Music Column: Family Folk Machine's spring concert

The spring concert by the Family Folk Machine is coming right up.

“Dreaming of Justice: Songs for a Crowded Table” will come to life at 3 p.m., Sunday, May 12 at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City.

That’s right, it’s Mother’s Day. We hope you can come and bring your mom along.

We are very excited to welcome a special guest singer to this concert. LaTasha DeLoach, aka LaLa DeLo, wrote “Dreaming of Justice,” and the song will have its first public performance at the May 12 concert. While most of LaTasha’s original music is designed for solo performance, she imagined “Dreaming of Justice” with a chorus of backing vocals, making it a great choice for collaborating with the Family Folk Machine.

“Dreaming of Justice” challenges us to do more than “support from a distance” in the face of the problems our society faces. In the Hozier song “Nina Cried Power,” soloists (three generations of a single family) tell us “It’s not the waking, it’s the rising”—in other words, awareness is not enough. Hozier references Nina Simone’s version of the traditional song “Sinnerman” and names musicians who have called us to do better across the decades. We have carried this forward by including the names of additional musicians who “cried power,” including one in our own community.

We’re pleased to be premiering “Fix This Place,” by FFM’s Alma Drake and Michael Crow, which tells the story of people contributing solutions: Pete Seeger working to clean up the Hudson River, Samantha Tol increasing carbon sequestration by working on seagrass seeds (spoiler alert: this involves turtle poop), and Ron Finley planting gardens in L.A.’s South Central. Several other songs on the program are also about rising up and making the world better: Iris DeMent’s recent song “Working on a World,” a favorite of the choir; Storm Large’s “Stand Up for Me,” which answers the question of what love asks of us; Lea Morris’s “Be the Light,” based on the Amanda Gorman poem “The Hill We Climb.” A reworked “Midnight Special” reflects on those times when we feel powerless in the face of insurmountable challenges, with some new verses inspired by our lives here and now.

A third song premiere on the program will be “I Like Spring,” a song written by Nicole Upchurch and the FFM kids just a few months ago. The FFM kids benefit greatly from Nicole’s ukulele instruction each fall and songwriting instruction in the spring session. This spring’s songwriting netted some individual kid-composed songs as well as this group song that we’ll hear on the concert. We are also grateful to FFMer and songwriter Jeff Capps for leading a beginning songwriting class for adults this spring!

This concert will be the last for two FFM graduating seniors, Erin Partridge and Sebastian Sauder. They have contributed enormously to the FFM over their many years of involvement, and we will miss them very much! We hope you can join us for “Dreaming of Justice: Songs for a Crowded Table” at 3 p.m. on May 12 at the Englert.

Jean Littlejohn is the Artistic and Executive Director of the Family Folk Machine and Director of Music at Trinity Episcopal Church. She lives in Iowa City with her husband Michael Sauder and kids Sebastian and Ben. For more information on the Family Folk Machine, including how to join, visit familyfolkmachine.org or send a note to jean@familyfolkmachine.org.

This article originally appeared on Ames Tribune: Music Column: Family Folk Machine's spring concert