A chance to enjoy and support folk music comes along Saturday at the Rackensack Folklore Society's not-quite-annual concert at the Arkansas Arts Center.
The gathering is billed as the 2015 annual concert, but the last one was two years ago.
Music
Rackensack Folklore Society
Jam session, 6:15 p.m. Saturday; concert at 7, Arkansas Arts Center, Ninth and Commerce streets, Little Rock
Admission: $10 adults 18 and over; $5 children; under 5 free; $25 families
For more information, call Janet Watkins at (501) 680-1700
"It's a pretty big undertaking to put together," Dennis Coop, the concert chairman, says.
This year's event will have about 40 musicians playing fiddle, guitar, banjo, mountain dulcimer, hammered dulcimer, mandolin, bass fiddle, autoharp, musical saw, accordion and harmonica. Several dancers from the Arkansas Country Dance Society will perform square dances, reels and Irish dances.
What won't be played is anything electric.
"It's strictly acoustic," Larry Cross, the group's president, says. "Music from the 1940s on back." Specifically 1943, he said, when Ernest Tubb introduced the electric guitar to the Grand Ole Opry.
Rackensack comes from an archaic word for an Arkansan. The local chapter formed in 1963, right after a chapter formed in Mountain View. It was a time when folk music was in a revival inspired in part by Jimmy Driftwood, Stone County's most famous son.
The Pulaski County chapter has met and played ever since at the Arkansas Arts Center. It meets on the first Monday of every month.
As described in the Arkansas Democrat in 1964, folk music is "conceived by someone for his own entertainment, a song from an isolated or uninhibited person." As described by Coop and Cross, Rackensack's folk music comes from Scotland and Ireland by way of the Ozarks and the Appalachians.
Most Rackensack members are from central Arkansas. The most distant member is accordion player Joe Kemmer, a farmer from Marvell in Phillips County. Others expected to play at the concert include guitarist John Cotton of Russellville, banjo player Tara Ludwick and her three children, all of Bee Branch, and fiddle player Denise Blessing Hurd, daughter of the late Kenneth Blessing, another noted fiddler.
Hurd, Coop said, is back in Arkansas after teaching the fiddle in Williamsburg, Va. "She's one of our main cogs, a very talented musician."
A 6:15 p.m. jam session opens the event, followed by a concert and a hoedown. The hoedown resembles the monthly meetings, at which someone will play and others will join in. The concert will end with another hoedown.
Coop became concert chairman by virtue of desire and default, he says. "I tell everybody what the deadline is and then I put them on the program." He also balances the program between instrumental and vocal pieces, and between solo and ensemble numbers. And, he said, "there will be at least one cowboy song."
Coop is retired clergy from Park Hill Baptist Church in North Little Rock. He mostly plays guitar and harmonica, although Cross described him as "a multi-instrumentalist."
Cross is a lawyer for the Arkansas Workers' Compensation Commission. In a previous life, he said, he was a rock and country musician, playing sax, electric bass and drums. A visit in 2010 to the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View inspired him to take up the mandolin.
The concert is the society's main source of income, along with $10 in annual dues.
Rackensack also has an annual catfish dinner and, as would be expected, hoedown.
"We don't seek to do fundraisers, but if we get called on to do a gig, we don't request it, but a financial gift may be given," Coop says. "We use it for the catfish."
Membership grows via word of mouth, Coop says, and all are welcome to the monthly meetings.
"It's amazing how many folks say, 'I can't get up in front of these people,' but they do."
How does a musical aspirant join the Rackensack? Coop says: "Show up."
"That's exactly right," Cross says.
"Because not only do we value traditional music," Cross says, "it's up to us to keep the tradition alive."
Style on 08/09/2015