Reason for a Change-Mitch’s Blog

I just can’t help it! Really. Since the 50’s, when I became conscious of music through my mom’s singing and our 78 and LP records, not to mention my handheld transister radio. Flying Purple People Eater on the back porch in California, PA., Tom Lehrer, Pete Seeger, Cisco Huston, Ledbelly, early jazz, the Newport Folk Festival recordings, all were heard around the house, though I got my music merit badge throrough my analysis of the Grand Canyon Suite!

Moving to Pittsburgh in my early teens in 1962, I fell in with a crowd of folksinging, Quaker, peace and justice oriented teens who helped shape my life course. When we got together as a group at the meetinghouse for a seminar, or out in the community at a weekend work project, we sang folksongs as we knew them from Pete Seegar, Wood Guthrie, Joan Baez, Missisippi John Hurt, Cisco Huston, Bob Dylan, Brownie MaGee and Sonny Terry, Dave Van Ronk, Jim Kweskin, whoever had dipped into the tradition, or created it originally were used to make us one. I sang with the Freedom Singers when they stopped on their tour for Voter Rights, teens like us who faced violent racism with love and music. We were totally inspired, it brought me to the realization that resistance to the intolerable can be, needs to be joyful as well as articulate.

I often attended the Friday nite Caleidgh on the campus of Carnegie Tech, really a song circle for Appalachian/folk music. my friends from the AFSC were often there, but also “older” folks who organized and led the sessions, including the banjo playing Pete Hoover, who has so many recordings in IU’s Archives of Traditional Music.

Moving to Cleveland in 1965, I lost interest in playing, my next door neighbor, Steve, want me to play rock and roll, but I just could not get behind the electric thing. After several years in the natural foods business, I went back to college and supplemented my income and by street singing on Coventry Ave in Cleveland, where I lived while going to CWRU and then Cleveland State Univ. I worked through my repitoire of Woody, Pete and Cisco, but needed more, which I got from Dave Newman, old time country DJ at WRUW, the local FM station. I recorded his shows on the on my expensive (to me) radio/cassette recorder, learning Carter Family, Jimmy Rogers, the Delmores and more. Fiddle tunes, the early stuff recorded in the twenties, this was where the NLCR got their material, Charlie Poole, Gid Tanner, Mississipi Shieks.

Upon moving to Bloomington I became absorbed in the oldtime dance tunes played for line and square dancing, banjo and guitar, later uke and harmonica.

Eileen and I began playing farm and food songs at the market when we first moved here from Nashville in 1979, and have done so ever since. The Bloomginton Farmers Market is our city’s priemer community building event, and we are open nearly 40 weeks per year. Our songs draw families to our spot at the south end of the market , the limberjacks are fascinating to all, and our songs food, farms, and Indiana are selected just for the Market.

Our album “Fresh from the Market” is available from us and CD Baby. This album has become a favorite of the younger set, played in all the best pre-schools, it is a great intro to Appalachian roots music, with vocals by Mitch and Eileen, accompanyed by banjo, guitar, harmonica and fiddle.