With his grandson Tao Rodriguez, Seeger will lead the audience in an evening of songs and stories. The event, free and open to the public, will be held in URI's Fine Arts Recital Hall. Seating will be on first come, first served basis. Musicians from the URI community, including Stephen Wood from Communications Studies, Stephen Myles from the Counseling Center, Paul deMesquita from Psychology, Bernard LaFayette from the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, the URI Traditional Jazz Band directed by Gary Buttery and the Honors Jazz Combo directed by Joe Parillo will also present songs of the civil rights and other movements. Popular Rhode Island singer Joyce Katzberg will also lend her voice.
People forget there's as many different kinds of folk songs as there are different kinds of folks.
Blues and gospel music are basically African-American folk songs. There's 4,000 spoken languages in the world, and probably several times that many different kinds of folk songs. Seeger and his wife, Toshi, have lived 51 years on a mountainside 60 miles north of New York City, in a house they built themselves. They are known in the Hudson Valley for having helped start the Clearwater organization, a mainly volunteer group, which sails a 106-foot traditional sailboat on the Hudson River. It introduces tens of thousands of school children every year to problems of pollution.