Music & Potlucks celebrates Woody Guthire’s birthday live stream July 14
RIVER FOREST IL - Folk singer-songwriter Mark Dvorak and The Bound for Glory Singers will celebrate Woody Guthrie’s birthday with a live stream concert on Monday July 14 at 7:00 pm CDT.
The program celebrates the 85th anniversary Guthrie’s most well-known composition, “This Land Is Your Land."
Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma July 14, 1912 and was America’s great folk ballad maker. Originally titled, “God Blessed America For Me,” Guthrie completed the song after hitch-hiking across the country, recalling some of the sweeping images he encountered.
Guthrie also included verses remarking on the America he witnessedon his trip: Migrant workers being locked out and the long lines at a soup kitchen.
Guthire head Kate Smith singing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” on the car radio of a fellow who stopped to offer him a lift.
“Guthrie hated that song,” said Dvorak. “ ‘God Bless America’ represented nothing of what Woody had experienced in his travels and in his personal life.”
“We’ve presented some 230 events,” said Music & Potlucks co-director Stephanie Schrodt of River Forest. "Our mission is to present programs that gather our community together and at the same time provide some assistance to our neighbors in need."
Dvorak has spent a lifetime following in the musical footsteps of Guthrie and is celebrating the release of his 20th CD, Live & Alone and 4th book of essays, 31 Winters: Finding the Folk Way, which reflects on his long journey through music and teaching.
The Chicago Tribune has called Dvorak “masterful,” and the Fox Valley Folk Festival describes him as “a living archive of song and style.” Dvorak has won awards for journalism and children’s music, and was honored in 2013 with the FARM Lantern Bearer Award from Folk Alliance International. In 2008 he received the Woodstock Folk Festival Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2012 Rich Warren, long time host of The Midnight Special radio program named Dvorak “Chicago’s official troubadour.”
To receive the free link, register at www.musicandpotlucks.org. A free will donation to support Music & Potlucks wikk be accepted.
Learn more about Mark Dvorak at www.markdvorak.com.