and Keith Berland, the regular Irish music session at Thomas O’Reilly’s Public House, musician John Maschinot, and a number of other local musicians and bands..

What’s Next for the Festival?

The success of the festival is a mixed blessing, and Teresa is clear that it is time for a reset that includes continuing to recruit new leaders. “This is a 100% volunteer organization,” she says. “Organizing 15 or 16 volunteers, it’s all year long, and parents only have so much time. Career people, even retirees—we don’t want to spend 100% of our time doing volunteer work anymore.”

One ongoing challenge is finding the right venue. The festival has moved through several locations—hotel ballrooms, historic cottages, the Roswell Cultural Arts Center—and is now reconsidering its options. It has evolved to include a strong outdoor presence, with several stages for dancers and local performers, and that seems to work well.

One option that’s not on the table is expanding the festival’s scope to make it a pan-Celtic event. Teresa says, “I’m not diluting it in any way, because that gets bigger, and then you don’t satisfy the Irish community. I can’t even give every Irish musician or dancer the stage space they’d like.”

The Persistent Challenge

After more than 20 years of involvement, Teresa says the thing that still catches her off guard is how scattered awareness of the community remains.

“I still hear from people: ‘I didn’t know this Irish community was going on.’ What do we need to do to connect the community?” The numbers suggest the potential is there. Around 10 percent of Georgia’s population claims Irish ancestry.

That bodes well for the continued existence of the festival and other Irish cultural activities but, ultimately, this depends on people continuing to do the patient, unglamorous work of keeping the connective tissue strong. If you are looking for a place to get involved, I guarantee there is room for you here!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this installment of Atlanta Folk. More good stuff to come! If you’re interested in getting involved in AAFFM, writing for Atlanta Folk, or have a suggestion for an article, drop me a line.

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After several people mentioned Ground & Pound Coffee1, I decided to drive up to Alpharetta and explore! Owner Sophia Crawford met me there on a weekday afternoon—a quiet time in a usually busy place. In a shopping center next door to an ice cream parlor, Ground & Pound is a coffee shop by day, doing a robust breakfast and lunch business.

Three nights a week, however, it transforms into a lively event space. Thursday nights are for trivia, and Friday and Saturday feature live music and other events. Sophia describes it this way: “In the evening, all the lights go down, it’s very dark, very cozy, very casual. People move their chairs around, put their feet up. It’s more of a living room feel—and it transforms really, really well.”

Sophia and her team (who she took great care to thank and appreciate in our conversation) have spent the last several years building this place into something that’s rare and delightful: a listening room with great coffee and a real commitment to live, original music.

Sophia Crawford

You probably know by know that I love a good backstory, and Sophia’s is a particularly vivid one. She grew up in London, and had a long career in Hollywood as a stunt artist and actor—including working as Madonna's stunt double and body double for 6 years. What I wanted to know, of course, is how she got from there to here.

From London, With Detours

Sophia grew up in London in a household filled with music. Her father was an economist who worked for the Sunday Times—and also a budding opera singer who walked around the house performing. Her mother was a pianist. She remembers being taken to see the Nutcracker, Carmen, and Madama Butterfly as a young child. “I loved the music growing up,” she said, “especially living in London, because there was such a scene.” She describes herself as a teenager in the ‘80s—with a blue mohawk, going to reggae shows on Brixton’s Front Line one weekend and listening to The Clash the next.

In her late teens, she and her sister got on a bus—the same operator who ran the legendary Magic Bus to India in the ‘60s—and traveled overland through 12 countries, including Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. “We would go underground because there were curfews,” she said. “We would remove our yashmaks, and we’d all hold hands.” She remembers a moment when someone lifted a floorboard and produced a cassette tape—contraband music. “They said, please dance with us, we want to dance with you, because I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again.” She and her sister eventually went their separate ways—her sister to South America, Sophia to Thailand.

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In Bangkok she started teaching English at a hotel near the airport and was asked to model for a brochure. That led to film work—she was an extra on Kickboxer with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and worked on the Pierce Brosnan version of Around the World in 80 Days, among others. A Hong Kong film crew suggested that her British passport made her a good candidate for work there; within a couple of days, she was on a plane. “I arrived in Hong Kong really with no game plan,” she said. “I tore out the film companies from the Yellow Pages and went to every single one of them with my headshot.” She spent five years there, training with stunt performers and building a career as what she cheerfully described as “the perfect Western baddie to fight Asian heroes.”

From Hong Kong she eventually made her way to Los Angeles, where she spent about 30 years in the film industry. She met her husband—a director—and they built a life there. But by the time she was in her 50s, she started thinking about transition. “My body was aching, and luck’s gonna run out,” she said. Her husband is originally from Banks County, Georgia, and they’d been visiting the area for years. It felt like home. So they moved.

Opening the Shop

Sophia had a dream she’d been carrying for years: a European-style brasserie, good coffee and wine and food, a place where people came to sit and talk, work, have meetings, and hear music. She had worked in coffee shops and brasseries as a teenager in London, and that warm, unhurried feeling had never left her. “I wanted to create a space that brought the arts to me,” she said. “I was leaving the film industry and I didn’t want to leave the arts altogether. So I thought—bring it to me.”

She found the space in Alpharetta and opened Ground & Pound. Four months later, the pandemic hit. “It was a do-or-die situation,” she said. She invested everything she had and figured it out as she went. Music was off the table for at least a year. So she started small, opening Saturday nights only with a regular jazz band, building a following. Then she added Friday singer-songwriter nights, then a weekly open mic on Wednesdays, and finally the Thursday trivia nights and Saturday night music.

Every member of her staff, she told me, is a creative—singers, visual artists, actors, writers. “They’re all artists,” she said. “Every single one.” The coffee shop is her way of staying connected to her creative community. “I do miss the film industry,” she said, “but not in the ways you might think. It’s not about money. It’s about being around these people—the energy.”

Music at Ground & Pound

In booking artists, Sophia has strong feelings about what she looks for. She prefers singer-songwriters and original music over cover bands. “I don’t like background music,” she said. “I love the people who tell stories through their music, who talk about their experiences.”

“Our Friday nights are dedicated to acoustic singer-songwriters, while on Saturdays we typically host duos, trios, or four-piece bands. The programming focuses heavily on Americana, blues, bluegrass, folk, and Appalachian folk music. She’s hosted double bass, banjos, harps, even a bowed psaltery. The acoustics, she says, are good, and the intimacy of the room does the rest.

We have had the pleasure of hosting many talented artists, including Lonesome Redwing, Hot Dill Pickers, The Threadbare Skivvies, Just Another Jimmy, Bill Sheffield, Nathan Nelson, and Hal Coleman. You can view some of our previous performers on our Instagram page.”

I asked her how she finds performers. “When I first started this, not being in the music industry, I didn’t know any musicians and had to figure out how to network. I started looking at other venues, seeing who was playing, going to their Instagram accounts, listening to their live shows.” “We have a lot of word of mouth, people coming in and calling the shop. And we have a website—I get a lot through there.” She books both local and touring artists, and works with her social media team to advertise and market the shows.

The room seats about 40 people, with a maximum capacity around 60 or so, and has a full menu and bar. Shows run 7:30 to 10 pm, with sound check at 6:30. Most of the musicians do their own sound, but there’s a sound engineer available on request. There’s no cover charge; instead, a 20% gratuity is automatically added to tabs on music nights, with a portion going to the artist. When I asked about the financial end of things, Sophia was clear that she pays the performers: “These are real musicians. They’ve worked hard at their craft, and they get taken advantage of enough.”

I asked her about any advice she would give to potential performers. Here’s her short list: Promote the show. Arrive on time. Check your gear. Communicate—let us know ahead of time if there’s something you need. If you need to cancel, try to find someone to cover you. And enjoy the moment!

As our conversation wound down, I asked what surprised her the most. “The good surprise is when somebody nails it—and you’re asking them, when can you come back? When can you come back?” “And sometimes I’m humbled by the fact that they want to play here at all. We’re not big time, the money isn’t huge compared to festivals. But we try to provide a good space and a good experience.” She mentioned a musician who had reached out recently just to say: I have some new songs, can I have a night to see how they land? “Absolutely,” she said. “Let’s hear them.”

I left wishing I lived a little closer to Alpharetta, and thoroughly delighted to have taken the drive.

Ground & Pound Coffee is at 8420 Holcomb Bridge Rd., Suite 220, Alpharetta, GA 30022. There’s plenty of free parking. They also host private events and parties.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this installment of Atlanta Folk. More good stuff to come! If you’re interested in getting involved in AAFFM, writing for Atlanta Folk, or have a suggestion for an article, drop me a line.

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Loving the Music

In the early 1980s, Paul was working for IBM in upstate New York and living near a venue called the Towne Crier Cafe. He started going to shows, and eventually began volunteering there, serving coffee and desserts during performances for several years.

The Towne Crier Cafe opened in 1972—the history page on their web site includes a jaw-dropping list of artists who have played there over the last 50+ years. They have moved at least once since Paul was there, but are still going strong.

The job came with a significant perk. Volunteers could stay for the entire show and often hang out with the band, and Paul very much enjoyed getting to know the performers—Livingston Taylor, Suzanne Vega and Leon Redbone were some who passed through the Town Crier during those years.

“This was the era when singer-songwriters were still coming up through listening rooms,” Paul told me. “You could see artists who later became very well known playing in these small venues, and you felt like you were part of something special.”

Coming to Atlanta

Over time Paul changed jobs, married, had children, and spent time living in New York City during the dot-com era. After the events of September 11, he and his family began thinking about a different pace of life. Atlanta turned out to be a good compromise—a place with seasons, but still close enough to Florida to remain connected to family there.

After settling in the area, he felt the need for more opportunities to interact with people in the community, so he started hosting music. “At the beginning it was really just about bringing neighbors together,” he said. “I thought if we had some live music and maybe a little wine, people might actually get to know each other.”

The gatherings originally took place in the subdivion’s community clubhouse as monthly “café nights” featuring local singer-songwriters and guitarists. That had some challenges, and Paul began hosting a house concert series called Sweetwater Cafe at his home in Cumming. Most of his guests are touring acoustic musicians passing through the Southeast. Here’s a little taste of these shows.

Thoughts on House Concerts

I’m hoping to write more about house concerts in the Atlanta area—if you are a host and would like to participate in the discussion, please send me a note! Here are a few of the thoughts Paul shared about his experience as a host.

“A house concert is a completely different experience from a bar gig,” he said. “The audience is there because they really want to hear the music. I like to start with a potluck,” he explained. “People come early, share some food, talk with each other, and by the time the music starts the room already feels like a community.”

For musicians, those rooms can be especially rewarding. The audience is attentive, the setting is intimate, and there is often time for conversation between performers and listeners. The result can be a level of connection that is difficult to achieve in larger venues.

Like many house concert hosts, Paul and his wife offer overnight hospitality to the artists, and they have built a tradition of taking them to Waffle House for breakfast in the morning.

Paul shared a video from a recent Sweetwater concert featuring the Celtic trio House of Hamill. “If you watch to the end of that first song,” he told me, “you can see the moment when the whole room locks in. That’s when you realize why house concerts are so special.”

Undiscovered Music

Paul began keeping a list of the artists who had performed in his series. That list gradually expanded into a larger database of musicians, venues, and hosts connected to the house concert world. At some point the idea occurred to him that this information might be useful beyond his own concert series.

“I started thinking about how hard it can be for people to find this kind of music,” he said. “There are thousands of small venues and house concerts out there, but they’re scattered and often hard to discover.”

The desire to help people find acoustic concerts happening across the country—especially the smaller listening rooms and other places that don’t show up on major ticketing sites—combined with Paul’s expertise in digital marketing let to the founding of Undiscovered Music. The site uses a crowdsourcing model, allowing performers to list their shows and venues to list events. It started with Atlanta, but over the years has reached a national audience and started to spread into Canada.

Paul says the site also helps concerts reach people who might not already be part of the folk music community. “When someone searches online for something like ‘live acoustic music near me,’ we often show up near the top of the results,” he said. “That means people can discover concerts they didn’t even know existed.”

The site now includes listings for more than 6,900 active venues, including more than 200 in Atlanta (including Fiddler’s Green) and a database of over 7,300 artists. More than 10,000 fans (including nearly 1,000 in Atlanta) receive weekly emails with concert listings. Here’s a link to the page for Atlanta events. (Paul and I talked about ways to integrate this information into the AAFFM web site…stay tuned!)

In addition to listeners finding shows and producers finding artists, the site is useful for performers looking for potential places to play. I was interested to learn that there are artists who make a living traveling the country playing in specialized venues like libraries, book and record stores, etc.

Most of Undiscovered Music’s offerings are free. To help offset the operating costs and fund his retirement, Paul has a link to receive donations and is working on some premium offerings. One of these allows artists to pull information from his database to help them identify target venues, plan tours, and more; he’s also looking at partnerships, advertising, and ticketing services.

The Folk Alliance Connection

Paul also talked about his involvement with SERFA, the Southeast Regional Folk Alliance. It’s part of Folk Alliance International, a nonprofit organization that brings together musicians, presenters, and promoters from around the world.

Both FAI and SERFA host conferences where artists can showcase their music and venues can discover performers who might be a good fit for their audiences. Paul plans to attend this year’s SERFA conference, which will be in Owensboro, KY in late May. He plans to exhibit Undiscovered Music and host a private showcase room featuring artists who are part of the Undiscovered Music community. He invites artists who are attending SERFA this year to contact him.

If you have never seen what those showcase rooms look like, here is a short video from the national Folk Alliance conference in New Orleans earlier this year.

This looks like so much fun! I’m not in much of a position to travel at the moment, but hope some of you can make it to a SERFA or FAI conference and send me your pictures and stories to share.

Advice for Potential Hosts

Paul had some good advice for potential house concert hosts. In addition to using FAI, SERFA, and Undiscovered Music to find potential artists, he was clear that hosts need to navigate some legal and logistical issues, including making friends with the neighbors, taking steps to avoid being seen as a business (not listing the address, not selling tickets, describing the events as private parties for invited guests, etc.), and thinking about chairs, parking, and sound. He particularly encourages hosts to include potlucks as a way of building community. He’s adding more features to the Undiscovered Music site to support house concerts, including allowing people to upload lists of fans to promote upcoming events, and helping hosts manage RSVPs. He also told me that FAI has negotiated an agreement with ASCAP and BMI to ensure that Folk Alliance members who present house concerts, and who abide by an established set of rules for the concerts, are not subject to any PRO fees. You can find more information here.

Whether you’re an artist, producer, listener, house concert host, or involved in the community in some other way, I encourage you to check out all of the resources mentioned above. And if you’d like to get involved with Atlanta Folk as a writer/interviewer, recommend people and organizations to include in our explorations, etc. please send us a note!

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Don Sechelski is one of those people. Among other things, he’s a member of the AAFFM sound team for the Fiddler’s Green concert series, but that’s only one piece of the story. He’s also a songwriter, performer, and lifelong student of music. He has played in bands, taught elementary school, mixed sound in analog and digital formats, and built a home studio where he continues to experiment with sound. Underneath all of it is what I would describe as the soul of a teacher—someone who is always learning and eager to share what he knows.

Origin Stories

Don’s first guitar was a $25 Sears Silvertone. His mother told him that if he learned to play “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Good Night, Irene” she’d buy him a better one. They found a Gibson in a pawn shop. Down the road, life intervened and Don traded the Gibson for a washer and dryer. He told me about walking into Guitar Center years later and seeing it hanging in the high-end room for $3,200. He now has a collection of instruments, with his main guitar being a smaller Martin.

Don and his younger brother played together when they were in school. He told me about auditioning for songwriter and producer Tim McCabe (who wrote “Home of the Braves” after the Braves relocated to Atlanta from Milwaukee). The two teenagers walked into his nightclub.

“He was really nice, he let us in, we came in the middle of the day, with no announcement, just walked to the floor and said ‘we want to audition.’ We played three songs—he told us how much he really enjoyed it, and just said, ‘but, you know, we serve alcohol here, and I can’t hire you until you’re 21.’ Which, of course, he knew all along we weren’t. But he was such a nice guy to let us come in and do our whole thing and make us feel important. It was a lot of fun.”

That spirit of encouragement and musical connection is a core part of his identity.

“Oh, yeah. I think it’s important. Music is the language. Musicians always kind of find each other. In the interview with Owen [see the video below] he mentioned the music teacher at our school, Mr. Lay. As soon as I started working there we hooked up right away—we started playing some music together. It’s just the way musicians do.”

The Teacher

Don was an elementary school teacher in Dunwoody for many years. He also has taught guitar and other stringed instruments.

This 2025 video interview was produced by Owen Gavlak. It’s part of a series sponsored by nonprofit organization Create Dunwoody. Don talks about his love of teaching and the story of how he and his wife Wendy met and started writing songs and performing together.

“I have one guitar student right now, and he’s at the point that I’m kind of turning him loose. I had him in second grade as a student in my classroom. He came back when he was about 12 or 13 wanting to take ukelele lessons. After a year or two he said, ‘well, I really want to take guitar lessons.’ Long story short, he went out with his own money and bought a $600 guitar. I went with him and helped him pick out one that he liked, and he plays constantly. His mom says he never puts it down. I’m reaching a point now where I’ll just…tell him work on this and this and this, and then maybe we’ll have a couple weeks before I see him again, because at this point he’s teaching himself by playing, learning songs, expanding his practice.”

The Songwriter

Don is an active songwriter. He uses Bandcamp and Spotify as the primary distribution platforms for his music. On the Blackfoot Daisy web site, quotes from reviewers describe his songwriting this way: “Don Sechelski’s ability to blend emotional weight with a light touch is exquisite… / …takes the listener into a deeply personal emotional landscape yet universally resonant.” Here’s one of his originals.

Don met his wife Wendy DuMond—also a musician and songwriter—online in 2008 on a songwriter forum. They discovered they lived within 5 miles of each other, got together to jam, and have been songwriting and performing together ever since.

The Performer

Blackfoot Daisy, Don and Wendy’s band, is named after the wildflowers that grow on western prairies. They play Americana-style music with Wendy on vocals, percussion, ukelele, and guitar, Don on vocals, guitar, and bass, and other musicians in varied configurations (most recently Eric Toomsen on fiddle and mandolin).

They have an active performance calendar at local venues and festivals. Don does most of the booking for the band—he told me that they are booked out for the next 5-6 months, and continuing to fill in open slots. When I asked him about his approach to finding gigs, he offered some advice to other performing musicians—with, not surprisingly, a connection to teaching.

“It’s not about you, it’s about the business. It’s always kind of cracked me up—a lot of musicians, and a lot of younger bands especially, it’s ‘all about me. Doing my show, my my my my.’ The venue owner doesn’t give a flip about you—it’s about his business. And the people in the audience don’t give a flip—they’re there for their own reasons, and if you can make them feel better and happier, they’re going to like you. They didn’t walk in the door for you. Even with a big star like Taylor Swift, the people at a show are there for a lot of different reasons. As an entertainer, your job is to make them feel better about whatever reason they’re there for, and help them have a nice experience.

This relates to teaching, too. It’s actually a two-part process—the teaching side, but also the learning side. A lot of young teachers come in with these great ideas for really fancy activities, and big displays, and never think about how the kids are seeing it. They put on their show, and they move on to the next topic, without thinking about whether there’s learning going on. You have to look at both sides of the coin.”

Atlanta Venues

Over the years Don has played at a number of venues and festivals familiar to Atlanta-area music fans. He mentioned a couple of favorites:

“Chomp & Stomp is a big music festival downtown, in Cabbagetown. It’ll be in November. It’s run by a local nonprofit organization. They have about 6 stages throughout Cabbagetown. The main stage is in a big open field. We played that two years in a row. It was a lot of fun. It was the biggest crowd we’ve ever played to…it felt like Woodstock. It’s a big deal. The first year we played, we were not the first act, and by the time we got finished, I know there were probably 5,000 people. That was pretty exciting for me.”

“We played on the top of a school bus, it was in Commerce, Georgia. This guy is a master brewer, he’s won all kinds of awards all across the country, and he and his wife, they’re very interesting people, covered with tattoos…they bought, like, 10 acres of land, rolling hills, and, built a brewery [Strange Duck Brewing]. The brewery building its up on the top of a hill. They’ve terraced the hill going down for seating, or you can sit inside the building. As you get down to the ground level, they’ve got more seating, and they’ve got putt-putt and cornhole and all that stuff. And then in the middle of all it, they have a school bus. On top of the school bus is a stage, and, there’s a ladder on the side. Inside the school bus is all the sound equipment, so basically, so you get up, and you’re on top of the school bus, above everything, playing your show. It was the strangest thing, we played it several times. Wendy works for a workman’s comp insurance law firm. Every time we went, she said, they’re gonna shut this down, there’s no way the insurance is gonna allow this. They did finally shut it down and put the stage on the ground.”

“We played Eddie’s—we were in the open mic shootout...that was a lot of fun, because it’s a packed house, and it’s just electric. You can feel it in the air. It’s very exciting.”

The Sound Guy

In addition to running sound for live shows, Don has decades of experience in the studio. In the ‘80s, he worked in an analog recording studio in downtown Atlanta.

“It was in an apartment building at 3rd and Peachtree. The guy who owned the studio had the whole penthouse. Part of it was where he lived, and part was the studio. It was the old style. Big tape machine, and…splicing tapes. cutting in and out, all kinds of stuff. It’s the same kind of recording, but it’s just so different now.

All the stuff you used to do by hand is now digital, and you’re just doing push buttons, but it’s the same process. It makes it so that anybody can do it. Well, is that a bad thing? You know, back before TV and radio, everybody danced, everybody played… My dad had 11 kids in his family; they all played musical instruments—it was on a farm, what else are you gonna do? Is it bad that more and more people can learn how to do these things? I’m not sure that it is.

That’s the problem people have with AI—anybody can do it. People worry about AI, and AI could be an issue, but it’s also one of those things that…that’s the way it’s always been. It’s a tool. It’s going to replace some musicians, and some music, no doubt about it, but it can’t replace the guy who comes and plays here (at Waller’s) live. It’s also not going to replace the guy who comes out with something brand new and mind-blowing, because it only regurgitates stuff that’s already been done. The most authentic and most exciting and new and diverting music’s is always going to come from some human being, because they’re going to think about something out of the box.”

One of Don’s sound mentors is Sid, a former high school classmate he didn’t know well at the time, but who came back into his life about ten years ago. Here’s the story Don told about Sid:

“We both went to St. Joseph’s High School in downtown Atlanta. We only had about 100 in our graduating class. I knew who he was, but we never intersected that much. I was a straight-A, short-hair guy...I won a National Science Foundation Math Award between junior and senior year—kids from all around the country went to Emory for mathematics. Sid was long hair, outside, get caught smoking, always in trouble—he was more a friend of a friend kind of guy.

Sid’s been around music all his life. He started working in studios, singing background vocals on commercials. He had gotten into Bill Lowery’s studios—Bill managed and published and recorded Tommy Rowe, Joe South, Classics IV…a bunch of acts based out of Atlanta—and they liked him. He was 16, and everybody looked at him funny until they heard him sing, and they’re like, oh, okay, come on. He now owns a mastering studio in Charleston, WV.

We had a class reunion about 10 years ago, and I crossed paths with Sid again. Not at the reunion—it was two nights; he went one night, I went the other—but a musician friend of both of ours made the connection. He called me out of the blue—‘Hey, this is Sid.’ ‘Okay, what’s up, Sid?’ We talked for a while, and he said, ‘Send me your stuff.’ So I started sending songs—he would send them back and say, ‘Well, I think, in your mix, you should do this...’ He would say, ‘I need a little more warmth in this track…the vocals need more warmth.’ At first I didn’t know what that meant. So it was training my ear, and understanding what he was saying, and learning the little tricks—how do you get more warmth in?

Sound engineers talk in kind of a coded language sometimes. The stuff like that is really hard to figure out sometimes. And when you figure it out, you find out that a lot of people knew it and never told you. That’s not right. So I try to tell people those kind of things.”

Don does much of his studio work at home now, with musicians recording tracks from a distance and sending them over to be mixed. In addition to the computers, cables, and other equipment, the closet and walls hold a collection of instruments, each with its own history—a mandolin from a former bandmate, a “panjo,” a guitar named after Lord Calvert whiskey…

“Wendy wrote a song called Lord Calvert. A friend of ours called us one day, another musician, and said, ‘hey, man, I’m in this guitar shop down here and they’ve got a Lord Calvert guitar.’ And I said, really? How much is it? He said, $250. I said, is it any good? He said, no, not at all. And I said, well…go ahead and get it, and I’ll give it to Wendy for her birthday. And so I did. It’s a terrible guitar…it’s actually a Frankenstein; the neck goes with an arch-top guitar, and they put it on a different body. We don’t play it, it’s just decorative.”

He’s currently working on a producing series of songs he wrote and recorded about 15 years ago with a friend in the UK, who now wants to put out an album. Don is revisiting them—improving the arrangements, the sound quality, and some of the playing. He has re-recorded one so far.

“I contacted him and told him I thought I’d try to put out an EP of some of these songs that we did together. We hadn’t talked in a number of years. I guess his child is grown now, and he got real excited, told me he is putting together a local band. He wanted to send me some more of his songs, and I said, ‘If you have something you’d like to include on this EP, send it…maybe I’ll find some way to record it.’ He sent me a song I really liked. The version he sent me was posted on a streaming platform, so I had him send me the basic tracks. Now I’m going back and forth with him—I’ve sent a skeleton track for him to record over to help him keep the beat, and we’re going back and recording vocal and guitar separately rather than on the same track.”

As we talked, I kept coming back to that idea of the soul of a teacher—not just in the classroom, but in the way Don approaches music, sound, and the people around him. Every story starts with him learning, and ends with him passing along what he’s learned. Whether he’s helping a student find their way on an instrument, working through a production mix, or volunteering behind the sound board at a concert, there’s a consistent thread of paying attention, sharing what he knows, and making things better for the people around him.

Those contributions don’t always get the spotlight, but they’re a critical part of what makes a music community actually work.

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P.S. AAFFM just started a YouTube channel. We’re starting small, but it will grow over time.

Fiddler’s Green

The monthly Fiddler’s Green concert usually features two artists, each doing a single set. The performers this month were Rupert Wates and Chasing the Light. Rupert is a touring singer-songwriter originally from London; Chasing the Light is a newly-formed ensemble of four local musicians—Dave Smith, Pat Harris, Mark Bumgardner, and Charles Absher. Here are a couple of recordings from the show.

You can find information about upcoming Fiddler’s Green shows here.

WRFG Community Sessions

Radio station WRFG hosts a series of Community Sessions concerts in the Harlon Joye Community Room at the Little 5 Points Community Center. This show featured three local blues-flavored artists: Nathan Nelson, Mandi Strachota, and Scott Low. They played in the round with each sharing several original songs; at the end there was a little bit of collaborative fun. We plan to post information about future shows to the AAFFM Announcements list—if you don’t subscribe to that yet, here’s the link.

Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

In addition to a performance of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 and the ASO debut of a work by Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen, this concert featured cellist Kian Soltani, born in Austria of Iranian parents. There were several moments of powerful resonance for me.
The performance was originally scheduled to follow a festival of Persian culture, arts, and food. However, they elected to cancel this in respect for the people of Iran—war was brewing, and two days later the U.S. began airstrikes in the country.
The work that Soltani performed, Lutoslawski’s Cello Concerto, is challenging on many levels, including a section that involves a battle between the cello and the orchestra, with various groups of instruments “attacking” the cello. Soltani took time to describe the structure of the work in advance, which allowed me to better anticipate and understand what I was hearing.

And finally, as is often the case, the soloist performed an encore piece of his choice. I am not sure of the specific piece, but here he is playing his own composition, Persian Fire Dance.

Scots-Irish Music

The fourth event was a special program produced by Chris Moser and jointly sponsored by AAFFM, the Frank Hamilton School, and Irish America 250. Opening with a panel discussion with ethnomusicology professor Tracey Laird, ballad singer Maggie Hunter, multi-instrumentalist and teacher Mick Kinney, and producer Chris Moser, it focused on the movement of Scots-Irish music from its origins to America. Here’s a clip of one song recorded at the show; you can find a recording of the whole program here. (Thanks, Dave Smith, for the video work!)

All in one week!! There is so much music in Atlanta. Performances, jam sessions, classes, festivals, house concerts, open mics…it’s sometimes hard to keep up with it all. I’ve got a growing list of people to talk to and lots more to explore in future installments of this newsletter. Subscribe, share with your friends, post comments, and follow along. And if you’re a writer and would like to contribute to Atlanta Folk, drop me a line.

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I’ve been wanting to do a story about Jason Waller and Waller’s Coffee Shop for a while. We’ve had several conversations over the past few years, and a few weeks ago we finally had the chance to sit down and talk at greater length. It’s a treat to be able to share some excerpts from that conversation.

Walking Through the Door

As soon as you walk into Waller’s Coffee Shop, you recognize it as a special place. Humming with energy, it’s full of crafts for sale, a free library, and a shelf stacked with games. The main room has eclectic seating, a small stage, and a sound board (with a whole rack of vinyl record albums). The large kid- and dog-friendly outdoor space is colorful and inviting, with a second stage and lots of places to sit and enjoy your coffee and treats. During the day, the coffee shop is the main event. In the evening, Waller’s becomes an event space hosting music and a wide range of other meetups and celebrations.

Bringing a Vision to Life

Waller’s is the manifestation of a vision Jason had almost a decade ago.

“I walked by a For Rent sign near my house and it just hit me all at once. I saw the end result of what Waller’s Coffee Shop is today. I started reverse-engineering my way, and struck out on my own. Two weeks after I went all-in, we found out we were going to have our fourth child, and I couldn’t turn back. So this overwhelming, all-encompassing dream just started happening. I wanted to do music, mental health awareness, and coffee. Coffee was the thing I had the least amount of knowledge about, so I started learning about coffee, what I like and don’t like about it. From there it was pulling in the community, doing fundraisers, throwing benefit concerts. One piece fell into place, one person, one group of people after another, and I got the lease here on August 1, 2017.”

Waller’s just celebrated its seventh year in business. It’s been a rocky road that still has plenty of bumps, including financial challenges made worse by the pandemic.

“It took a year and a half to get open—a year and a half of paying rent and not making money. We finally got it open in early 2019. For that first year it was full steam ahead. I never said no. I was working 17, 18 hours a day. We were doing 2 or 3 events a day. I kept burning out over and over again.”

Although Jason has been the driving force, he describes the power of the community in helping him keep things going.

“I’ve had a lot of volunteers—countless hours—whether it’s playing music for free, popping in to paint a wall, running sound, cutting up trees, shoveling wood chips; people coming in to help me with accounting, organizing, brainstorming.”

The Coffee Shop

“I like to think of Waller’s as a mom-and-pop place—almost like a hardware store that sells coffee. Where people just kind of come along and tell us about their day. Although we do take coffee seriously, and we’re always trying to get better at what we do, that’s not what we do. We are kind and helpful. I hire some people who have had no coffee experience—that can be learned. But it’s hard to teach compassion and empathy for strangers. I have three bakers and there are 13 staff members—it is awesome that I’m able to employ people. Blake Rainey, one of the first people I hired, still works for me 2 days a week. ”

“I feel really strongly about making sure people don’t feel less than. I’ve felt that my whole life. It feels awesome to have worked so hard to create an atmosphere and a force for that in the community, to make sure that no matter who you are, who you vote for, who you identify as, or what type of person you live, I want you to know that you’re just as awesome as the next person. I’ve got several trans employees—it’s not a question I ask or something I seek out. I became an accidental ally. Figuring out who you are, no matter who you are, is a hard road.

“I started baking during the pandemic. I had three staff members who were willing to work after that first couple of weeks. And I just started baking and baking. I hired my baking mentor, Boyd, for a year, and then he went on to open Howdy ATL. What an amazing human being. We’ve leaned into the things that seem to be working.”

The Outdoor Space

“During the year and a half it took us to get open, I would do this thing where I was cleaning and dreaming. All of the outer space was briars and bramble. I would spend a couple hours a day clearing brush. I’d spread wood chips around the edge and fill in some of the dips and valleys.”

“The stage was donated. Robert (Green) and I built the backdrop. We’d haul out our sound system and have people bring lawn chairs, camping chairs, and stuff. I used to put a bar out there during shows. It was pivotal for the pandemic, because we were one of the only people doing live shows while trying to do the social distancing, wearing masks…and I got sick twice. It was awful…but…”

“It’s very dog-friendly. Recently a conglomerate of nonprofits and do-gooders put in a kids play area. The Decatur Makers made a little kitchen area. A nonprofit called No More Liddering that takes trash or recycled goods and makes art did two butterfly wings made of bottle caps. You stand in the middle and it looks like you have butterfly wings. And they put up a bunch of cool, inspirational signs. They made that cross-roads sign next to the canoe.”

The Music

We talked a bit about the musical side of Waller’s. I learned that while they started as a music venue, this has transitioned over time to operating as an event space.

“Part of the dream was thinking about where I could do some videos. I decided to open up a coffee shop music venue. And we ran it as a music venue for a couple of years, until I realized that I was doing 5 full-time jobs. So I transitioned to a community event space where I wasn’t booking bands any more. That took a load off my chest and off my plate. I was finding that I brought in world-class talent and four people were showing up. I had kids at home, and a mental health outreach I’d had to push pause on for years, because I didn’t have the time and energy. So now the community fills out a rental form, and we find the date and time and staff and run it for them.”

The Event Space

I asked Jason about what kinds of events they hosted at the space.

“The first event we ever did was a memorial service for a local songwriter who killed himself. We weren’t even open yet. It was me and two of my staff, and there wasn’t much in the building. We had an open mic, because some community member said, “Hey, my buddy passed away. I want to bring his sister and some songwriting buddies together.” It was super emotional. And it was awesome—it was a great first event. Obviously, I’m super-sad about how and why we got together. But we’ve had memorials here, we’ve had birthday parties, we’ve had a couple weddings. I actually was the reverend in a wedding here last March for one of my employees. That was awesome. We’ve done HOA meetings, which are really fun to listen to.”

“Music shows are still the majority of what we do. Some buddies had a gig at another venue that canceled on them two weeks before, so we did it here. We do rock and roll, metal, folk, bluegrass…my bluegrass band is playing here. We try to cap it 80 for seated shows.”

I hosted my own birthday party/music session at Waller’s event space a couple of years ago.

Waller’s Events

“With the rental business and to supplement the days that people aren’t renting the place, we’re trying to look a month or two out and schedule our own events. So we have a trivia night. We have an open mic every first Tuesday—all original music, all around one condenser microphone.”

“We have a local guy who has been doing these vinyl listening experiences, because he was a DJ in Chicago for a long time, and so he’ll curate a night of music, and then he’ll have the records. He sits on stage with a microphone, and we’ll get into a Q&A about the songs, or what they felt, or what they think the song’s about. I’ve only seen snippets of it, because if I’m not a part of it working, I have to be gone, or I will burn out.”

Sound Systems and More

I asked about the sound, and whether people ever do live recordings in the space.

“The Reverend Justin Hylton did a live record here. Robert Green, who’s played bass with the Georgia Mountain String Band, is also a recording engineer. He taught me everything I know about live sound. So, he was my main sound guy. He taught me a lot, and then I did it 3 or 4 nights a week for years. I’ve since passed it to Ian, who also works behind the bar, and there are a couple of other folks I can call on occasion.”

“It’s a unique room. It’s got an interesting shape to it, so sound doesn’t bounce around. I have sound panels that I made of 2x4s, insulation, and coffee bags. All the coffee bags you see on the wall are sound insulation. Robert and I took out the acoustic ceiling tiles in there over 3 or 4 days. We secured the insulation with lattice, and put up cloth. The sound in that room is amazing. People are always commenting, whether they’re just blowing smoke at us or they mean it.”

About Jason Waller

It’s impossible to separate the place from the man who founded it. As we talked I learned more about him and his motivation for doing this work.

Mental Health

Jason is candid about the fact that he has been carrying anxiety and depression with him his whole life; he has a deep desire to break the stigma and support mental health.

“I wanted to let people know that it was okay. The more you talk about it openly, the less powerful or dangerous it is. This whole thing actually began with a video series I started. It was called D.A.D. presents. I created the Depression Awareness Dude—that’s D.A.D. I interviewed songwriters, and we’d have a real candid conversation, and then they would play an acoustic song, one take. I’ve got maybe 30 or 40 of those on YouTube.”

Music

“I’ve always played the guitar and been in bands since I was in high school. My life did some zigging and zagging, and I found myself working with at-risk youth in North Georgia. Did that for about five years, and fell in love with mountain music, bluegrass. My tastes went from punk rock to country music, and I realized that it really didn’t matter the vehicle it was traveling.”

“I’ve always seen folk music as just kind of speaking truth to power—not really worrying about mainstream or commercialism, and sharing songs with each other. The marriage of music and words, and that being delivered, still gets me going every day. Some new artist or one of my baristas will come in and share some new band with me.”

“I was trying to record music, and—especially with the pandemic—the livestreams were a way that we tried to pivot. We were doing an every-other-week livestream for about a year. We partnered up with Amplify My Community. They’re a nonprofit that raises funds for other nonprofits fighting poverty. Since then we’ve become good pals with them, and one of their directors was going to play at our 7-year anniversary that got postponed.”

Jason has played for quite some time with the Georgia Mountain String Band.

A Little Bit of Back Story

Somewhere in the conversation, we wandered into a little bit of back story that explained a lot to me about how Jason came to have such a diverse set of skills and ability to navigate the demands of running Waller’s.

“I grew up going to summer camp, and I worked at Camp Calvin (now the Calvin Center)—down behind the Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton. Yeah, Presbytery-owned, 548 acres…my mom was a counselor there. My first marriage happened there. I was a reverend at my brother’s wedding down there. After I did many years as a counselor, then I was a facilities director. I was there year-round, so after 10 weeks at summer camp, I would be the weekend host for all different types of camp—the police academy, Catholic couples weekends... I would make sure there were towels, make sure everybody knew what to do at the dining hall. “Oh, your toilet’s clogged up?” I was driving around in a golf cart, just trying to fix things.

I also ran the high ropes course and climbing tower as one of my main gigs. I was facilitating team development events. I did all types of different teams—school boards, Bell South management team—just me, a little scrawny tattooed kid, like, blowing these people’s minds. The people that I worked with were older than me; I was their boss, and we’re all still really close, because we’ve learned and taught how to communicate, how to express emotions, and how to take feedback and give feedback. When I went and worked with at-risk youth in the woods I sharpened those skills even more. When I came out of there, I was freelancing—I worked with this guy at Georgia Tech, I was on the first high-ropes team at Georgia Tech. They have a huge, state-of-the-art facility, and I was just blown away. I’d love to do more of that. I’d even love to do some of it here if I could give the coffee to somebody else, and the food.”

Dreams for the Future

I asked him what he sees/wishes for the future with Waller’s.

“For this place, I want a person running the business side of this. And of course, they’d have to be doing it with the same heart and mission that I have. I would have enough time and space to do the Waller’s Wellness stuff. I’d like to get the podcast and video podcast going again. It would alternate a 10-week season with 10 weeks off. It would be a part of our Patreon. It would stigma-bust, as well as help fund the coffee shop, maybe feed my kids, put somebody through college.”

“And then, getting to go fishing. I haven’t been in a while. I went sometime in December with a good buddy of mine, and we went on a full-on day adventure in the backcountry…when we got back to camp, we were both just wrecked. It was great being able to have two nights with a really good friend who I hadn’t seen in years.”

“We’ve got another year and a half left on the lease if my math is correct. August 2027. If I’ve hit my stride and we are making money, or at least breaking even, and I’m able to either continue the lease or move to somewhere else, I’ve got a long-term goal to own property—a mountain cabin, or a conglomerate of tiny houses where I can run programs.”

We ended our discussion there, and I walked away with even more appreciation and respect for this guy and the community he’s built.

Waller’s is located on Dekalb Industrial Way in Decatur. There’s plenty of free parking. The cafe is open daily from 8 to 5, serving coffee, baked goods, and sandwiches. Event space hours are from 6 to 10, and rentals include a barista/bartender. And here’s the event calendar.

If you’d like to support Jason and his work, Waller’s has a Patreon account, and there are a couple of GoFundMe fundraisers out there, including this one that AAFFM started a while back.

AAFFM’s Ten-Year Anniversary

From what I can find, AAFFM held its first Folk Concert in Dec 1976 at the Garden Hills Recreation Center. I ran across this May 1986 story about the organization’s 10-year anniversary that provides a few additional tidbits.

Because I can’t resist a good curiosity trail, I looked to see what I could find out about the bands who were performing at this concert. Here’s a 1985 video of a kitchen jam with Cajun band Hurt Dog.

The First 10 Years: 1976-1986

I turned to the newspaper archives to see what I could learn about the concerts AAFFM presented between 1976 and 1986. Here are a few of the early performers, with some videos to give you a sense of what the AAFFM audiences would have heard.

The first show I could find a listing for was a performance by Trapezoid, a group founded in 1975 as a quartet of hammer dulcimer players. It was held at the Unitarian church on Dec. 12, 1981. (All the videos I could find on YouTube were just audio recordings with album covers—you can easily find them if you want to dig in!)

Musician and folklorist Mike Seeger performed at the First Existentialist Congregation in Jan. 1983. He received the Folk Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. Here’s a documentary about his music and his influence on folk music.

Jean Ritchie, folksinger, Appalachian dulcimer player, music collector, and another Folk Life Alliance Lifetime Achievement winner, performed at the Unitarian Church in Feb. 1983. Here’s a video of her from 1986.

Malcolm Dalglish and Grey Larsen performed in March 1983 at the Unitarian Church. Here’s a 1980s recording of them at The New Varsity in Palo Alto.

The Sept. 1984 season-opening concert, at the Unitarian Church, featured the Hurt Dog String Band, Elise Witt, Bruce Molsky, and Frank and Mary Strawn-Hamilton with nationally known folk storyteller Chuck Larkin as emcee.

Cajun legend D.L. Menard and the Louisiana Aces performed in Feb 1985 at the Unitarian Church. Here’s a video of them from the early 1980s.

In April 1985, the Atlanta Journal published this story on traditional music in Atlanta that highlighted the opening of a new location for the Musikworks School of Traditional Music. It set this context:

"Folk's popular wave...washed over Atlanta in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Acoustic music clubs like The Bistro, The Great Southeastern Music Hall, Twelfth Gate, the Bottom of the Barrel and the Catacombs hosted local folk-accented bands, like Silverman, and national acoustic acts, like banjo-picker Earl Scruggs and Odetta.
As the wave ebbed the clubs disappeared... Lacking public outlets, traditional and acoustic music retreated to the living rooms and front porches of those who played it and loved it. 
Then, in 1976, the Atlanta Area Friends of Folk Music organized to host monthly sing-alongs, and members began putting on their own concerts in borrowed space, sometimes covering losses at the door with money from their own coffers.
But these days traditional sounds [...] seem to be gaining more attention and more airtime.

The article goes on to list several new developments on the folk music scene including monthly coffeehouses at the Northwest Unitarian Congregation Church and the Central Congregational Church, weekly English country dances at the First Existentialist Church, Chris Moser’s “Tonight at Ferlinghetti’s” show, and WRFG’s “What the Folk?” and “Spam and Grits.”

I discovered that John Miller, co-founder of WRFG, opened Musikworks as an instrument shop on Euclid Ave in 1981. The second location was on North Highland Avenue, and the new location was at 696 Cleburne Terrace (in the building that houses the Majestic Diner), including classrooms, retail shop, instrument repair workshop, and a performance area. Miller recruited Frank Strawn-Hamilton (who went on to found the Frank Hamilton School) as a senior faculty member.

If you want to read the whole article, you can download it here.

1985 Traditional Music Story

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Sadly, a story from 1986 related that the school shut its doors on August 15 due to financial issues.

In Sept 1985 AAFFM hosted a “Real Folks Concert” featuring Betty Smith, Hurt Dog, Catchpenny and Peavine Creek at the Little 5 Points Community Center, with proceeds going to AAFFM and WRFG-FM.

Fiddler’s Green Begins

In December 1986, almost exactly ten years after hosting their first event, AAFFM established a monthly coffeehouse they called Fiddler’s Green. Here’s the announcement of the first one.

Here are the artists for the first year’s worth of shows (as listed in the newspaper).

• Jan 1987: Michael Catalano, the Shoestring Band, Viva de Carion +2 other acts

• Feb 1987: Charley Rappaport, Frank Strawn-Hamilton, Ellen McQueen, Steve Rose, Jim Culliton

• March 1987: Chuck Larkin, Cajun music by the Muskrat Review, Dan Sechelski and a trio consisting of Elmo Colburn, Katherine Cash, and Jerry Brunner

• April 1987: Red Plum, Barry Etris, Hurt Dog and Playing Possom

• May 1987: The Morning Star String Ensemble, Theym Agayne, Mike Whitney, Paul Spitzer and Lynn Carpenter

• June 1987: Elise Witt, Michael Catalano, Jimbalaya, David Skinner and Dog and Pony

• July 1987: Theatre Gael, Mike Sayre, the Morningstar String Ensemble, the Muskrat Ramblers and Simchas (klezmer music)

• August 1987: Pen Bogert and Jim McGee, Viva DeCarrion, Pigiron and the Back Bayou Band

• September 1987: Mike Whitney, O.J. Barron and The Good Friends Folk Ensemble

• October 1987: Clay and Barbara Jordan, Common Ground, Craig Rafuse and Joyce Brookshire

• November 1987: Judy and Ted Burden, Theatre Gael, Celti Ceili band and the Often Ensemble

• December 1987: Nonesuch, Matteson and Moser, the Good Friends Folk Ensemble, and the Morningstar Morris Team, presenting a traditional Christmas Mummer’s Play (a Celtic ritual in which life and re-birth after death is acted out in rhyme, song, and dance).

I’ll continue this history in a future post—there’s been a lot of good music in the 40 years that have followed.

Happy Anniversary!

In the meantime, it’s worth noting that this year of 2026 marks 50 years of AAFFM and 40 years of Fiddler’s Green. It feels like we should plan some kind of a celebration. If you’re interested in helping cook something up, drop us a line!

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I Still Need Your Help!

I’d love to have some co-conspirators in putting this newsletter together. (There are plenty of other volunteer opportunities as well.) If you’re interested, send a note and we’ll add you to the “AAFFM Corps.”

One of the best things about starting the Atlanta Folk newsletter has been hearing the comments and stories from people who have been involved with AAFFM for a while. I recently got this note from Doug Allison after posting the 1988 newsletter material:

Funny thing about reading that again: I remember submitting some of those items to Helen to include in that issue. If you’d asked me cold about any of them, I wouldn’t have remembered, but now seeing them again, they’re familiar. Since our address was the return address for the newsletter, I used to receive a lot of info from other clubs, performers, promoters and so on, which I would include in the AAFFM newsletter when appropriate.

Helen was filling in for Marilyn McKinney as temporary editor. Marilyn was the fastest typist I’d ever met. I could call her with items for the newsletter and she’d type as I read them to her. I’d pause for her to catch up and she’d say, “Go on.” She could type as fast as I could read aloud.

Many people took a turn at editing. I think it was under Sue Curry’s editorship—or maybe it was Kevin Kleinfelter’s—that we finally began submitting items electronically. I remember bring a floppy disk to Sue at her job with the latest text file submissions. Sue and Kevin ended up marrying.

There is a mention of the famous Hard Labor Creek campout. Here’s a photo. Walt Hultgren thinks it’s from 1983.

Gathering for Music

AAFFM got started 50 years ago because people wanted to get together to play music. Many of the artists who perform today at the Fiddler’s Green concerts got their start in those song circles and jam sessions, and the people and organizations who are contributing the most to folk music in Atlanta are doing so by creating opportunities for people to gather.

I found this article in the files—it has some great advice for those of you who are thinking about getting folks together to play:

Picking Parties and Jam Sessions

One of the most important and valuable characteristics of folk music is that it’s participatory. Throughout history, from Irish cottages to Appalachian cabin front porches to modern-day living rooms and back yards, people have enjoyed the fun and fellowship of making live music together. Some of us are proud and grateful to be in circles of friends who can entertain themselves and each other rather than being dependent on media produced by someone else.

Part of AAFFM’s mission is to nurture participatory music-making. Song circles, picking parties, jam sessions—whatever you want to call them—provide wonderful opportunities for fun and social bonding. Read on for some guidance on hosting these delightful get-togethers.

Tips for Hosting a Song Circle or Jam Session
Sharon Stepler (former AAFFM board member)

There are several types of musical gatherings. Some are primarily sing-alongs, others emphasize instrumental jamming, and still others are circles where people take turns performing. And, of course, many gatherings combine elements of all three.

We’ve been hosting monthly gatherings of the “all three” variety for about twenty-five years. Some months, as many as half the group will be singers only, and the other half will have guitars and/or other instruments. Other months almost everyone has an instrument. For the most part, our gatherings are primarily sing-alongs, although in any given month we might do more instrumental jamming or individual performances.

Here are a few tips that have worked well for us over the past twenty-five years:

1. Take turns choosing songs. My number one suggestion is to go around the circle and give each person a chance to pick a song. Otherwise, it’s almost always the case that a couple of people dominate the song selection. It’s more fun when everyone has a chance to participate.

2. Use a songbook and/or song sheets. It’s much easier for people to sing and play along if they have words and chords in front of them. We’ve been using the group songbook Rise Up Singing, supplemented by songs sheets, since we began. Recently we added Rise Again, the sequel to Rise Up Singing, to the mix. We encourage people to bring the books if they have them, as well as 15 copies of any song they’d like the group to do. We have extra copies of Rise Up Singing and Rise Again for those who don’t have their own copies.

3. Make time to socialize. While music-making is the primary purpose of our gatherings, we think it’s important for our guests to have the chance to visit with one another as well. We may do a little chit-chatting as we go around the circle, but we save most of our socializing for a break. Generally we stop after we’ve been around the circle once or twice to eat, drink, and visit for awhile, then go back to the circle for another couple of rounds.

4. Relax and have fun. Our motto is “Most of the notes, most of the time”! The group tries to sing and play as well as we can, but we know it ain’t brain surgery. Occasionally we mess up—and that’s OK. Over the years, we’ve tried to make our circles a safe space for people who, for example, are shy about singing in front of others, or who are just learning an instrument. If we focused too much on perfection, folks like that might not be as comfortable participating.

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To Sharon’s excellent pointers, we’ll add suggestions from two faithful AAFFM members:

Frank Hamilton notes that sometimes problems arise when someone in the group wants to perform when others are expecting a sing-along or instrumental jam. From much experience Frank’s solution is to have each person in the circle do a performance piece (if he or she so desires) and a participatory piece. That way everyone is satisfied and expectations are clear.

George Hergen expands on Sharon’s last point by emphasizing that participants at all levels of ability, from professional performer to novice, should have equal opportunity to perform (obviously without negative criticism). “I’ve been in situations where some of the more advanced folks ‘took over’ the gathering or maybe didn’t show enough respect for the capabilities of those with less experience or talent,” George observes. “These should be fun gatherings where we all respect and appreciate one another’s musical level.”

Thanks to Sharon, Frank and George for their wisdom. Enjoy your music party!

This Substack is set up to allow subscribers to comment on posts. If you would like to share information about a song circle, jam session, or other event, please feel free to do that in a comment.

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I Need Your Help

If you’ve been reading this newsletter and thinking “gee, I wish they’d write a story about _____,” or “she should really go talk to _____,” please send me a note! And if you are interested in contributing, please send me a note! If one of these stories tickles you in some way, please send me a note! (Are you noticing a theme here?) You can hit “reply” on this email and your response will find its way to me. Or use the button below.

In my wanderings through the AAFFM history files, I keep running across Elise Witt. I learned that in addition to being a performing artist (at AAFFM and around the world) for many years, Elise Witt is a revered teacher and an inspirational force for bringing people together to sing.

She graciously agreed to sit down with me for an interview. Before I went, I took a peek at the bio on her web site and was completely blown away by all she has done. Among other things, she sings in over a dozen languages, and has released 11 solo and collaborative recordings.

She has published a book of her songs arranged for solo and community singing, and another that was created with students of the Global Village Project, a middle school for refugee girls.

She teaches a wide range of classes and workshops, including live events in Atlanta and an online series. You can find her calendar here.

Interview with Elise

What I really wanted to know was how she got to be this musical force of nature. Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

Linda: How did all of this get started?

A Little History

I went to UNC—Chapel Hill. I was a French major. I thought I was going to be a translator at the UN and have another language hung in my ear, and…I got sidetracked into theater, which is a different story.

In 1977 I moved here with a group of people to start the Theatrical Outfit; we merged with the Gypsy Rainbow Dance Theater. We lived in a big house together, and we wrote all our own plays, and we made our own peanut butter and tofu.

I found this article about a Theatrical Outfit/Gypsy Rainbow Dance Theater production from 1978,

Because we all came from different disciplines and backgrounds, we decided we should teach each other what we knew. So they said, “you’re gonna teach us singing.” I’ve had great singing teachers since kindergarten, and in my family, we sing, so…I started figuring that out, and then we decided we needed to have classes for the public to make some more money for the theater. I started teaching a class, which I called “singing for the non- or quasi-singer,” which is the worst possible name, because I don’t believe that. I believe everybody can sing, and has a voice.

“So many people in this western culture have had someone at some point tell them they are ‘unmusical,’ ‘tone deaf,’ or some other deflating and demoralizing criticism. That is the reason I teach – because I just don’t believe that there is anyone who can’t or shouldn’t sing. We are all born singing, and in cultures before this busy, hectic, modern one, singing was the main way we had of communicating with each other and remembering our stories. We sang babies into the world. We sang to honor marriages, the harvest, and community celebrations. We sang our grief, and we sang to accompany someone to the next life. Now we have had our music taken from us and sold back to us. We have become consumers of music, rather than creators and participants. But we love to sing and we need to sing – as individuals and as community! Singing vibrates our bodies and changes our molecules. It brings healing and joy.”

~ Elise Witt

Learning

For me, learning is part of my teaching; I’m always learning from wonderful teachers. I started studying with Dr. Ysaye Maria Barnwell at Augusta Heritage Center in West Virginia. She did a whole week-long class, and I took it many times. Then, in 2008, I became one of the first cohort with Rhiannon—who sings with Bobby McFerrin—in vocal improvisation. It’s a year-long program called All the Way In which meets in three different places with a small group of people. In 2012 she invited me to be a co-pilot. I’ve been studying with her forever, and have had many other wonderful teachers, including my elementary school teachers. I sang in the Carolina Choir in college. In high school I sang in the ensemble, because we got to get out of school and go sing places.

The Small Family Orchestra

For ten years, we had a band called the Small Family Orchestra. It was me, my sister, my sister’s husband, my sister’s husband’s best friend since elementary school. And my sister’s husband’s friend’s neighbor. We had many instruments—clarinet, flute, saxophone, cello, fiddle, and guitar—and we did five-part harmonies.

We were very fortunate, because in that period The Southern Arts Federation (now South Arts) had a tour program. A lot of places around the south that could’t afford the giant names had this pool of people, groups they could hire. So we got to play all these different places. We got an article in Southern Living Magazine that looked like an ad. It was this full-page thing with a picture of us and the Atlanta skyline in the background. We had just released our first album; because of that, we sold that album, the whole pressing, within 6 months.

Using Songs for Teaching

The band broke up when my sister and her husband moved to Massachusetts. I was doing a lot of school shows and workshops. I started doing way more of that, and doing residencies. I would go live in someplace like Milledgeville for a month or six weeks, and work in a school, but also play for the Garden Club, the Rotary Club, the Elks, and the whatever.

I’m a language nut, that’s what I love. I would introduce kids to a lot of different kinds of music from different cultures, different parts of the world, and then write songs with them. And I would say to the teacher, what is something that you have a hard time teaching and the kids have a hard time understanding? Then we would write a song about that. It could be 15 verses, because they wrote it…and they’d remember the whole thing, because they wrote it. I did that for many, many years.

The Global Village Project

I did several things in town as well—I was an artist in residence at the Friends’ School, I did stuff at Paideia, and a lot at the International Community School (ICS). Some folks from ICS and some churches started a Saturday school for the parents and older siblings of the refugee kids. They realized there was a really big need for teenage girls, and so they started the Global Village Project in 2009.

A musician friend of mine was involved in that—she had also done the Rhiannon program, and was going to do singing circles with the girls, and invited me to do that with her. We did it, and it was really fun. We wrote a song called “Imagine a Circle,” with sign language. When she decided she didn’t want to continue, I kind of became the artist in residence there—the music teacher, using singing and songwriting to teach English to these newly arrived teenage refugee girls. The Imagine a Circle book is 50-something songs we’ve written organized into categories—a song for English language learning, a song for punctuation... Not just school things—there are songs for community building, and women, and more.

Women’s Wisdom Project

We did the Women’s Wisdom Project, where I invited successful refugee or immigrant women—three of them went into each of the forms (classes). We asked each them to tell us her life story; we recorded it, and we asked questions. Then we took her words, and we wrote a song—we wrote her life in a song. At the end of the year, at graduation, we invited them back and sang them their life. We did it about every 3 years. I think there are 12 of those, and they’re really wonderful. I love them.

The first one, which I’ve been actually doing in concerts, is with the founder of the Burundi Women’s Garden, which is part of the Global Growers Network. This is one of my favorite songs, because it’s my specially patented, polyrhythmic multilingual musical collage. Taking a word, and just getting that word in every language, and then layering them together musically. Because they’re different syllables and different rhythms and stuff, they layer up really well.

I don’t know if this is the specific song she mentioned, but it definitely has her polyrhythmic multilingual signature.

Teaching Online

During the pandemic, I met a bunch of wonderful singers from all over the world in a class I took with Rhiannon. And I started teaching online. My friend Elizabeth Melvin in Maryland invited me to be part of a thing she was doing, and I saw that I could do it. Now I have a Monday night online class that’s ongoing, because they want to keep going, and it’s super fun. It’s completely different than singing in person. I might have 2 people in Vermont, 2 people in Chicago… 3 in Chicago, somebody in Washington State, somebody in Alabama…

It’s not about creating sound, being inside of sound like you are in a chorus or a workshop. It’s about duetting with me, because you can only hear me. I can’t hear you, but you can try wild things. I teach songs, but then I encourage them…“what if you hold, like, a note for a long time? When it’s like, ‘ugh, I don’t like it,’ move up a little, or whatever. Or try using consonants, try words, whatever.” They’ve also gotten to know each other, and become a little community. And some of them have sung with me in person.

I teach at the Swannanoa Gathering, and I teach at John C. Campbell Folk School. Many years ago, I did several years of 4-day workshops on Ossabaw Island. And then, a few years ago I started back with my friend Gayanne Guerin, and teaching with her, and then this year I’m teaching with Becky Reardon, who is an amazing, wonderful singer in New Mexico.

Collaboration

I am part of a trio with Becky Reardon and Terry Garthwaite. Becky is an amazing, wonderful singer who lives 8,000 feet above sea level, up in Cuesta, New Mexico; she goes hiking, and she writes these beautiful rounds and songs about what she finds. She has a song about the mating habits of tarantulas, for example. Terry lives in California and was part of a band in the ‘60s and ‘70s called The Joy of Cooking. Somebody left one of their albums in my dorm room in college, and I thought, “I love this band.” It's led by two women, they write all the music, they play instruments—they were amazing.

Forty years later, I was invited to be part of a circle at Kate Munger's house in California. She started the Threshold Choirs, which are the people that sing at bedsides. There are Threshold Choirs all over the world now. Kate had a gathering of women who lead and write for community singing. We had close to a week where we sat around this big table and just shared music and taught each other songs. Becky and Terry and I got really connected. They were going to make an album together at Becky’s called Natural Rhythms. We did these beautiful songs of theirs, but we also recorded a thunderstorm, we recorded popcorn…we went to a friend of hers that's a flamenco dancer and recorded her feet…

Now the three of us have a trio; we get together and sing—we harmonize on each other’s songs, and we’re very, very different, which is the coolest thing ever. I don’t even know how to describe it, but it’s very, very different.

Here are the three of them with a couple of other singers.

What’s energizing you these days?

During the pandemic, I got very involved in the Daily Antidote of Song. I think part of it was through the Smithsonian Archive. There’s something called the Archive Challenge. If you want, you can take a song from the archives and do your own version of it, and record it, and they’ll put it into the archives. I was going to Folk Alliance one year, teaching a workshop. The people from the Smithsonian were there; they challenged me to do a song, and I did the song Jenny Jenkins. “Oh, what will you wear, oh my dear, oh my dear, what will you wear, Jenny Jenkins?” The original Jenny Jenkins is super grumpy. She doesn’t like any of the colors, and she’ll tell you why. And so I thought, “well, I’ll just shift it.” So I made her enjoy the colors and explain why.

When the pandemic hit, the people from the Smithsonian were connected to this thing called the Daily Antidote of Song. It started in the DC area, but it was online, and every single day since March of 2020, a song leader comes on and teaches a song, and the people in the Zoom room learn it, but you can also watch them after the fact. They invited me to come on. Since then, I suggested a bunch of different people and I’ve become a host.

Then I took Jenny Jenkins and decided to make it into an art project. I invited artists of any kind, anywhere, to illustrate one of the verses. Then I had my tech person create a video of Jenny Jenkins with all of this art.

That was the first one, and I decided the next year that I wanted to do another one. I was trying to think of a theme that inspires visual art, and a friend of mine suggested the suitcase. If you could only pack one suitcase, what would you put in it? So I wrote a song called Ready or Not, and we did another project. The people involved were literally age 1 to 81.

What I’m excited about right now is that I’m working on the third one. It’s a Brazilian folk song called Who Taught You? “Who taught you to swim? Fish taught me to swim!” That’s the whole thing. So I’ve written a million verses of Who Taught You. It starts out more literal, but then it gets more metaphorical. And Mick (Kinney), my partner, who’s an extraordinary musician, is recording it with Evan (Kinney), and he’s put a different instrument on every single verse. It’s really beautiful, because the song itself is very simple. We’re getting ready to finish. In the beginning of the year I’ll premiere it on Daily Antidote [this happened in early January—here’s the link], and then invite artists to send in their art, and a woman named Monica is going to put it together. We’ll premiere it on the Daily Antidote as well, and on YouTube.

As we closed the discussion, Elise kept dishing up nuggets of information, upcoming events, and suggestions of people for me to talk to. She’s also the one that told me about Chris Moser’s show Tonight at Ferlinghetti’s—her Small Family Orchestra was one of the bands that performed on the show.

I’ll close with this 1997 AJC article about Elise’s performance at the long-gone but well-remembered Freight Room in Decatur.

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The oldest newsletter I found was from April 1988. Just for fun I scanned it…

Aaffm Newsletter April 1988

2.07MB ∙ PDF file

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What was going on 38 years ago in Atlanta folk music? It was even more fascinating than I expected! Here are some highlights:

Fiddler’s Green

The April 16 Fiddler’s Green Coffeehouse was at the Garden Hills Community Center. Doors opened at 8, music at 8:30 (we must all be getting older…we now start at 7 and are pretty much done by 9:30!) The requested donation at the door was $2.

The artists were an eclectic bunch, and I dug around to see what I could find about them:

David Skinner1 with Dog and Pony—from Asheville

I found David’s YouTube channel, including this video of the band playing at McDibbs (a wonderful but now-closed music house in Black Mountain, NC) in 1990.

Steve Mareches—local guitarist, jazz and New Age music

I found a few mentions of him online, but wasn’t able to locate any recordings.

Joe and Karen Holbert—members of Dog and Pony who also perform as a hammered dulcimer duo, mostly Appalachian

I found this picture of them online with Doug (former president of Warren Wilson College and founder of the Swannanoa Gathering) and Darcy Orr performing as the Southern Highlanders.

Mike Whitney—a local musician and songwriter who played for 10 years at Dante’s Down the Hatch

I found his YouTube channel too…here’s one of his original songs just for fun.

Then I did a quick online search and found this article Chris Moser wrote about him in a 1995 Atlanta Journal article…much to my surprise and delight, the article references the song in the video.

Get-Togethers

The 1988 newsletter listed several AAFFM get-togethers—one hosted at a home (“bring instruments, your favorite munchies, and beverages of your choice”) and another that was a day-long Spring Fling and campout with a main stage, open mike, and jam sessions held on a private property near Lithonia.

Other Events

A number of non-AAFFM related events were also listed, including:

Country Dance

The Chattahoochee Country Dancers, every Friday night at the Atlanta Shakespeare Company (with “a new, secluded room for child care—still only $1 per hour per child”).

Country Dance: Atlanta, the second Saturday of every month at the Garden Hills Recreation Center (the April session featured a short class for people interested in learning a dance called Nonesuch).

Music/Dance Week at the John Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC (including play-party games, songs, and Appalachian stories).

I did a quick search to see whether any of these things were still going on. It looks like the Chattahoochee Country Dancers became Atlanta Contra Dance, which meets just about every Friday at the Decatur Recreation Center. English Country Dance Atlanta meets at the First Existentialist Congregation (also the home of Fiddler’s Green) several Sundays each month. There are also a Dance Musicians’ Week and a Winter Dance Week at the John C. Campbell Folk School along with quite a few other dance events.

Medley

A wide range of other events was listed, including performances, house concerts, festivals, storytelling, arts and crafts, Sacred Harp singings, and publications.

The Rest of the Year

I don’t have a complete set of newsletters from 1988, but in skimming through the others, here are a few tidbits I found, in addition to a bazillion festivals and concerts around the Southeast:

A Loudon Wainwright concert (tickets $11 in advance) put on by long-time Atlanta event promoters Windstorm Productions.

Auditions for musicians to perform in a Southside Theatre production of “Cottonpatch Gospel”—the director “very much wants to perform the play with the instruments called for in Harry Chapin’s score.”

A notice that the April 1 concert of Silly Wizard at Center Stage Theater was videotaped for WPBA, with Chris Moser as producer. This was one of their last concerts. I found a recording on YouTube. Definitely worth a watch.

A weekend-long AAFFM Fall Music Campout at Hard Labor Creek State Park, with workshops, jams, dance, a Saturday night concert, and Sunday morning shape note and gospel singing. (Sounds like fun!)

The Fiddler’s Green debut of the St. Cyril’s Village Orchestra, presenting an international selection of songs from Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Scotland and England. Here they are performing a few years later at a local festival.

A double-billed show of “new country star Lyle Lovett and His Large Band” and “guitar virtuoso Leo Kottke.” Reserved-seat tickets $17.50.

An announcement of the AAFFM Yule Tide Folk Concert at the Upstage Cafe, 515 B N. McDonough St. in Decatur Square (upstairs from Babaloo’s Cuban Restaurant).

Alert Atlanta readers will immediately recognize this address. Apparently this is the origin story of the space that is now Eddie’s Attic. The Upstage Cafe opened in July 1988 as a performance and exhibit space with a restaurant featuring a main dining room and a rooftop garden.

In December 1988 they rebranded as the Picasso Performance Cafe, featuring eclectic performances and a Northern Italian menu.

I’m hoping to do a story on Eddie’s Attic one of these days…I’ll see if I can fill in some of the rest of the history along the way.

I’ll leave you with this picture of the 1987 newsletter mailing list printed out on green-bar. IYKYK.

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Origin Story

I was curious about how he got started in the world of folk music.

I got my first guitar, like most everybody (including John McCutcheon), a Silvertone, for Christmas when I was a freshman in high school, but didn’t do anything with it.

I had a friend in high school—Nancy—who was already getting to be an accomplished folk singer, guitarist, and was performing in off-campus coffeehouses at the University of Tennessee. I never did go to any of those, but followed what she was doing. There were a few other people in my school who were into folk music, but I wasn’t really taking part in this.

In the Fall of ‘67, I was starting college at UT. I went to see The Graduate.
“Hello darkness, my old friend…” I was just transfixed.

When I got home I called a buddy of mine named Jerry, who had been playing guitar for about 6 months. I said, “Jerry, you’ve gotta go see this movie, you gotta go hear this music.” He was enthralled with it, too.

And then I pulled out that guitar and Nancy showed me how to get started by strumming; she and her husband showed me picking and arpeggios. Jerry and I worked up an act, and we started going to the local off-campus coffee houses there at UT. I started getting exposed to all kinds of folk. There were people who were doing all the Greenwich Village stuff, and people doing more traditional. That’s when I started broadening and deepening my knowledge of folk music—and then I took a “great ballads” course in college.

AAFFM

How did you get involved in the Atlanta Area Friends of Folk Music?

The details are a little hazy. I came to Atlanta in March of 1975. I went to a yoga class at the Unitarian Church (UUCA). I got interested in UUCA, joined, and was a member for several years. There were some folk singers there, Nancy Bartlett being one. I think it must have been through that group that I found out about AAFFM.

I went to a jam at Don and Laeta Smith’s…and then went to more of those. And that’s as much as I remember about how I got involved. By the mid-’80s, I was active. I was on the board. Walt Hultgren, the original president, retired. So we needed a president, and I accepted.

Fiddler’s Green

I’m going to write a much longer post about the history of the Fiddler’s Green Coffee House concert series. Here’s a short version pulled from my interview with Chris.

Back then AAFFM was sponsoring concerts on an intermittent basis—some were at First E, some were at Mary Lin school and other places. I don’t remember them being monthly, but they were fairly frequent.

We started Fiddler’s Green as a monthly event in December of ‘86. The other concerts were absorbed into that—it became our vehicle. Joy Carter and Ken Boff were really the original organizers & talent schedulers. Those were really exciting times, and they were eclectic.

The original intent was to have some traditional, some singer-songwriters, some international, and more. I can remember some really exciting Christmas shows. We had the original format of two acts or two sets, but at Christmas, we sometimes brought in several acts and each did a short set. We did it around the fireplace. We had mummers coming in…it was great!

Over time various people took it over, and it stopped for a while after 9/11. We started back up again around 2008/9, and in about 2016 we moved to First E.

Celtic Music

In addition to the Fiddler’s Green series, I learned that Chris was very involved in the Celtic music scene in Atlanta.

In about ‘82 or 3, on one of my trips back to Knoxville, Nancy took me to a Celtic concert at the Bijou Theater there. The opening act was a group called Blended Scotch, whom I’ve never heard of since, and then Norman & Nancy Blake, and then Mick Moloney with Eugene O’Donnell.

It was an epiphany for me—especially Mick and Eugene. So that’s when a buddy of mine named Phil Manson and I dived headlong into Celtic music. I became very strongly involved with that community.

I got involved with the Atlanta Celtic Festival in the early ‘90s. It was held at Oglethorpe. The first year they had a big afternoon concert. They asked me to MC that, and it went over really well. So they asked me to get more involved, then they asked me to be the music director. I became vice president.

Then we started raising money to pay fees to bring in some headliners. It was all local before that. 1995 was the first time we had headliners—Tommy Sands & Eileen Ivers.

I found newspaper articles for multiple years of the festival. Other headliners they brought in included Andy M. Stewart, Cherish the Ladies, Fiona Ritchie, Ed Miller, Mick Moloney, Seven Nations, Tannahill Weavers, Kevin Burke, and Liam Clancy, along with a wide range of local groups. The organizers worked to represent Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and other Celtic nations.

The headliners would all do a Saturday afternoon and a Sunday afternoon set, and then there was an evening concert which was just the headliners. It was mostly out on the grounds …some performances and workshops were in the buildings. The big events were all outdoors. It grew, and we had really strong headliners on through about 2002.

Here are two articles that show the beginning of the festival in 1987 and its growth over the following decade.

But we were a victim of our own success. We were sort of outgrowing our volunteer base. Going at that scale, we needed to somehow professionalize, we needed to raise money for professional management, and to continue to bring in the performers. That was a stretch for the board, including me.

Carol and I had gotten engaged. At that time I had been freelancing for several years, and having a hard time putting food on the table because I was spending so much time on the Celtic stuff. It was literally like a half-time job. For years. Carol and I had just gotten engaged. And so when I started at CNN with a full-time job in the fall of 2001, I just couldn’t do it any more. I went on through 2002 and wasn’t even able to attend the function because I was working.

I found accounts of the festival in the newspaper for several more years—I believe the last one was held in 2006 on the town square in Duluth.

Scots-Irish Projects

Chris’s interest in Celtic music has led him to pursue other projects as well. We talked about two of these.

The Scots-Irish: A Musical Journey

For a number of years, Chris has been working to complete a documentary exploring the Scots-Irish influence on US democracy, using songs as an instrument of storytelling. Here’s a trailer for the project, which has not yet achieved full funding, and Chris’s story about how it got started.

I have Kirkpatrick on my mother’s side, and we had a relative who had done our family genealogy, taking it back to 860 AD, and I knew about our family castle in southwestern Scotland, which we have visited.

I knew what Scotch-Irish were1, and I always had an interest in history…in 1994 I somehow got invited, because of the work I was doing in cultural production, to take part in a Scots-Irish Historians’ tour of Northern Ireland, sponsored by the British Council. Historians and scholars and me. Somehow I got enough cred to get invited. That’s when I started working on this project.

As it’s planned, about half of the 2-hour screen time would be music performance, but it’s not really about the music. It’s really about the influence of the Scots Irish on the history of democracy in America, bringing the same proletarian spirit reflected in their music. We’re using ballads to illustrate the narrative. For example, to tell the story of the first major immigration of Ulster Scots to America, a dramatic immigration ballad that dramatizes how terrible the journey was. And in the Revolutionary War, an American patriot ballad set to an Irish tune.

Tony McAuley

The year before, I had met a legendary Ulster broadcaster, filmmaker and folk music performer named Tony McAuley. He was one of the most remarkable people.

I did a little research on Tony, and he was indeed a remarkable person. Here’s one biography I found. Among other things, I learned that in his BBC television career he gave Enya and Paul Brady their television breaks and linked the Chieftains and Van Morrison for their first joint performances.

Tony was an urban Irish Republican. But he was a peacemaker, beloved by people on both sides of the divide, and I first got to know him when he brought up a group called Catholic and Protestant Musicians for Belfast, and put it together into a show called Atlantic Bridges. Jim Flannery made sure it got scheduled at Emory. He hosted a concert at Emory in ‘93. That’s when I first met Tony and found out what he was about.

When I was on this tour in ‘94, Tony was not officially one of the tour guys, But he was in and out of the tour, and I got to know him better, and that’s when we decided to do this project together. His fundamental theme I wanted to make sure to develop for the 1/3 of the program that’s set over there—and part of his philosophy as a peacemaker—was that the people of the north of Ireland and lowland Scotland, had really been one people for centuries before the Ulster Plantation and conflict started. They were closer, more bound to each other, than they were to the people in other regions of their own countries. And their descendants deserved to be living in the same peace and harmony that they did.

We struggled on and off. He always had other projects going, and I was trying to make a living, and we got some grants for development, research and scripting, but never enough for production, and still haven’t. Tony died, and I’ve been through different partners. I’m making one last attempt to make a go of it. Since I can’t do it with Tony, I’m still trying to do it for him, dedicated to him.

And I have some good news! We've recently been awarded a £5,000 grant from Scottish Connections. The grant will fund our field production in Scotland, which we'll do in the first three months of 2026. This grant is huge for us, because it means we will for sure have a film product. It may or may not be of the scope we're planning, but we'll get something done; the project is now a reality.2

Scots-Irish Music Program

Chris is producing a free public program called Scots-Irish Music to be presented on Saturday, January 24 in Atlanta. You can find event information here.

The idea is to show how the music the Ulster immigrants brought to Appalachia, which was English and Irish and Scottish, balladry and dance music—how people took the ballads and the dance tunes and preserved and modified them. How they changed. How Barbara Allen became Barbary Ellen, and why the words changed, and so on.

Chris will moderate a discussion with Agnes Scott College ethnomusicologist Tracey Laird, balladeer Maggie Hunter, and musician Mick Kinney. After the panel discussion, Hunter and Kinney will perform Old World and Appalachian variants of selected ballads and tunes.

The program is jointly sponsored by AAFFM, Irish America 250, and the Frank Hamilton School.

Oh, By the Way

Every time I turn around, I find a new facet of Chris and his work. Here are a few of the treasures I have uncovered. First, some excerpts from his biography:

Chris Moser is an accomplished public television producer/writer/director and a former news writer for CNN-USA. Chris is a 1994 recipient of the Governor’s Award in the Humanities for his career achievements using media in service to that field.  His Georgia Public Television documentary The Day Atlanta Stood Still won a 2002 Green Eyeshade Award and was widely seen throughout the United States via distribution by PBS-Plus. In 2015 Chris retired from the position of Assistant Professor of Communications at Georgia Perimeter College.

The Day Atlanta Stood Still

Chris produced The Day Atlanta Stood Still, the story of the June 3, 1962 plane crash at Orly Airfield that killed 106 Atlantans who had traveled to Paris to explore its arts culture. It is the story of who these people were, what brought them together, and how the city was changed by the determination to honor them.

Frank Hamilton and the Folk Revival

Chris was also producer/writer for the documentary Frank Hamilton and the Folk Revival: From Woody Guthrie To ‘We Shall Overcome’, which you can watch here. Here’s the panel discussion that followed its initial (standing room only) screening in Atlanta.

Tonight at Ferlinghetti’s

Just when I thought I had the content for this story complete, I talked to musician Elise Witt, who I will write about in a future post. She mentioned a show called “Tonight at Ferlinghetti’s” that I’d never heard of. It was a syndicated PBS production—along the lines of Prairie Home Companion—created at WPBA-TV, produced by Chris and featuring performers from various areas of roots music of the Southern United States. It ran from 1983 to 1988. I found this 1984 article from the Atlanta Constitution that describes the show as Chris’s brainchild:

The show featured quite a diverse range of acts. The article mentions bluegrass, Brazilian, and blues in the lineup of one show. I found a couple of videos on YouTube, including this performance from Indian group Sangeetkar and one from Doodle and the Golden River Grass.

Happy Holidays! Atlanta Folk will be back in January to continue exploring the world of folk music in Atlanta. I’ll leave you with this delightful tidbit from the December Fiddler’s Green concert, featuring Rivka Levin and friends.

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Origin Stories

Max: I grew up in Atlanta and went to Galloway, and then to Middlebury College (in Vermont) for a couple of years. Then I took a couple years off and did farming—apprenticeships and stuff—and then finished at UGA. And then met Maggie. I play fiddle, banjo, and other instruments. I teach music lessons at Guitar Shed in Kirkwood. And on Sundays I do the kids’ class at Frank Hamilton School. On Monday mornings I have a repertoire class there too.

Maggie: I’m an occupational therapist. I work with kids at About Play in Grant Park. That’s my day job. I play guitar, and love to sing. I’m also an artist, so I do a lot of artist markets. I do painting—I like watercolor—and basket weaving. Right now I have a bunch of holiday stuff, like woven stars. I have dried flower wreaths, felted pumpkins, brooms…sort of an artist collective of one. I grew up in Atlanta and went to Waldorf, which is probably where some of my crafty stuff started. I went to Warren Wilson College, and then to Milledgeville, and to grad school at Brenau.

Frank [Hamilton] actually came to our wedding and sang a song. It was so sweet. It was so beautiful.

Performing

Max and Maggie and Friends played at Fiddler’s Green in February 2025. Here’s the artist information from that show:

Max and Maggie have been fixtures of the Atlanta roots music scene for over 10 years, playing for dances and festivals around Georgia and beyond.
They began performing together at the Grant Park Farmers Market, and frequently team up with other local players. This performance will include bassist/fiddler Jenna Mobley and singer/guitarist Jeremy Aggers.
Featuring foot-stomping old-time Appalachian music, soulful harmonies and artful renditions of folk standards from the mountains, piedmont, and deep south, Max and Maggie and Friends perform everything from wild fiddle tunes to low-down country blues, uplifting spirituals and haunting mountain ballads.
Max and Jenna also co-teach the Sunday afternoon kids’ music program at the Frank Hamilton School in Decatur.

We started playing together in 2012. We love to sing, too. Now our harmonies are really tight—good three/four part things. Max plays everything. We’ll sometimes switch off—banjo and bass and stuff. Jenna is our bass player, but she also plays fiddle.

We play on Tuesday nights at the Home Bar in Kirkwood. That’s been kind of fun. It’s not strictly old-time. More loosey-goosey. Sometimes we’ll play a little John Prine or something, and we usually bring on new musicians, so it’s always a little bit different. It’s been fun because people will come in and say “you guys are doing some fun stuff. I would love to play.” We’ve met so many people through that. That’s how we started the Four O’Clocks.

Recording

Maggie and Max shared copies of two new CDs with me—one from the Four O’Clocks, which includes Jenna Mobley and Jeremy Aggers; the other from the Corn Tippers, which includes Evan Kinney (who also recorded and produced the album) and Tre Watts.

On Evan’s YouTube channel I found videos from the recent CD release party for these albums.

Jam Sessions

Old-Time at the Lost Druid

Max hosts an old-time jam at the Lost Druid Brewery in Avondale Estates.1 I asked him how this got started.

We hadn’t been playing music during the pandemic very much. I think a lot of people wanted to jam; they tried different places; it would stick for a little while. But I think maybe the group was too small, or it wasn’t the right people…it just never really happened. This was the first time that people kept coming back. It was so cool. Then we kept that going. And it kept getting bigger and bigger. It’s usually about 15 or 20 people, but it can be more. At some point we moved to Lost Druid. Second and third Sunday. Through that jam we met Jeremy, our banjo player.

We mostly just play [old-time] tunes. It’s almost like an Irish session. Start with one tune, then next…next…next. We pass it around in a circle. Everybody will call a tune, and we just try to stay in the same key for like an hour or something. Otherwise the fiddles and other instruments have to retune and everything. There’s a few keys that work best…if you try to shift away from that, everyone leaves, you know?

Other Jam Sessions

I asked about other sessions in the area.

There’s the Frank Hamilton stuff. Besides that, there’s one at Unearthing Farm & Market on Memorial Drive—on first Saturday mornings. Then there’s the Spiller Park Coffee one on Thursday nights. Those are all old-time ones.

Dancing

Square Dances

We’ve been putting on square dances at the Cabbagetown Community Center. They’re different than contra, and a lot faster. They feel kind of like what it would have felt like a hundred years ago. It’s fun. It’s silly—like you’re laughing the whole time.

Buck Dancing with Moonshine

You should talk to Moonshine. She does buck dancing. She created this YouTube channel and supports lots of things. She’s something else. She worked for the CDC as a doctor for a long time, and used to walk on the Beltline really early in the morning, learning her fiddle, dragging her dog in a little wagon. Everyone knew her as the fiddle lady.

I found her YouTube channel…here are Max and Maggie and friends playing while she dances.

Odds and Ends

Here are a few other bits and pieces from our conversation.

Banjos

Max: This is kind of a very specific thing, but I know that banjos—entry-level banjos—are hard for people to get hold of. I know the Black Banjo Reclamation Project does a thing where they renovate donated banjos and get them to people who are interested in learning. I have a lot of people who come to do a lesson, and the recommendations I give are all $200-300 or more. I’d love to do something about that.

Crafts

Maggie: I think it’s neat to mix folk traditions—music and the arts go so much together. I don’t know of any classes of crafts from this area, the sort of stuff they might teach at the John C. Campbell Folk School. Jenna is a quilter and she’s learned from some really amazing people. We went up to the Campbell school and I learned sweetgrass basketry from a fourth-generation Gullah weaver.

Communication

I asked about communication channels for reaching younger musicians—currently AAFFM is mostly on Facebook and email, which primarily reach an older audience.

There’s some on Instagram—but I’m old school in that way…I’ve just gone on Instagram with my art. It’s mostly in person—people who show up at the venues and stuff. There’s an email list, but usually we’ll make announcements at the jams and things.

I feel like we do a lot of posters, too. Those are actually so funny because I didn’t think they’d work, but we put them up here and around, and people come out. Maybe because people don’t use them as much they notice them more. It’s sort of this old way to spread the word.

What is Folk Music?

Max: Something very participatory—where people are. I treat the jam sessions and all the dances and stuff as kind of a pretense to get together and be with people.

What’s Next?

I think we’re going to try to do a couple of tours. We’ve got this mini tour on Valentine’s Day weekend up in North Carolina—we want to get out there with the CDs we just finished in August. We’re playing in New Orleans over spring break. A couple more gigs on the way there & on the way back. And try to keep the square dance going.

I came away from the conversation inspired and delighted, with a bunch of ideas and a list of more people to talk to!

The Deep Archives

Chris and Carol Moser brought over three boxes of historical records from AAFFM. I did some preliminary sorting, which barely scratched the surface.

I ran across a pair of letters that Doug Allison, a former AAFFM board member, forwarded to others in the group from a man named Dave Rodum.

The letters provide history about a group called the Atlanta Folk Music Society, active in Atlanta from the mid to late 1960s, that did various events and projects. This sent me down a fascinating curiosity trail which I’ll share more about in a future post. Among other things, AFMS hosted a music retreat at Unicoi State Park in 1965 and another in 1966.

If you’re enjoying Atlanta Folk, please share. And if you would like to contribute content, or have an idea for a story, please drop me a line. — Linda Hoopes, AAFFM President

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WRFG is Atlanta’s “independent, non-commercial, listener-supported, nonprofit, community radio station.” I hope to do more exploring and talking with people from the station, but today I’ll start with the only show on their calendar that has “Folk” in the name—Mark Gilson’s What the Folk?!, which airs on the second and fourth Tuesdays from 8-10 p.m.

Mark and I had an excellent conversation a few weeks ago; I could have listened to his stories for hours. Here are some of the highlights.

About the Show

Mark, who is a psychologist by profession, started at WRFG in 1976.

They were about 4 or 5 years old, they had a coat hanger for an antenna, and, like 30 watts or something like that. Shabby would be a compliment. But Harlan Joye put it together and I thought, okay. I started a mental health show, and I think I did a classical show on Sunday mornings, and then I started doing the folk music show. At the time, it was more traditional folk music, but then I went away for a while for an internship and fellowship.

When I came back I really had no intention of going back to radio, but this was about the time I met Frank Hamilton. I started to talk to him about all these things, the musicians he played with, Weavers and all the rest, and I said, Frank, you’ve got to have a radio show. I can be your producer. And that was how we started the show.

They did some things to insult Frank, and he said, “I’m not doing this show.” And so it was my show. In 2010 I started it in earnest, and it’s morphed into a topical music show that sometimes strays away from pure folk arrangements for the sake of political topical music.

Mark orchestrates each show around a theme—he mentioned one on “gullibility”—and connects it with politics. He has interviewed poets, musicians, activists, and more. Recordings of over 100 shows are available on the site; this spreadsheet lists them with one- or two-word titles and links.

John Lewis

Probably the highlight of my time there was in 2014. I really wanted to interview John Lewis. I got through a bunch of barriers, as there always are, and I wrote a proposal: “I want you to be a guest DJ. Give me your playlist—a list of songs you listen to when you march with Martin Luther King, the stuff you listen to at night, the music that you want to see.” And he bit the hook. He used to like to go to roadhouses—African-American roadhouses, and he named some songs and said “you might not have heard of this, but, you know, if you can find it…” I found them all, because, hey, the internet. So I’ve replayed that show maybe about 4 times.

Here’s a link to the most recent rebroadcast of the show.

The WAY-Back Story

When I asked Mark how he got started, he initially jumped to his time as a student at the University of Florida, but quickly went even farther back than that.

I was involved in radio at WKAT in Miami, Florida, where they had a show called Young Miami Speaks; someone there said, “Why don’t you come on?” And right beyond the station was a theater. I remember when I first came there, on a Saturday afternoon, there was a sign on the theater: “Lenny Bruce tonight.” That’s how long ago it was. Lenny Bruce was still alive and playing gigs. And one of the morning DJs there was a guy named Larry King. That was before he got into the CNN thing.

What the Folk started at WRUF in Gainesville, FL in the early ‘70s.

The U of F station had a little ad in the newspaper: “We need someone to do a classical music show on Sunday. You must be able to pronounce classical names and composers.” My dad was in the Cleveland Orchestra, so we listened to a lot of classical, and he would correct me. So I had that down pretty well, and I got the gig. And then I said “let’s do a folk music show.”

Meeting Pete Seeger

Although Mark has impressive professional mentors in psychology, the picture that took pride of place in his office was of himself with Pete Seeger.

I got my only paid gig at a radio station, at WGVL / Gainesville. That was during the Vietnam War protests, and it was probably one of the most intense times of my life. All these people came in to demonstrate against the war and work with the VVAW, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Born on the 4^th of July was the movie about it. The real guy that was the head of it was Scott Camil. Graham Nash wrote a song about him. One notable person who came in was Pete Seeger—I’m 20 or 21, and he winds up interviewing me more than I do him. He says, “Let’s go to breakfast.” We’re sitting there at this greasy spoon place and he says, “Well, what are you gonna do with your life?” and I said, “I don’t know.” And he said “Here’s my phone number and address…I want to keep in touch with you.” I have a whole thing of correspondence with him.

Phil Ochs and Getting Fired

My show was on from something like 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.; someone called and said Phil Ochs wanted to come by. He came to the station with his guitar; instead of talking about the war, he decided to talk about Richard Nixon and what a wretched person he was. Easiest interview I ever had to do. Ask one question, just kept going.

So, this is an old-fashioned station, with the control room in the middle and four walls of soundproof glass, with turntables and a couple of microphones. Someone holds up a note. Irv, the manager, is on the phone. I started shaking my head no, but Ochs sees the note, and stops, and says “Uh, Mark, you better pick up the phone.” And I said, “Well, you know, we can keep going.” “No, it’s the manager, it has to be important.” So I pick up the phone and on the audio tape you can hear me going “uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh” and he’s yelling. Ochs said, well, I guess I gotta go, don’t I? and I said, Nope. I said let’s go down in glory. Sing the song that you’re going to sing. He sang, “Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon.”

The VVAW guys are hanging out, but Ochs was saying, “that was really brave…I appreciate what you did.” He had an album called Pleasures of the Harbor, and on the cover he’s wearing this newsboy cap. He was wearing it that night. He said, “I want you to have this cap.” I said, I can’t take your cap. He said, “No, I want you to have it. Lenny Bruce gave it to me.” I put the hat down and started putting away record albums, and I look over, and the hat’s gone. One of the Vietnam veterans took it. But I still have the audio tape.

WRAS, Dolores French, and Larry Flynt

I’ll wind down with a story from WRAS, where Mark worked before joining WRFG.

I don’t know if you know a person named Dolores French…she wrote a book called Working, about the sex trade. Um…well...I will take some responsibility for her shift in direction when she was younger. As the manager of the station, I got all kinds of requests for interviews. I got a magazine, with a letter requesting that we interview a guy named Larry Flynt. I opened the magazine, and although these days it’s nothing shocking, at that time it was. I thought about who I might get to interview the publisher of Hustler. Dolores was a very staunch feminist at the time. No makeup, very intellectual and interesting to talk to, very left-wing. Fun person, I thought, and she was my public relations director.

We had a production room, and you signed up for half-hour slots. Larry came to the door—he was really wild-eyed. This was before he got shot and crippled. He had a bodyguard with him. He and Dolores went in. A half hour goes by, and people are saying “we can’t get into the production room.” I figured it had to be a great interview, so we let it run. An hour and a half later they come out of the production room, and she’s arm-in-arm with Larry. She’s smiling, and she said, Mark, this is the most wonderful man. I’m going to Ohio! She got on the board of directors of Hustler, and then after that she developed this career in the sex trade.

Mark on Folk Music

Toward the end, I asked Mark about his definition of folk music. He cited Pete Seeger’s definition—music by folks—and sees acoustic instruments as an important part of the tradition. He closed with this:

My view is that it’s about community music that lets people know what’s going on. And my penchant is for things that are being done wrong to the community and, in this case, the community of a nation. That’s why I gravitated to singer-songwriter David Rovics in the past couple of years, and then asked him to come do a concert.

I’m hoping to make it to the concert and dig a little deeper into the world of WRFG.

Folk Everywhere

Once you start looking for folk music around you, it shows up everywhere. Last weekend membership director Maureen Wilce and I set up a table at the Lake Claire Craft Fair to promote AAFFM, and got into lots of great conversations. There were a number of artists playing throughout the event, including several that described themselves as Americana and/or folk. Here’s one of them—A Wing and a Prayer.

On Saturday I went to the Atlanta symphony. One of the pieces was a violin concerto by Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, who was deeply influenced by the folk music of Armenia and other countries. Just before writing the concerto, he finished a six-month folk-song-collecting tour of Armenia.

The soloist, Sergey Khachatryan, was also Armenian; as his encore he played a folk tune called Krunk (the Crane), which he performs in memory of victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915. The tune was composed by Komitas, an Armenian priest and composer who is recognized as one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology.

I’ll leave you with a little lagniappe from the Seed & Feed Marching Abominable. Perhaps not strictly folk music, but definitely a community of people enjoying and sharing the spirit of joy in music.

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Origin Story

Last week I posted a 1976 newspaper concert listing, the earliest online mention I could find of the Atlanta Area Friends of Folk Music. A reader—Doug (thank you!!!)—sent me this document he found in his files, which “looks like a draft and probably came from Don Smith.” He also commented:

“That phone number in the 1976 clipping belonged to Don & Laeta Smith, who lived in Norcross. They were among the founders of AAFFM. Don scheduled performances and they often put up touring folk musicians who were fed Laeta’s lasagne (carnivorous or vegetarian, depending on the performer).”

The Next Link in the Chain

When I got involved with AAFFM a few years ago, the post below was on the front page of the web site. I had known about John McCutcheon and his music for many years, and was pleased that he had written an endorsement, but it wasn’t until I went back just now to look at it that I saw something remarkable. Betty Smith, the artist mentioned in the “origin story” above, invited John to perform his first show in Atlanta.

A newspaper listing from 1977 mentions John and his band Wry Straw performing a concert put on by AAFFM; he has continued to be very active in the Atlanta folk music scene over the years.

Almost Fifty Years Later

Last Saturday I went to a benefit concert John performed for children on the war front in Ukraine. It was an engaging and quite amazing show. He’s continued to expand his range of instruments over the years, and the playlist for the show was broad and varied.

And if you’ve never heard Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty” with a rocking hammered dulcimer, here’s a little clip so you can see what you’ve been missing!

It was lovely to learn more about the Ukrainian community as well. The Atlanta-based HelpingUkraine.US organized the benefit, which included an auction and artworks by children in Kharkiv. And I learned a little bit about Ukrainian folk music, including an instrument I’d never even heard of before—the bandura, which is deeply intertwined with Ukrainian national identity and a symbol of the struggle for freedom and independence.

Bandura player Olena Kovban shared some history about the instrument and performed two traditional pieces.

And so we’ve come full circle. The echoes of the early days are still with us, and we continue to pass along the music, the stories, and the gifts of community and generosity. I invite you to imagine what the next fifty years will bring, and to help bring that future into being.

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Frank Hamilton Music Swap and Shop

There will be more about the Frank Hamilton School in future posts. Although I’ve known about the school for a while, I’d never actually been to their location at Decatur’s Legacy Park. It turns out it’s less than 3 miles from my house, off Columbia Drive just south of Decatur.

We decided to set up an AAFFM table. Secretary Carol Moser, who had a number of instruments and other musical items to sell (including the odd-looking two-headed bell below), joined me.

It was fun! I saw some people I knew, got into several great conversations, picked a few instruments, and enjoyed listening to the jam sessions (old-time followed by bluegrass).

There was a table of old/weird/oddball instruments with a “make me an offer” sign. I fell in love with the details.

I didn’t bring anything to sell, and hadn’t planned on buying anything. Sigh. Brought home a small electric bass, an amp, whistle, songbook, and a couple of old CDs. And in a fit of curiosity, this strange and wonderful instrument, which I at first thought was a homemade koto, but now am thinking is a Vietnamese zither (dan tranh) or a Chinese guzheng. The bridges are movable and a couple are missing, and it badly needs new strings, but one of these days this will be a project—in the meantime, it will make an interesting piece of wall art!

Fiddler’s Green / Sparky & Rhonda Rucker

The day ended at the monthly Fiddler’s Green Coffeehouse Concert series, which AAFFM has been hosting for decades—more to say about this later. It’s held at the First Existentialist Congregation (aka Old Stone Church) in Candler Park on the third Saturday of each month. This month we had the joy of hearing Sparky and Rhonda Rucker, visiting from Maryville, TN.

At the intermission, Chris Moser introduced me as the new AAFFM president, and I invited everyone to participate in this quest to explore the “spiderweb” of Atlanta folk music. Several people came up afterward, and the list of people to talk to and things to explore continues to grow. Send me a note if you want to be involved.

The Wayback Machine

Just for fun, I did a newspaper search to see what history I could uncover. The earliest item I found was from December 1976.

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Questions

Here are some of the questions that will guide this quest:

1. What is folk music?

2. What is Atlanta’s history with folk music?

3. Who are the people playing, teaching, supporting, and appreciating folk music in Atlanta?

4. Where do people go to play, learn about, and listen to folk music?

5. How do new artists get started learning, playing, and performing?

6. What role should AAFFM play in nurturing, encouraging, and fostering the Atlanta folk community?

A Starting Point

Here is a little bit about me to help you understand where this journey began:

• I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s with Peter, Paul, and Mary, Joan Baez, and other artists of the era, and picked up the guitar in high school. I was a Girl Scout and played the guitar for campfire singalongs. I played the violin in my junior high school orchestra and sang in choral groups in high school and beyond.

• During college, I spent a year in Wales and hung out in folk clubs. Somewhere along the way I got exposed to the English ballad tradition and the migration of music to Appalachia.

• About 15 years ago I discovered the Swannanoa Gathering music workshops at Warren Wilson College and found my tribe at Celtic Week. I picked up the guitar and fiddle again and added bodhran and mandolin to the mix.

• Over the past few years, I’ve started a couple of family history projects and discovered that I learn by writing. I found AAFFM a few years ago and am bringing that curiosity and the desire to share stories into this Atlanta Folk quest.

Invitation

This journey will be a lot more fun with company. Here are some ways you can participate:

• Suggest stories and people to talk to.

• Write articles.

• Conduct interviews.

• Comment on articles / start conversations.

• Volunteer to host a podcast.

• Come to the Fiddler’s Green concerts.

• Help with social media.

If you’re interested in any of these, please send a note. And if you see me at an event or around the neighborhood, come say hi!

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