Dear hearts,
After a month and a half adventuring Stateside, I’m writing from Georgian Bluffs, Ontario where we’ve been luxuriating in a rare break from the road. We landed here two days ago with our friends Clark and Ann, in the gorgeous house they built themselves, surrounded by a forest they planted fifty years ago. They’ve been insisting on feeding us and giving us space to work, and last night we played for a full house in their living room. Many of their friends are artists, educators, and activists, and we got to hear a smattering of all the cool things they’re working on: teaching kids in a forest school, amending bylaws to allow for green burials, shoring up financial support for Summerfolk after last year’s rain-out, working in community radio, making stained glass, greening the local council’s fleet of vehicles, sharing tools and know-how to fix broken stuff at a monthly repair café, planting a community permaculture garden, making moves toward reconciliation with local indigenous folks, running a fundraising auction for the local United church, and just generally breathing life into Margaret Mead’s quote about a small, thoughtful group of citizens changing the world.
Today we’re playing a house concert at From Scratch Farm in Grafton that’s also sold out – the first full houses we’ve had since our Edmonton send-off. These are hard times to be touring, as we’re hearing from all our colleagues – what with inflation and alienation and polarization and anxieties and folks stuck in front of their screens – but it still feels worthwhile to gather folks together, to feel together and sing together and hope together, and we feel incredibly privileged that we get to do it. If you’d like to join us, we’ve still got shows with seats waiting for you:
Fri Oct 25 • Kingston, ON • Live Wire Music Series with Emma Cook
A long-running series curated by Al Rankin that has hosted many greats over the years. This’ll be their first show in the lovely Théâtre le Sésame, and Emma Cook’s opening. Tickets are here.
Sat Oct 26 • Kitchener, ON & ONLINE! • Folk Night at the Registry with Jay Linden
Another storied series in a beautiful theatre that I last played in 2018. Colin Linden’s brother Jay Linden’s opening the show, and they’re livestreaming it too. Last I checked, there were 35 seats left in the Registry Theatre, and there’s always room for one more at the livestream – tickets are here.
Sun Oct 27 • Toronto, ON • Cameron House matinee with special guest Corin Raymond
The Cameron’s the beating heart of my Toronto, and we’re elated to share a rare ticketed afternoon show in the front room with our pal Corin Raymond. He’s bringing something new and special to the event – I don’t even know what it is! – and we’ll be his band for a few songs too. The show runs 4-6pm and tickets are $25 (with no extra fees) here or $30 at the door until sold out.
Mon Oct 28 • Perth, ON • Listening Room Concert Series
Steve and Sue Tennant have been presenting music in Perth for ages, and it’s always an honour to play for them. Advance bookings are essential, and all the info you need is here.
After that we’re taking three days off in a cabin in Foresters Falls, where I’m going to work on the book of liner notes for Troubadourly Yours, then we’re back in the saddle for another string of shows:
Fri Nov 1 • Chelsea, QC • Hotel Chelsea (our first time, this place looks sweeet!)
Sat Nov 2 • Ottawa, ON • Tunes After Noon with Greg Kelly (just one set from us, before the open mic)
Tue Nov 5 • Akron, OH • GHS Presents show at TrustBooks (election night in Ohio!)
Wed Nov 6 • Columbus, OH • Rambling House w/ Eric Nassau opening
Thu Nov 7 • Nashville, IN • Brown County Inn
Fri Nov 8 • Carmel, IN • TBA (watch scottcook.net for details)
Sat Nov 9 • Grand Rapids, MI • house concert
Sun Nov 10 • Kalamazoo, MI • Harmony Barn house concert
Thu Nov 14 • Toledo, OH • Lucas County Public Library
Fri Nov 15 • Dexter, MI • house concert
Sat Nov 16 • Detroit (Birmingham), MI • Mama's Coffeehouse
As always, all the deets for those are on scottcook.net. After our Detroit stop we’re heading back across the border to reunite with our pals Joe Nolan and Scott Nolan as our new fearsome foursome Ramblers Choir:
Nov 20 • Winnipeg, MB • Park Theatre • tickets
Nov 21 • Inglis, MB • Roots at Rusty’s • tickets
Nov 22 • Saskatoon, SK • The Bassment • tickets
Nov 23 • Watson, SK • Watson and District Regional Library • tickets
Nov 24 • Regina, SK • The Artesian • tickets
Nov 26 • Vulcan, AB • Nine In a Line Brewing • tickets
Nov 27 • Nanton, AB • Loree house concert • tickets
Nov 28 • Canmore, AB • house concert • tickets coming soon
Nov 29 • Calgary, AB • Fish Creek Concerts • tickets
Nov 30 • Edmonton, AB • Northern Lights Folk Club • tickets – LOW TICKET alert!
Dec 1 • Vermilion, AB • Vermilion Folk Club
The tail end of summer
It’s been five weeks since I wrote you last, but it feels like ages ago. That night we played the carriage house of a mansion called Joslyn Castle in Omaha, Nebraska. Hanging out with our hosts afterward, we got an idea of what it was like to grow up as hippies in Nebraska, and what it’s like now to live one of the many “blue dot” cities scattered across the red Great Plains (for readers abroad, blue means Democrat and red’s Republican). We played two shows in Kansas next, another state I’d never played in before, and had a great talk with our host Ann Zimmerman, who’s also a performer herself, about the Kansas Artists Directory, a government initiative whereby performers can apply to be listed for hire with educational programs for schoolkids on science, history, music and dance, or whatever teachers might want their kids to learn about, like Kansas flora and fauna, or Kansas’ state song (“Home, Home On the Range”), or the stories of Kansans’ role in the fights for civil rights and women’s rights. To me, that’s patriotic education.
We checked out the Land Institute outside Salina, where they’re developing more resilient crops and working on natural systems agriculture, and in town we bought beers made with Kernza, their new strain of perennial wheat. We made our way to Winfield, Kansas, and camped out for five blisteringly-hot days at the Walnut Valley Festival – a picker’s paradise that draws folks from far and wide, and plays host to the international fingerstyle guitar championships, plus the national championships for flatpicking and a bunch of other instruments including what I call the folkie-folk trifecta: mountain dulcimer, hammer dulcimer, and autoharp. John McCutcheon, who plays all three, appears at Winfield every year, and isn’t afraid to sing about politics to a diverse Kansas crowd – take this one, for example, co-written with Tom Paxton: a short-shelf-life song for this election season.
Like the Kerrville Folk Fest in Texas, most of the action happens in the campground at Winfield, with jams into the wee hours and folks setting up elaborate campsites and even renegade stages like Stage 11, the songwriters’ showcase stage that hosted us, and Stage 5, a little box on the back of a flatbed truck.
The festival also hosts paid workshops on the Wednesday, so Pamela and I jumped at the chance to study bass and flatpicking.
That same weekend was the last hurrah of Harvest Gathering on the Earthwork Farm in Lake City, Michigan, a festival that truly changed my life. I played it nine times over the years, and every visit I made to the farm was a deep drink from the well, a reminder of how gathering together around music can build bridges, inspire and heal, of how cultural change can be built person-to-person, and – by the examples of the Bernard and Erlewine families and the farm’s own son Seth Bernard – of what gentle, powerful leadership looks like.
For a variety of reasons, the family decided that this year would be the last, at least in its current form. I was gutted not to be there, but even more so, just grateful for all the inspiration, guidance and connections that gathering brought me over the years.
Several festivals have folded since the pandemic, and it does seem to be part of a larger trend, the same trend that’s making touring ever more challenging. It was never easy to begin with, as you know, but finding human connection really does feel like swimming upstream nowadays, which makes us doubly grateful for the folks who actually buy tickets and come out to share some red-blooded joy with their fellow bipeds.
From Winfield we swung through Tulsa, where we played a feature at a songwriters night and two friends and Fellow Travellers from Vancouver Island dropped in, and then to Arkansas, another state I’d never played in before, where our friend Jack Williams – a living legend, still touring in his 80s – linked us up for a show at the Folk School of Fayetteville. It’s an amazing community music space in a big old house, with music lessons, workshops, concerts, weekly jams and songwriters’ nights, and is part of the larger Folk School Alliance, a beautiful idea that got Pamela dreaming of starting one in Edmonton.
While there, we also hung out with Kelly and Donna of Still On the Hill, saw the incredible Ozark Ball Museum in their house, and heard the story of their friend Ed Stilley, a farmer from Hogscald Hollow who got a message from God in 1979 to make instruments for children, going on to make and give away over 200 one-of-a-kind instruments with no prior training and really no idea of how it was done. His guitars have old sawblades and springs inside as resonators. I’ve never seen anything like them.
Kelly and Donna have an incredible energy and ingenuity and childlike wonder about them, and our visit to their place felt potent, like the kind of moment I didn’t want to take my phone out for. They actually survive without smartphones, and it shows. They’ve got a hilarious Woody Guthrie rewrite called “I Ain’t Got No Phone In This World Anymore” that you’ll have to find them to hear, ‘cause it ain’t online.
We had some serious miles to cover from Fayetteville to Asheville, North Carolina for our next two shows, and we drove two long days with one eye on the forecasts about Hurricane Helene. We and both our hostesses were optimistic about the shows still happening right up until the morning of the first one, when NCDOT announced that all highways in Western North Carolina were closed and the horrible extent of the flooding started to become clear. It’s heartbreaking to think of how much has been lost, how hard folks will have to work to rebuild, and how many more severe weather events we’ll witness in our lives as the climate becomes increasingly chaotic.
We skirted northward, played a house concert in eastern North Carolina for a friend we’d met at Lamb’s Retreat, then headed up to Virginia for a songwriting workshop and church concert in Roanoke for the folks at 3rd Street Coffeehouse and our yearly visit to the charming Floyd Country Store.
Before September was out, we co-wrote our first song and recorded it in the van for my Fellow Travellers on Patreon. It's a duet called “Something In My Eyes”, and we think it's a stone-cold classic. You can hear it by coming to find us at one of our gigs, or by signing up for a monthly donation of whatever feels right for you over on patreon.com/scottcooksongs.
From Virginia we were up the coast and abruptly into autumn in New England. We marvelled at the different foliage and birdsong. We camped in State Parks and in parking lots. We stayed four days with dear friends in Connecticut. We got to hang with old pals and play three sets in one day at Black Bear Americana Festival. We got to drop in and sing a couple songs for the inspiring folks at People's Music Network's annual gathering. We played a song and story swap in an old church in Amherst, Massachusetts, right across the street from Emily Dickinson’s house. And we visited so many wonderful, decades-old concert series that are powered only by volunteers and enthusiasm. Everywhere we went, people told us the songs were opening their hearts, making them cry, reminding them of stuff they’d long forgotten about. It’s a privilege and an honour to do this work. And we sure hope you’ll come join us along the way.
photo from Me&Thee Music in Marblehead, Massachusetts
One last bit of news: I'll be releasing a proper studio-recorded single – my first in four years – called “Christmas on the Mekong” in late November, and will be sharing that recording, along with this month's new song, on my Patreon page before October's out. I've never written a Christmas song before, and while this certainly isn't your typical Santa jingle, I think it's got the spirit of Christmas in it.
Love from this brief respite to wherever you are,
s
