Fw: songs and signs for the Ellenville Parade

From Sarah Underhill
Hi Parade marchers:
 
Please write in with the messages on the signs or banners you will  be bringing, so we can get an idea of what our message is going to look like.
So far I have :
HONOR THE DEAD/HEAL THE WOUNDED/END THE WAR
YOUTH NEED JOBS & HEALTHCARE, NOT RECRUITMENT
FUND SESAME STEET NOT WALL STREET
 And I am planning to make a few which say:
OIL COMPANY PROFITEERING IS KILLING THIS COUNTRY [AND THIS PLANET]
NATIONAL SECURITY= JOBS, HEALTHCARE,EDUCATION & AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR ALL
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY CREATES JOBS
 
As to the songs, in the past we have had a good response from the following marching songs:
This Land is Your Land
De Colores
God Bless America
Down By the Riverside
Aint Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round
America the Beautiful
 
Please send in other suggestions
Thanks and hope to see you on Friday
Sarah

Folk Music Class at the historic Phoenica Train Station

I'll be teaching a class in historic regional folk music startingFolk Music Class at the historic Phoenica Train Station starting Wednesday 7/9 for 4 weeks! 7-8:30, pm

Traditional Music of the Catskills and Hudson River Valley Cost $40 for 4 classes. (10% of the cost goes to the Empire State Railway Museum)

(4 sessions) This course will cover traditional regional and historic music of the Catskills and Hudson Valley. No musical experience is required, but experienced musicians and singers will have a chance to increase their repertoire with "Home Grown" music from our area. We will study the major local collections of music including area colonial songs from the Allison family, songs of Henry Backus "The Saugerties Bard" from the 1850's and songs and dances from Camp Woodland in the 1950's. Examples will include songs of the railroaders, quarrymen, lumberjack's, steamboat captains, and apple growers., We will also include 20th Century songs by folksong writers such as Grant Rogers, Les Rice, William Geckle, Ken Gonyea, Mark Fried, Rick Nestler and Pete Seeger.

The course will conclude with a 5th session performance at Catskill Woodlands Camp.

Bob Lusk is a well known local folk singer and has been studying the historic music native to this area for the past 30 years.

To register, call (845) 338-8587

Directions to:
Phoenicia RR Station, #70 Lower High St, Phoenicia, NY, 12464
From Kingston, Thruway exit #19, go 23 miles West (North) on Rt. 28 -
- past the RR crossing (& Mt. Pleasant Station on your right) -
- on past the Phoenicia Diner (on your left), .3 mile to the first Right turn) -
- the Phoenicia RR Station (ESRM) is the first building on your Right.
From Phoenicia:
- Main St. turn South on Bridge St. across bridge and RR track -
- turn Left after the track onto Lower High St. -
- the Phoenicia RR Station (ESRM) is the 3rd building on your Left

Bob Horan at The Green Fair

I wish there was someway I could have this come up directly, but you will have to go to the link.   Bob is one of my favorite singers of all time.  Broadsheet DAILY/Green Fair

ELLENVILLE 4TH OF JULY PARADE - Voices needed!

From Sarah Underhill-
Catskill Peace Alliance/Rondout Valley Patriots for Peace  has been invited to march in the Ellenville parade on Friday July 4th. Lineup is a 11 am in the High School parking lot. We skipped marching last year so this might be a good year to get back into the swing of things.
 
All marchers with signs, placards, flags and banners are welcome. The theme is traditionally one of social justice: peace, health care for all, funding education and human needs instead of corporate greed, alternative energy [we may have a vegetable oil powered car  in our contingent], affordable housing, rebuilding infrastructure, stopping the war machine and war profiteering .....you know the drill!
We also hope to have live music as we march, as we have had in the past! Bring your guitars and favorite marching songs.
RSVP with more ideas and themes.
 
Sarah Underhill

At a Roadside Vigil, an Iconic Voice of Protest (Pete Seeger) - NY Times

New York Times
June 22, 2008
At a Roadside Vigil, an Iconic Voice of Protest
By DENNIS GAFFNEY

WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. - Pete Seeger pulled his black Toyota Highlander into the Staples parking lot here and plucked some signs from the back seat,including one with "Peace" spray-painted in large orange letters.
With that, he slung his banjo over his shoulder like an old musket and marched toward the intersection of Route 9, a bustling six-lane thoroughfare, and 9D, the "Hudson Valley P.O.W.-M.I.A. Memorial Highway." But before the 89-year-old folk singer flashed his antiwar signs to passing drivers from this no-man's land - a patch of green about an hour north of New York City on the Hudson River - he bent over again and again, picking up litter. "This is my religion now," said Mr. Seeger. "Picking up trash. You do a little bit wherever you are."

Mr. Seeger, the man behind the founding of the Clearwater Festival, being
held this weekend at Croton Point Park, is scheduled to appear there on
Sunday. But for the last four years, most Saturdays he has been keeping his vigil in Wappingers Falls, usually not recognized by the hundreds of drivers
who whiz by. It is a long road from 1969, when to protest the Vietnam War he sang John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" at the foot of the Washington
Monument.

"After two minutes, thousands were singing," he recalled. "After three
minutes, four minutes, a hundred thousand were singing. At the end of eight
minutes, all five hundred thousand were singing."

These days, fewer than a dozen protesters usually participate, while nearly
as many who support the war in Iraq hold a counterdemonstration across Route
9. Mr. Seeger, a political activist who has traveled the world, rarely
ventures farther than the few miles from here to his home in Beacon, N.Y.

On this particular Saturday, Mr. Seeger chatted easily with Chris Miller of
Poughkeepsie. "He's an ex-Army member," Mr. Seeger said, "and they're trying
to send him over again."

Mr. Miller, 38, served as a therapist for four years before receiving an
honorable discharge in January 2006. But on Dec. 22, 2007, he said, he
received orders to return to Iraq, although he is appealing that decision.

Mr. Miller said he had spent countless hours listening to Mr. Seeger's
stories, like the one about how his car windows were shattered in Peekskill
in 1949 as he and his family left a performance he had given with the singer
Paul Robeson, who was thought to have Communist sympathies, as was Mr.
Seeger. Or the one about the Vietnam veteran who said he had come to a
concert in the Catskills to kill Mr. Seeger because of his antiwar stance,
but was turned around by the performance and made his way backstage to tell
of his transformation.

"I smiled and shook his hand," Mr. Seeger said. "I had my banjo. We sat down
and sang, 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' " Afterward, Mr. Seeger said,
the man told him, "I feel clean now."

Mr. Seeger said he wrote that song in the mid-1950s accompanied by the same
banjo he totes around today. As for Mr. Miller: "Seeing what Pete has gone
through and always standing up for what he believed in, despite the
consequences, made my decision easier to resist the war. It made me
comfortable that in the long run I'll be all right."

At one point, Mr. Seeger looked across the highway to the knot of
counterdemonstrators. "They always have more flags," Mr. Seeger said. "But
our signs are more fun." He said he crossed the street once about a year ago
and talked to a veteran.

"I shook his hand and said, 'I'm glad we live in a country where we can
disagree with each other without shooting at each other.' He had to shake my
hand. He didn't know what to say. I even picked up a little litter over
there."

As he chatted, Mr. Seeger broke into "Take It From Dr. King," which he wrote
after the Sept. 11 attacks, in a voice as worn as an old phonograph
record."Don't say it can't be done," he sang, tapping out the rhythm on his
thighs as his Adam's apple bobbed to the music. "The battle's just
begun/Take it from Dr. King/You too can learn to sing/So drop the gun."

With songs like that one and "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," an anti-Vietnam
War anthem, it is easy to assume he is a pacifist. But that assumption would
be wrong. His family tree is adorned with both Quakers and a Revolutionary
War veteran.

"Hitler had to be done away with," said Mr. Seeger, who served in World War
II.

His 1966 antiwar anthem, "Bring 'Em Home," resurrected by Bruce Springsteen
in recent years, includes the words: "There's one thing I must confess/I'm
not really a pacifist/If an army invaded this land of mine/You'd find me out
on the firing line."

Asked whether he thought that protesting by the side of the road would help
end the war, he said: "I don't think that big things are as effective as
people think they are. The last time there was an antiwar demonstration in
New York City I said, 'Why not have a hundred little ones?' "

He said that working for peace was like adding sand to a basket on one side
of a large scale, trying to tip it one way despite enormous weight on the
opposite side.

"Some of us try to add more sand by teaspoons," he explained. "It's leaking
out as fast as it goes in and they're all laughing at us. But we're still
getting people with teaspoons. I get letters from people saying, 'I'm still
on the teaspoon brigade.' "

slow session

 
Hey, Bob. The traditional Irish slow session is located at the Old Songs Community Arts Center, 37 South Main Street, Voorheesville, NY. We got from 7:30 to about 9 PM with a little break in the middle. Cost is $4, which includes photocopies of sheet music. I can record and send mp3s to those who want to learn by ear (my preference!).
 
We've set it up to have a place for people learning Irish traditional music to work on repertoire. If you visit my blog (see link below), you'll see the standard session sets of tunes we've been working on. We use sheet music to learn tunes and then my intention is to have people playing the tunes without sheet music by the next month, so mostly its revisiting stuff we've been working on and learning new stuff. Sometimes we try new stuff by ear, but most people seem to be learning best with some sheet music.
 
I'm considering having the July session be a round robin, but haven't decided yet. I may keep it the same structure as usual. We'll take August off, and start up again in September.

Visit The Hudson Valley Trad for news and views on traditional Irish and world folk music: http://hudsonvalleytrad.blogspot.com/ 

New exhbit of LOST SONGS of protest, labor on laborarts.org

From John Pietaro

Sisters and Brothers...

Here's a notice from labor historian Rachel Bernstein, concerning a new
exhibit on her website www.laborarts.org : 'Play It Again, Sam' -- Lost
Chords of the Labor and Progressive Movements".

If you are not familiar with this site, you should be---it contains a great
amount of documents, art and other priceless pieces of labor and people's
history. Now, she and co-archivist Heny Foner, present an exhibit of lost
songs from our people's history. Here are some titles that remind us just
who the American Student Union was, help us to errily remember that it was
Martin Dies who founded the HUAC, and clarifies that in the face of red
scare oppression between the 1930s and early 1960s, we fought back. In
addition to seeing the complete lyrics, you can listen to these songs
performed by the inimitable Henry Foner, one of the guys who was always in
the thick of the movement and actually penned some of these songs. They'll
take you back to a smokey union hall where guys names Lefty waited for
delivery of the Daily Worker before going home each night...

In Solidarity,
John Pietaro - www.flamesofdiscontent.org

From: Rachel Bernstein <rachel.bernstein@NYU.EDU>
To: H-LABOR-ARTS@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Subject: New exhbit of old songs : "Play It Again, Sam"

We at Labor Arts/ LaborArts.org invite you to visit our newest exhbit:

"'Play It Again, Sam' -- Lost Chords of the Labor and Progressive
Movements"

The exhibit features music from that particularly fertile period of the
labor and progressive movements --the 1930s and 1940s. There are a number
of little known songs, songs that are in danger of passing, unrecognized.
into our musical history, and we have recorded some of them for this
exhibit. The are sung by Henry Foner, whose unerring memory for the lyrics
of these songs is unique.

Labor arts followers who have "lost songs" to add to our list are encouraged
to contribute notice of them to this list.

In solidarity,

Evelyn Jones Rich, Rachel Bernstein and Henry Foner

Jesus as Vishnu - Old Fashioned Hymn Sing and Song Circle

Jesus as Vishnu

Old Fashioned Hymn Sing and Song Circle

Sunday June 15th  -  6:30 - 7:45   Free!

 

Hosted by Cory Smith & Bob (Bhaav) Lusk

An informal singing group, gathering to sing old and new songs of praise and worship.  Repertoire includes but is not limited to hymns, spirituals, folk songs, meditative songs, chants, bajans, and plainsong.  We come from a variety of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu traditions.  All are welcome.

Please feel free to bring instruments

Children Welcome - Family friendly

Namaste Yoga Studio
2568 Rt 212 (Between Gallos & the A Frame Church)
Woodstock, NY

 

For more information, call (845) 338-8587

Massive New Paltz meditation

from Ethan
 
In around December 2007 a moment of inspiration came.  The vision was simple, but extremely powerful: organize a MASSIVE group meditation in New Paltz, NY on June 21st 2008 to raise individual, local, and global consciousness.  I am not doing this event affiliated with any group or organization; I am only doing it out of love and gratitude for this beautiful town of New Paltz and the beautiful Earth we live on. Right here in New Paltz, through this mass meditation event, we have the opportunity to set an inspirational example for other communities, create a positive energetic field that radiates throughout our own consciousness, the whole country, and the world, and lastly, be still in the presence of ALLOT of people!

For this to be as great as I have envisioned, your help is needed... I would like you to send this message to everyone on your email list once now, and once around 7 days before the event. The "field" has been "built," and now all we need is the people! I will send you another email in a few weeks to remind you about the event :-)

The event I have organized is titled, "New Paltz's Largest Group Meditation - Ever!" It will be held at Hasbrouck Park in New Paltz, NY on Saturday, June 21st from 6PM-8PM. I obtained a permit from the Village Hall to use the park from 6-8PM, so we wont have to worry about any baseball games going on :-).  We will be surrounded by flowers as we meditate and chant.  The meditation will take place from 6-7PM and the chanting will take place from 7-8 PM.  All are welcome to practice any type of prayer/meditation of their choice.  People don't have to stay for the whole hour of meditation (6-7PM) or the whole hour of kirtan (7-8:15PM), but can come and go as they please.  It's free, and there is no registration necessary.  It will be held rain or shine! :-) The group kirtan (chanting) at 7:15-8:15PM is also open to everyone.


Please email me at ethansisser@gmail.com or call at 516-410-1163 if you have any questions or suggestions of how to make this event as great as possible.

Thank you! With love, Ethan

Juneteenth Celebration - Fri, 6/13 - Pokeepsie

 

CELEBRATE

 

The Oldest Nationally Celebrated Commemoration

of the Ending of Slavery in the United States

 

JUNETEENTH

 

5:30pm — 8pm, Friday, June 13th

at the

Sadie Peterson Delaney

African Roots Library

FAMILY PARTNERSHIP CENTER

29 North Hamilton St, Poughkeepsie

 

PROGRAM INCLUDES:

Dr. A.J. Williams-Myers

The ReadNex Poetry Squad

A Short film on Juneteenth

Community Discussion

Refreshments

 

On Juneteenth we come together

young and old to listen,

to learn and to refresh

the drive to achieve.

 

Call 845-452-6088 x3343 for more information