Eclectic Company: At the Old Songs Festival, Donna Hébert and Jane Rothfield are Groove Mamas

Sixteen summers ago, fiddler Donna Hebért was in Altamont, New York at the Old Songs Festival, watching performers on the children’s stage when Director Andy Spence asked her “what do you think of this?” Without missing a beat, Donna, whose music and forthright manner I’ve known since her days as a member of the now-defunct feminist folk band Rude Girls, said “How come they’re just sitting there? How many of these kids play an instrument? This irks me. They ha[ve] that glazed-over TV watching look. They’re consuming music. Well, we want them to play music.” Andy looked appraisingly at Donna. “You have an idea here, don’t you?”

That brief exchange germinated the seeds of the Great Groove Band, now going 15 years strong at the Old Songs Festival: Music With Roots (this year, the festival’s 33rd, is on June 28–30, 2013), and with that success, expanding to eight years at the Philadelphia Folk Festival (this year, the festival’s 52nd, is on August 15-18, 2013). On that fateful afternoon, Donna told Andy she was willing to bet there were a lot of string players in the crowd of kids sitting still at the stage, and asked “How many volunteers do you have, and how many kids do they have?”

The following year, Donna and her old-timey fiddling friend Jane Rothfield took to the stage with a bunch of volunteer’s and weekend attendee’s kids whose musical skills and experience ranged from practically none to somewhat, with maybe one or two classically trained kids with chops but no improvisation skills. In three two-hour rehearsal sessions spread over the weekend, the kids learned to play together, melody and harmony, from scratch. Today, the Great Groove Band of kids, coached by Groovemama, the band of grown-up professionals featuring Donna and Jane, along with guitarist Max Cohen and upright bass and banjo player Stuart Kenney, can number 40 to 50 self-selected kids (it’s open to everyone, no auditions needed, Jane told me) between the ages of five (or six) and 17 (“they age out when they’re too cool to be in the band” Donna explained), playing a diverse group of instruments, who end up with a mainstage concert on Sunday afternoon, at which everybody practices their performing technique, dressing up, smiling, taking bows, and introducing the songs and themselves to the charmed audience lucky enough to see and hear them. Last summer, at both Old Songs and Philly, I was one of the very lucky charmees.

“We started with arrangements on paper,” both Donna and Jane reminisced, Jane when I sat down with her and Andy Spence at the Eisteddfod back in the fall (Jane’s band Red Hen was performing, and Andy and her husband Bill were receiving the Eisteddfod award), and Donna when she spoke with me by phone from her Western Massachusetts kitchen last week. “Playing from sheet music got to be a nightmare,” Donna said. “Number one, you’re in a place where music blows away off the music stand if you forget the clothes pin, and then the stand is going to fall over too.” Eventually, the woman on the Festival committee who insisted on sheet music rolled off the non-profit’s board, “and then,” Donna smiled down the phone line, “we didn’t have to do it her way. Janie and I looked at each other and realized kids learn fast. They’re used to doing what they’re told. If you tell them they can learn this tune, it’s no problem, they do. They learn it fast, accurately, with dynamics. It’s actually the way we want folk music to be taught – by ear. We’re not just teaching them folk music, we’re empowering them with a method of learning that is innate in humanity. The most important thing we do is instill a sense of their own competence.”

Whatever it is, the chaos calms down quickly under the band’s cheerful tutelage (helped by several volunteers, including Julie Sorcek, who coaches the brass and woodwinds), and by weekend’s end, there are friendships for life, and an experience that they can take away into the rest of their world. “One veteran of the Band is finishing up a degree at Rochester University in music and culture that’s directly attributable to the things she learned from the Great Groove Band,” Donna told me, with pride.

I asked Andy why the Old Songs program worked, for the kids, for the adults. “You really have to have an open mind,” she told me. “A long time ago when I started the festival, I thought no one gets better as a musician unless they have an idol they want to play as well as. So the whole project for me has always been to bring the best, where the people come and rub elbows with the best. The kids who play in the Groove Band can sit with and hang out with and eat with and even jam with the performers.

“Old Songs is a not-for-profit corporation. One of our mandates is to attract new members of the public, and not just perform for people that know about it already. There’re so many segments to this music. You have the people really crazy about old time, Celtic music, Canadian music, so this festival has always been the melting pot for all kinds of folk music, as much as we can afford. It’s not possible to get audiences involved the way people got involved with folk music in the ‘60s. Today you need a connector, someone who gets you to come along because you trust their taste. For the kids who come back, or the new kids who come along each year to be in the Great Groove Band, Old Songs is the connector. They come for the Festival. And they meet their old friends, their old teachers, their old songs. I can see this going on for a long, long time.”

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