Over the past ten years I have had the opportunity to sing with the kids in some of the rural schools of San Benito County: Jefferson School out on Old Hernandez Road, and Cienega, Tres Pinos and Bitterwater/Tully way down Hwy 25, nearer to King City. I still hope to get to work with the kids at Willow Grove and Panoche. When I first began working with kids in school, back in the 70’s it was in rural schools like these.
I had been running a Folk Music Festival at Monterey Peninsula College and invited a bunch of my friends to come down from their haunts from all over Northern California. We were all members of the San Francisco Folk Music Club and I had moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Big Sur. I felt a need to gather my musician friends closer to me. We put on concerts, and workshops and shared our music with the public, which responded warmly and strongly to the music. Musicians came for gas money. We charged 50 cents a ticket and filled the theater. There were no names on the posters, everyone was equal. It was about the music and not the personalities. We had several musicians who later became quite well known like Kate Wolf and many others.
At that first festival, I was approached by a woman from the Monterey County Museum of Art who asked if I might know anyone interested in singing folk songs to accompany their mobile exhibit of Folk Art from around the world. It was called the “Museum on Wheels”. The van carried art made by people from whatever they happened to have around them, tin cans, wood, gourds, beautiful, amazing artwork using what was at hand. They carried the displays to people who did not have access to this kind of experience.
I told her that I would be interested in volunteering and so began my early morning risings to meet the others at the van and drive to wherever it was we had an appointment that day, unload the van, set up the exhibit and start our schedule of classroom visits, prior to their coming to view the exhibit which was set up in some appropriate part of the school. We would assemble the exhibit box by box, fitting the shapes together, the familiar items filling up the space in yet another distant setting.
Before their time exploring the artwork, I would sit the children down and talk to them about making things out of what you have around you and would sing them some songs that friends had made out of what they saw around them as well as some old songs I had collected.
I traveled with the Museum on Wheels out of Monterey to provide museum experiences to the students of rural schools, from Bradley, way down in southern Monterey County, just above Mission San Miguel, up to Soquel, which was a span of much more than miles. I noticed that the kids in the rural schools were open and willing and welcoming. The schools were and are one of the few central points which focus those vast expanses of country which we enjoy here in Central California.
It takes a lot of countryside to gather enough students to make a school. I remember driving out of the parking lot of Bradley School being followed by a crowd of kids singing a song that I had taught them.
That was the beginning of an experience which took me all over the United States singing with children and adults, making up songs, meeting other musicians who were doing similar work and sharing our songs and stories with one another. It began in those rural schools.
I have been fortunate to have been able to return to playing with the kids out in the country here in San Benito County. It has given me perspective on the county which I wouldn’t have if I had stayed holed up in San Juan Bautista.
I was an Artist in Residence at Aromas Elementary School for 3 years back in the 80’s of the last century. We wrote songs and sang and performed and kids from Aromas were frequently on the weekly radio program I appeared on KUSP in Santa Cruz. Ten years ago, I performed one of the songs I wrote with the Fifth Graders, “Water”, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. (You may click this link to see it).
The rural schools are one of the points of connection here in San Benito County, there are many others. It is my intention that BenitoLink assist in building connections between them!
In San Juan . . We wave!
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