Photo by Patti Cooper

You Are Invited!

What: CD Release Concert for Folk Songs You Never Sang In Grade School
When: Saturday, July 8, 2017 at 7 pm
Where: Uptown Bill’s Coffee House in Iowa City

Keith Reins and I are thrilled to be releasing our album Folk Songs You Never Sang In Grade School that we’ve been working on for the last several years along with our friend uilleann piper Jon Cooper.

This project has been one of the great thrills of my professional life and it has so many layers that I find it hard to describe so heeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Keith!:

My name is Keith Reins, English Professor Emeritus at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I am also a musician and essayist and have long wanted to combine my artistic interests by writing essays about music. This goal became a reality when I was delighted to receive an Endowed Faculty Chair Award from the Kirkwood Foundation. The endowment allowed me a “mini-sabbatical” in 2012 to pursue my ambition by researching and writing a series of essays about a collection of folk songs I have learned and loved over nearly 40 years of collecting and performing.

The result is Folk Songs You Never Sang in Grade School (FSYNSIGS), a multifaceted project that combines research, original essays, musical performance, an interactive website. and original recordings of songs in the collection.

On my website you’ll find all the essays and lyrics (as I learned them) to the songs in the Folk Songs You Never Sang In Grade School collection. The essays are linked to many of the sources I used in my research as well as varied performances (Thanks, YouTube!) of many songs. I didn’t write an essay about each song per se; I included all the songs in the FSYNSIGS collection in my essays, but the essays are more about themes, history and the artistry of composition than about individual songs. All this I wove together with personal narrative—my relationship with the songs and how I came to love, interpret, arrange and make them my own as a performer. My intent is to produce a compelling, entertaining, reader-friendly collection of essays about the songs I love and my creative life.

I invite you to pop over to Keith’s website to enjoy his wonderful essays, to join Keith, Jon and I tomorrow night at Uptown Bill’s, and to bring home one of our CDs for your very own. If you prefer a digital copy, check back here and  I will let you know when the album hits CDBaby and iTunes in a few weeks.

Thanks for supporting local music!