Concerts on the Creek celebrates Woody Guthire’s birthday July 11 in Rockford
ROCKFORD IL - Folk singer-songwriter Mark Dvorak and The Bound for Glory Singers will celebrate Woody Guthrie’s birthday with a sing along tribute on Saturday July 11 at 7:00 pm. The event takes place at at Spring Creek UCC, 4500 Spring Creek Road.
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 heard 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.”
Dvorak has spent a lifetime following in the musical footsteps of Guthrie.
The Chicago Tribune has called him “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 learn more and make a reservation phone 815.877.2576 or 815.979.1949. Vist www.springcreekucc.org.
Learn more about Mark Dvorak at www.markdvorak.com.