Henhouse Prowlers
Sample Educational Program: Part 1
1. Begin with an up tempo traditional bluegrass tune, followed by a breakdown of the history of bluegrass. a) Genre born out of the melting pot of America in the early 20th century. Irish, Italian (mandolin), English, African (banjo), African American (jazz) and other influences combined to make it what it is today. c) Bill Monroe is widely considered to be the father of bluegrass. His band, the Foggy Mountain Boys, played up- tempo songs about life in the country, mixed with sad ballads of lost love and broken hearts.
2. Each member gives a two-minute tutorial of their instrument, discussing their classical roots (violin, guitar, bass) and cultural (banjo from Africa, difference between ‘fiddle’ and violin) history.
3. The last instrument we all use is our voices. Bluegrass has a heavy focus on singing and lyrics. The voices can be blended together to make two, three and four part harmonies (Demonstrate harmony in vocals by building a chord with our voices).
4. Next we build a song by starting with guitar rhythm and adding each instrument to the sound one at a time. Banjo is added to guitar, the bass is added to demonstrate the downbeat, and the fiddle plays some melody/rhythm to demonstrate the backbeat. We often encourage literal hands-on learning with audience participation by having half of the room clap on the downbeat while the other half claps on the backbeat. Finally, we break into a song to demonstrate vocals on top of it all.
5. Following this demo is a performance of several songs to demonstrate themes of songs, which happen to be fairly universal across cultures, including: Loss of love and family, redemption, farming, falling in love, etc.
Some songs we might play: “30 Years of Farming” - About a family that loses their farm to creditors - “Blue Moon of Kentucky” - “Take Me Back to You” - Original song about going home. “Ruby, Are You Mad At Your Man” - Song about a man’s argument with his wife.
How these programs fall together is often off the cuff. Younger children will learn a lot from the history of the instruments, but you can lose their interest if you talk too long. Keeping the music going throughout the allotted time is key with ages 3 to 10 or so. We often do a sing-along with the younger kids on a Guy Clark song called “Home Grown Tomatoes,” which goes over extremely well. The older kids start engaging more and often have great questions/observations about our lives as musicians and about the differences between bluegrass and the music they listen to. We always make sure to leave a portion of the time to indulge and encourage questions.Henhouse Prowlers | Chicago, IL |
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Sample Educational Program: Part 2
The following program is in relation to our trip to West Africa with AMA; specifically the community performances that happened most often.
1. Arriving to the venue ideally with at least 2-3 hours before the performance (if possible), we would be given ample time for sound check. Following this, we would have time to meet the performers and collaborate with them. This was often one of the most rewarding parts of the evening, being that we were able to connect on a musical level with people from another culture with whom we often didn’t share a language. We would learn one or two of their songs and occasionally were able to teach them one of ours.
2. Most often there would be a 30-minute performance by the local band followed by a 30-minute set of our music. We found it important to sit in the audience during their set and mingle with folks at the show. During our set, we would often have a translator on stage with us so we could speak about Bluegrass in relation to America and give short explanations of each songs meaning before performing it. At times we would speak about the rhythm and how we don’t use drums, teaching the audience how to clap along with the stylistic beats we create with our instruments. The last couple tunes would be sing-along or call-and-response. The songs “Take Me Back to You” and “Ruby” are very easy for non-English speakers to sing along with and always elicit a great response.
3. The final collaboration portion of the show was always the most powerful. We worked at learning to sing parts of the songs we learned in local dialects, likely botching pronunciation at times, but the effort was always applauded with vigor. After each performance there was almost always a rush to the stage by the audience for discussion and picture taking. The children loved to try our instruments and try out their English phrases with us.
If we were to do the program again, we would work at having the lyrics of our songs translated into the local languages (when possible) on the 3x5 band cards we brought with us to hand out at shows. Programs at schools often went similarly to the previous sample, sometimes with us swapping songs with the children. As ever, it proved important to be able to think on your feet at each performance and go with the
flow. Greater success was always achieved by finding a way to fit in with the local musicians rather than attempting to wedge our style into theirs without compromise. Sometimes sound issues caused some problems, and other times the schedule wasn’t adhered to, but no obstacle was ever insurmountable and it always worked out in the end. Less than a month after returning, we’re still in awe of the incredible opportunity we were given. We would be more than honored to have another chance to take part in such a life-changing program.