Black Swamp Arts Fest 2015

– Wednesday, September 9, 2015 SENTINEL-TRIBUNE

2015 Black Swamp artS FeStival

By DAVID DUPONTFestival Program Editor

The juried art show at the Black Swamp Arts Festival continues on the upswing.

Brenda Baker, who chairs the festival’s visual arts committee, said that while the number of appli-cations was down slightly, “the overall trend” over the last few years has been up.

This year the festival received 286 applications to fill its 112 booths. In the end, 108 were accepted with four artists occupying double booths. That includes the eight award winners from last year who automatically are accept-ed.

“We expected that as the applications went up and the overall quality of the show got higher, some applicants who regularly

got in but haven’t in the past few years would stop applying,” Baker said.

The artists’ sales remain steady, and that keeps the festival 67th in the top 100 annual rankings compiled by Sunshine Artist, the leading journal for art fair exhibitors. That’s the same rank as last year. In 2014 the average sales were just shy of $2,600. That’s a dramatic rise from the toughest year of the reces-sion when average sales dipped below $2,000.

Baker said the festival’s ranking has held more or less steady, while other area festivals have seen more fluctuation and even dropped off the list. The magazine, she said, referred to the Black Swamp Arts festival as “a perennial feature in the top 100.”

Festivalgoers seem to like how the art show is going.

“Most of the feedback we receive regarding the festival is people are very happy with a change of art-ists and they like to see the increase in quality,” Baker said.

How this affects some local artists “depends on the personality of the jurors,” she said.

Artists who live within 30 miles of Bowling Green have the option of entering the Wood County Invitational. The show includes 52 spaces and is located in the Huntington Bank parking lot at the corner of Clough and South Main streets.

The show is being coor-dinated by a newcomer to town and the festival.

Andrew McPherson arrived in Bowling Green with his wife, who is purs-ing graduate studies in phi-losophy.

(See ART on 4)

Art show retainstop 100 ranking

2014 winners• Amy Beeler, Best

of Show, jewelry • Marge Meserve,

best 3D for her enam-els

• Xiao Xia Zhang, best 2D for traditional Chinese embroidery

• Ellen Smith, sec-ond place, for furni-ture.

• Yan Inlow, third place, embroidery.

• Honorable men-tions: Allan Teger, for black and white pho-tography; Chris Plummer, lprintmak-ing; and Jack Pine, for glass.

2

Enjoy the Black Swamp Arts Festival!

City ofBowling Green

SENTINEL-TRIBUNE Wednesday, September 9, 2015 –


By EMILY GORDONSentinel Staff Writer

Growing up in Bowling

Green and graduating from

BGSU helped shape Erin

Holmberg’s colorful per-

sonality and prepared her

for a career in art.

Now a designer at

Owens Community

College, Holmberg is say-

ing “thank you” to her

hometown for its artistic

influence by designing the

poster for this year’s Black

Swamp Arts Festival.

“There’s a feeling of

happy anticipation when

the posters pop up around

town because it’s a sure

sign that we’re preparing

for our favorite weekend,”

Holmberg said. “I was

thrilled to create this year’s

poster and to be part of the

fun.”

Holmberg’s design

emphasizes the historic

downtown setting of the

festival along with its fam-

ily friendly atmosphere.

(See POSTER on 6)

Poster has hometown touch

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(Continued from 2)With a master’s in fine

arts in painting from Ohio University, joining the visual arts committee seemed like a good way for him to get involved in his new community.

The Wood County show is a great way, he said, to maintain a local presence at the exhibit.

That helps the festival, he said. “The local artists bring their fanbase. That’s an instant influx of peo-ple.”

The other local presence is just across Clough Street where Bowling Green State University art students dis-play their work.

Luke Sheets, one of the festival’s two judges with Catherine Royer, first experienced the festival selling ceramics in the stu-dent show. He received his MFA from BGSU in 2000.

He’s continued to be

involved in the show over the years. This is his third time as a juror. And he and his wife would come to the festival as often as they could. He and Royer will return to decide on the winners. The festival awards $5,350 in prizes.

“The Black Swamp Arts Festival is a good size,” Sheets said. Large enough to offer variety, but not so large that it’s overwhelm-ing.

“One of the advantages of Black Swamp is that it’s been around so long,” he said. “You have an educat-ed public. ... It makes it easier for young artists to get their work out there.”

Sheets said he person-ally doesn’t have the patience to do the art cir-cuit. “It’s a lot of work to man a booth.”

Those booths will fea-ture more glass this year, Baker said. Glass making

is becoming more accessi-ble to artists, she said.

There was also an uptick in fiber and textile.

Jewelry has always been a mainstay, but it is now being balanced out by other media.

The artists, Baker said, “continuously comment on the community and the hospitality.”

That combined with the high sales, Baker said, “is why we generate a lot of word of mouth.”

Art

J.D. Pooley/Sentinel-Tribune

Art lovers take a Sunday stroll through the Black Swamp Arts Festival juried art show in 2014.

The 2014 Black Swamp Arts Festival poster designed by Will Santino, a Bowling Green native now of Madison,

Wisconsin, was cited by two judges in the Sunshine Artists magazine’s festival poster competition as their favorite.

Judges like 2014 poster

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Jeweler Amy Beeler has blossomed at the Black Swamp Arts Festival.

The show is a special place for the artist who grew up and still lives just a few miles north of Bowling Green, and not just because she won best of show in 2014.

Beeler creates jewelry inspired by natural forms. Using the lost wax method, she burns away seed pods and other flora and then casts their shape in silver.

She started her career as an art fair artist at the fes-tival, first exhibiting in the Wood County Invitational Show. Five years ago, she successfully applied to the juried show on Main Street, and has done well there. In 2010 she won a second place award and received honorable mention honors in 2012.

Her best of show award

at last year’s show marked a year of growth in which she had a solo show at the University of Maine.

The work exhibited in Maine and later at River House Arts in Perrysburg is large scale and sculptur-al, meant more for display than personal adornment. Beeler said working in that scale has influenced all her work.

“This allowed me to go back to art for art’s sake,” she said during the December show in Perrysburg.

Beeler found herself concentrating more on shading and texture, and that attention to finer detail is demonstrated in the work she sold at art fairs. The two sides of her work “feed off each other.”

And that, Beeler believes, is what led to her string of winning six awards within a single sea-son in 2014.

Beeler said she is “try-

ing to challenge the viewer with concepts of wearabil-ity.”

There is a teacher with a theatrical fair who wears some of the larger pieces.

The festival offers a venue to trace her develop-ment. “People like to see the progression of my work and see what is new, what is the latest thing I’ve been working on,” she said recently.

“We still have custom-ers that find us now that we met there and some of your first work went to them,” her husband, Neal Harmon, said.

While she exhibits else-where, Bowling Green remains a home base. “People always ask me if I’ll be at Black Swamp.”

That connection goes back to her start in jewel-ry.

She grew up on a farm in Oregon, just a few miles from where she lives, and she cultivated a love and

interest in nature.Beeler went to Bowling

Green State University intent on studying biology until she took metalsmith-ing as an elective. Working with master metalsmith Tom Muir sparked her love of the craft.

Still, she said, “I was an obstinate student.” That, she noted, made it even sweeter when Muir was

one of the two judges who awarded her Best of Show at last year’s festival.

In college her goals were modest — graduate and go work for jewelry store. Beeler did just that. But after five years, and several employers, she found the work stifling. She said she learned about the craft from those she worked with, but she want-

ed more.She cut back her hours

to part time and started doing her own work. Again her goal was simple: “Build up a clientele” and supple-ment sales with repairs.

When she created a necklace using local seed pods, “I felt like I was onto something.”

Festivalgoers and judg-es certainly agree.

Amy Beeler shines as fest’s best

J.D. Pooley/Sentinel-Tribune

Amy Beeler won Best of Show in 2014.

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(Continued from 3)The 2004 graduate of

the School of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus on design and art history never doubted she’d become an artist, as she was creating and designing at a young age, she said.

Attending the Black Swamp Arts Festival every year not only encouraged Holmberg to pursue her dream of designing, but also helped reinforce her love of small town living.

“It’s become part of our local fabric and identity,” she said. “It’s great to run into friends and neighbors

while perusing the art, music, and food.”

Her relatable experience as a “townie” can be seen in the poster, which cele-brates the spirit of commu-nity as much as the award-winning art.

“To me, the festival is about people, so the poster celebrates the people and events that we all love,” she said.

“It also struck me that the festival not only has something for everyone to enjoy, but that the fun also spans both day and night. This led to the sun, moon, and stars hanging large over the city.”

While some artists pack up and move away to California, New York or even abroad for the sake of their art, Holmberg’s enduring love for Bowling Green motivated her to put down roots in the place she knows and loves best.

“After college I moved out of state for six years, but I came back to my home town to be closer to friends, family and to start a family of my own,” she said. “Bowling Green is a small town with so much to offer. I love it here.”

Poster

Photo by Walter McKeever

Erin Holmberg designed 2015 festival post-er.

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From abstract expres-sionism to kinetic sculp-tures, young art lovers will learn about several art forms and the artists who developed them at the Kiwanis Youth Arts Village at the Black Swamp Arts Festival.

The goal of the village is for kids to learn about artistic styles and artists while making art they can proudly display at home, said Matt Reger, youth art chair.

“Each art project this year is focused on a differ-ent artist. Kids learn about them as they do the project

and see how their project connects to the artist,” he said. “The emphasis is on making art but also giving kids a real understanding of art.”

The activities include making mobiles inspired by the work of Alexander Calder, portrait painting in the style of Vincent Van Gogh, creating pipe clean-er “dancers” modeled after those painted by Edgar Degas, painting with mar-bles to resemble the work of Jackson Pollock and shadowbox construction simulating the work of Louise Nevelson.

Fan favorite activities such as tie dying T-shirts and paper hat making, a

nod to Mary Cassett’s mil-linery muses, will also be available this year, Reger said.

But kids won’t be the only ones having fun exploring different artistic styles in the village.

Bowling Green State University students will once again be on hand to help kids make their proj-ects.

Architecture and con-struction management stu-dents, along with members of the Wood Working Guild, will show kids how to build a wooden toy.

Meanwhile, English students will help kids craft poems out of words

(See KIDS on 8)

Masters to inspirekids to create fridgeready masterpieces

Listeners have already gotten a taste of Barbara Bailey Hutchison’s voice: She’s the pitch-perfect sound of several McDonald’s commercials.

Singing jingles promot-ing hamburgers or Hallmark greeting cards or Sears is just a small part of a career that dates back her dorm room at Michigan State.

Then an art major, Hutchison would play her guitar and sing for herself. She’d started singing pub-licly in junior high.

Her roommate was insistent she get back on stage. The dorm had a cof-feehouse. Hutchison remembers her saying:

“Come on down and you’re going to play.”

“I believe music choos-es you more than you choose it.”

So she set aside her art career as she played more and more. Hutchison hit the college circuit, and was a four-time winner of cam-pus entertainer award. She also played the White House.

In a recent telephone interview, she said the big-

gest crowd she ever played for was here in Bowling Green.

In October, 1994, she opened for comedian Rita Rudner at Anderson Arena, playing for 7,500.

Hutchison will be back in the neighborhood to play two shows on the Family stage, Saturday at 11:45 a.m. and Sunday at 10:30 a.m.

As a performer, she said, “it’s about entertain-ing and connecting with the crowd. That’s the most important thing for me and music sure is a great way to do that.”

She does that with a mix of originals and work

(See VOICE on 8)

Hutchison’s pitch-perfect voicefeatured twice on Family Stage

On stageFamily Stage:

Saturday, 11:45

a.m. & Sunday

10:30 a.m.

Enoch Wu/Sentinel-Tribune

Daniel Schuman, of Bowling Green, constructs a duct tape top hat with help from his friend McKenna Seman, in 2014.

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(Continued from 7)cut from newspapers, mag-azines and books.

While there’s plenty to do in the village this year, there are fewer projects for kids to complete compared to past festivals.

The decision to down-size from between 10 and 15 projects to nine was made in effort to promote quality over quantity, Reger said.

“In years past, the goal was to have as many art projects as we could do. Now we’re transitioning to having each project be a quality project,” he said. “It’s not just something to do; it’s meaningful.”

Fun, yet educational performances will also be held on the new Youth and

Family Theatre stage in the Wood County Public Library to add to the fami-ly oriented spirit of the festival, Reger said.

The weekend line-up includes a 1940’s style radio comedy show fol-lowing a concert by the Black Swamp Players, a performance by Julie’s Dance Studio and a read-ing of “The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet” by Horizon Youth Theatre.

The new stage will help the village and the festival become bigger and better, Reger said.

“You can go to different arts festivals and they’re great, but there’s nothing like the Black Swamp’s emphasis of involving kids in the arts. It’s just not there,” he said.


Eli Buser, Perrysburg, stands near a tower of boxes during last year’s festival.

(Continued from 7)from her fellow songwrit-ers. “I have lots of song-writer friends. If I find a wonderful song written by someone else that has something to say, I’ll add it to my repertoire,” she said.

Often she discovers songs that are more humor-ous than what she writes.

She recorded her first album in the mid-1970s, when she’d accumulated a enough songs to go togeth-er.

Those songs, though, seldom make it into a show unless someone requests it. And then she said it’s a matter of remembering it.

Beside she’s interested more in songs about fami-ly, the state of the world, “what I’m experiencing now.”

That includes returning to visual arts. She’s done papermaking workshops for children, and is now expanding that to painting workshops.

Those “have completely snowballed,” she said. She’s also painting for her-self. “I’m going to take on painting again.”

She tends to draw and use watercolor, since those travel better.

Working with children in visual arts complements her work singing for kids.

For her the art and music all come from the same place inside of her. “I name paintings after lines in songs.”

Voice

Photo by Dal Cooper/provided

Barbara Bailey Hutchison will perform twice on the Family Stage.

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Things are about to get messy for area high school students during this year’s Rotary Chalk Walk at the Black Swamp Arts Festival.

On Saturday, 24 teams of five students each will have just a few hours to create chalk murals on Main Street.

The 8-by-10 foot murals are expressions in the I Madonnari style, an Italian street painting tradition dating to the 19th century, said Kate Kamphuis, chalk walk co-chair.

This year’s festival marks four years of the art competition, which was created specifically for high school students. “The youth arts and adult areas are fantastic but we real-ized not too long ago that there wasn’t really any-

thing for high school stu-dents to do,” Kamphuis said. “This event is geared toward them, and it’s got-ten big enough to have its own social media pages.”

The event also serves to

help keep the arts in schools, with prize money donated by the Bowling Green Rotary Club going directly to the schools’ art departments.

“Due to budget cuts, we know schools’ art depart-ments are the first to go. Our goal is to put money

back into our schools’ art departments, to give back some of what they’ve lost,” Kamphuis said.

The murals are judged by the team’s creativity, being able to finish in time, and the ability to transfer an idea from a piece of paper to real life on the

street. Any bumps, grooves or cracks in the pavement of their “canvas” can be incorporated into the mural, as well as any color on the ground, like yellow street markings, she said.

The first prize-winning team’s high school will receive $500, while the second will get $250 and the third $100.

When Eastwood High School’s team won first place in the competition in 2013, the school purchased a throwing wheel with the prize money, she said.

The fact that those who come to the festival get to see artists at work is a huge draw. “It’s great for the festival goers to get to see art being made in front of their eyes,” she said. “The fact that the artists work on the ground to create these beautiful murals, some-times in 90 degree heat, is awesome.”

There will be pizza and beverages for participants, as well as live music.

There’s also a space for

little kids in the audience to doodle with chalk on the ground in a separate space away from the judged area. “They see the big kids doing it and they want to be like the big kids. They inspire them to make art,” Kamphuis said. “But adults want to do it, too. You’d be surprised.”

Participants have from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday to design and create their masterpieces on the pave-ment, as well as make an artist’s statement on paper describing their interpreta-tion of the year’s theme, which is diversity.

The color drawings of the designs in the state-ments give judges some-thing to work with in case of rain, Kamphuis said.

“It’s sad but kind of amazing to see the murals in the rain because when they start to fade, the way the colors run becomes art, too,” she said. “Having them get walked on or washed away just adds to the experience.”

Chalk art event brings color to the streets


Lake High School student Kristen Robnolte, works on a chalk street mural in 2014

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The Black Swamp Arts Festival depends both on local monetary contribu-tions as well as community sweat equity.

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Sacred steel — a style of gospel music played on steel guitar — has been a regular sound at the Black Swamp Arts Festival for 10 years.

Back in 2005 Calvin Cooke, an elder in the genre, drove down from Detroit to play a Sunday afternoon.

Since then the festival has also hosted The Campbell Brothers, upstarts The Lee Boys, the sacred steel all-star group The Slide Brothers and last year, the style’s break out star Robert Randolph.

This year the Slide Brothers make an encore visit. The sacred steel sum-mit session features Cooke, Darick and Chuck Campbell and one of the legends of the music, Aubrey Ghent, the nephew of the style’s founder,

Willie Eason, who with his brother Troman brought the steel guitar into the church in the 1930s.

The band was assem-bled by Randolph to spot-light those who inspired him.

Before his festival show in 2014 Randolph said that Cooke could have been as big a star as he’s become, if he’d ventured further from the confines of the church.

These musicians have been jamming the gospel at House of God conven-tions for years.

Still Ghent said in 2013 that getting them all together

(See STEEL on 15)

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The key to finding a distinctive musical style is failing at copying the styles of your idols.

“We aspire to be what our heroes are, and we fall short,” said Ewan Currie, songwriter for The Sheepdogs. “Wherever we land, that’s out style.”

The Canadian band found its inspiration in the classic rock of the 1960s and 1970s — Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Kinks and the like.

Currie and his fellow founding members bassist Ryan Gullen and drum-mer Sam Corbett didn’t care about any musical fads. “Basically we liked a lot of old music. We wanted to play old school style and that’s basically what we’ve done for 11 years.”

In that time the rockers f rom Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, went from teens just learning their instruments, to a top Canadian act with Juno Awards and gold records to their credit. They did it rid-ing an old-school rock groove reimagined for their own purposes.

The band now includes Currie’s brother Shamus on keyboards and trom-bone and Rusty Matyas on guitar and vocals.

Currie said in a recent telephone interview that none of the founders had experience playing in bands before they decided to start one when they were 19.

Currie had played clari-net and piano. “That’s what my parents put me in.” Those instruments, he said, “are lame if you want to play rock.”

So he picked up guitar in high school, and a few years later The Sheepdogs w e r e b o r n . “We had pretty definite ideas what we wanted to do,” he said.

From the start the band played originals, but also “we learned a lot of covers to learn tricks and licks we could steal. That’s impor-tant to do,” Currie said.

“The music from that era is so much more invig-orating,” Currie said. “It came from people who worked really hard and perfected their thing. Everything about it sounds right. We did our best to do the same thing.”

As their shelf of Juno Awards (the Canadian Grammys) attest, The Sheepdogs have a large following in Canada.

That was built on exten-sive touring. “We just tried to play live as much as possible,” Currie said.

The Sheepdogs, Currie said, have room to expand their fan base in the United States. The opportunity to play at a festival such at the Black Swamp Arts Festival that showcases a variety of musical styles, fits well with the band’s aims.

It gives musicians and listeners the chance to find some new music.

“We’re a band that needs new fans,” Currie said. “We might be that discovery.”

Sheepdogs bite into classic rock

On stageMain Stage: Friday,

10 p.m.

14

OUR COMMUNITY AT ITS BESTThe Black Swamp Arts Festival reveals Wood County at its best. Hundreds of volunteers work together to make downtown Bowling Green ready for artists and musicians from all over. Friends and neighbors turn out in great number to enjoy the festivities and celebrate our dynamic community.

Wood Countians have also united to support another project that benefits us all: community-based behavioral health care for all residents. Citizen support makes mental health and substance abuse assistance available for all Wood County famlies. Caring about our neighbors keeps our community at it best … and that’s something

to celebrate!

ENJOY THE FESTIVAL!



(Continued from 11)in this ensemble

“brought about a special spiritual feeling.”

His friendship with Cooke goes back to the early 1960s.

Slide guitar, Cooke told the Sentinel before his 2005 appearance, was a more Hawaiian style steel sound at first.

Ghent and Cooke were among the young genera-tion, who were incorporat-ing more popular rhythms and harmonies into the church’s music.

It was a sound that appealed not just to the Church of God faithful, but to secular listeners of all stripes. The elders were

jealous of the attention. Ghent said when he was a youngster he couldn’t play outside at school assem-blies and such.

“That’s the way of my parents,” he said. “When I was kid they were really strict.”

He’d started playing at 6, and it was his grandfa-thers, both deeply involved in the ministry who bought him his first lap steel.

His talent was discov-ered by those outside the church in 1992. He was in a Miami music store to try out the instruments.

“I messed around with it and they discovered I could play,” Ghent said.

Soon he was playing

festivals and shows

throughout the state.

The Slide Brothers, fol-

lowing the path blazed by

Randolph, Ghent, Cooke

and the Campbells, have

taken the music to major

international music festi-

vals.

The Slide Brothers

appeared on the Experience

Hendrix Tour, and covered

a couple of the rock guitar-

ist’s classics. Those aren’t

in the band’s regular reper-

toire, Ghent said. “It was

for that time.”

Instead the band focuses

on its core repertoire of

rousing hymnody that for

decades they’ve been rock-

ing for the Lord.

Steel

15

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Sonny Landreth has lots of friends who play guitar.

Check him out on YouTube and you’ll find videos of him with the pantheon of guitar virtuo-

sos — Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Peter Frampton, to name a few. It’s compa-ny he’s at home with, his slide guitar soaring with the best of them.

Landreth will perform an 8 p.m. Saturday on the festival’s Main Stage.

In a recent telephone interview, Landreth, 64, said his distinctive style,

which mixes finger pick-ing and slide, as well as a few other tricks, came from listening closely to his gui-tar heroes, and then listen-ing to his own muse.

“You have to know what your heroes are doing, and at a certain point you have to let go of that and not let it take over.”

Growing up in Lafayette, Louisiana, he was exposed early on to all the styles that hum in the bayou air. He listened to Chet Atkins and Wes Montgomery, B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix.

He got to hear the great big bands who were still on tour with their original leaders. He heard jazz at the New Orleans Jazz Festival when it was still a jazz festival.

His first instrument was a conga drum. He was 7, when his family visited the store,. He won a raffle, and his older brother tried to convince him to buy a record player.

But all he wanted to know was how much was that red conga drum in the window.

So he started off as a percussionist, adding a set of bongos to his rig.

Later his friend Tommy Alesi decided he wanted to be the drummer, so Landreth set aside his per-cussive ambitions. (And Alesi ended up as the drummer for Michael Doucet and Beau Soleil, headliners at the 2010 fes-tival.

Landreth also started playing trumpet at 11, an instrument he studied all the way through college.

The horn had a strong influence on style on gui-tar, which he picked up at 13. He uses “phrasing more like a horn player... There’s an expressive more voice-like quality to it,” he said.

All that music in the bayou air was brought into focus when a cousin from Mississippi, where

Landreth was born, played some Delta blues for him.

That’s when he heard slide guitar.

“When I got into the blues it just came togeth-er,” Landreth said. “Now I had a way to focus all these different styles.”

His playing brought him to the attention of zydeco pioneer Clifton Chenier. When Landreth was “in my big discovery stage” he’d heard about this guy who played blues on accor-dion. “I couldn’t fathom that.”

He and a friend went to a show. Chenier spied them outside the venue and “waved us in and sat us at his table.”

The music Landreth said “was so much more” than he was expecting. Chenier integrated all kinds of elements in his music.

A few years later Chenier heard Landreth at a jam session and let him sit in with his band.

In 1979, Landreth signed on full time. “It was the highlight of my career.”

When Landreth takes the stage now, he tries to touch on all aspects of his career, pulling a few num-bers from each album.

The songs that make the cut are those “that have evolved over the years.”

“Some songs just seem to take on a life of their own,” Landreth said. “I just get out of the way and let it happen. It’s a myste-rious thing, a beautiful thing, when it works.”

Sonny’s slide started in the bayouOn stageMain Stage:

Saturday, 8 p.m.

16

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It’s been 10 years since Chuck Prophet rocked out on the Black Swamp Arts Festival’s Main Stage.

Since then he’s contin-ued to record including the acclaimed “Let Freedom Ring” and “Temple Beautiful,” an ode to his hometown San Francisco. He’s produced records for others, including the Jace Everett’s “Bad Things,” the theme song for “True Blood.”

He’s played guitar, toured, read books.

“A lot of songs, a lot of gigs, a lot of miles, a lot of laughs, a lot of fears, prob-ably a couple vans,” Prophet said of his life in the past decade. “That’s how it goes. How far can I drag my teenage dream into adulthood?”

In that time, Prophet has continued to be on the playlist for the members of the festival’s performing arts committee, so with another powerful album “Night Surfer” out last year it seemed like time for a return engagement.

Prophet’s happy to return. “Playing outside you can take your time, you can soar a little more. You take your time. You can’t be in a hurry.”

The setlist will focus on his last few albums as well as his hit “Summertime Thing.”

Hits are not what Prophet is about. “People kind of assume you want to be successful.”

What matters to Prophet is the art and craft of being a songwriter, a profession informed by his love of American music in all its diversity.

“The trick is to stay excited about it,” he said.

He just wants to wake up in the morning and still have that urge to work. “I kind of live for wrestling something to the ground.

“If I’m lucky enough to have a good song, get something to stick to the tape and come out the speakers, then that’s a good day for me.”

Those songs tell the sto-ries of American charac-

ters, city bred, or city drawn, their tales set to an American soundtrack of rock, punk, country, blues strains, intoned in Prophet’s gritty baritone that brings to life Econoline vans and girls who run with shot-guns. The words and music come from odd angles. He has a love song that evokes a great heavyweight fighter Sonny Liston, who’s been

turned into a cultural punching bag. Prophet’s voice has an edge of cyni-cism that’s always at odds with a particular strain of deep-seated American romanticism.

All this is rooted in Prophet’s teenage epipha-ny at a punk rock show with the Dead Kennedys.

That was when he was 16, that was more than 40 years ago, and the song-writing still doesn’t come

easily.Sometimes he feels like

he’s “pole vaulting mouse turds.”

“I’m just a desperate little man” who’ll try any-thing to get the song going. Maybe it’s trying to build from a song title, or maybe it’s turning on a drum machine “and shouting at the wall.”

“If you like what’s com-ing back at you, you keep doing it,” he said.

Best is when the words and melody and chords emerge together.

Prophet persists. “For me if I can make a great record, a classic, then it’s going to make up for everything I’ve done in my life that’s stupid. I’m still trying to make that record.”

He feels he “tapped into something special” with “Temple Beautiful.”

(Later he helped pro-duce a gala concert cele-brating San Francisco. Among those he recruited was Telecaster maestro Bill Kirchen, who he met at the Black Swamp Arts Festival and who also returns this year.)

“We’ve done it right” with “Night Surfer,” Prophet said. “I really enjoy playing the songs.”

And as he performs the dong, they evolve.

“It’s very rare that the recorded version of the song is definitive,” he said “They get faster or slower. The grooves change, the melodies change. They find another life on the stage.”

Prophet rides teen rock dream back to BGOn stageMain Stage:

Saturday, 6:15

p.m..

Community Stage:

Sunday, 2:45

p.m.

Photo Charles Homo/provided

Chuck Prophet will play two sets at this year’s Black Swamp Arts Festival.

17

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The Black Swamp Arts Festival presents a wide range of music, so wide it defies definition.

The term Americana comes the closest to describing the festival’s reach, and that makes Telecaster master Bill Kirchen a perfect fit.

In just one song, “Hot Rod Lincoln,” Kirchen covers the gamut of Americana music. Starting with Johnny Cash, Kirchen roars through a high-pow-ered revue of guitar styles,

American and otherwise.

He’s even been known

to throw in a bit of march

king John Philip Sousa, not

to mention a nod to tennis

star Billie Jean King, sum-

moning the pop of the ball

on the racket from his gui-tar.

Like the festival he defies easy categorization, so much so he’s come up with his own name for what he plays “dieselbil-ly.”

Kirchen, who played the festival and Grounds for Thought, regularly in the first decade of the 2000s, will close out the festival Sunday.

Kirchen said he’s always modifying “Hot Rod Lincoln.” He’s recently

brought in a bit of Santana and Jorma Kaukonen, from Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane. That shows that as much as he is widely recognized as a guitar mas-ter he remains as much a student as he was when as a kid growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He started playing folk music on his mother’s banjo.

But it was the more electric sounds he heard around town and further afield that caught his ear.

Bob Dylan played a con-cert in his high school, and then the next year, 1965, Kirchen traveled to the Newport Folk Festival to hear Dylan go electric.

Neither his hero nor Kirchen turned back.

Starting with a stint with Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, Kirchen fashioned his career as a guitarist extraor-dinaire, He lent his Americana sound to the bands of Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris and Nick

Lowe. As a solo artist he

honed his “dieselbilly” sound. The name, Kirchen said, derives from the trucking songs that were in vogue when he first started listening to coun-try music. Those songs may not still be in fashion, but Kirchen keeps their spirit alive,

He told the Sentinel-Tribune in 2005, “If I call myself a dieselbilly artist I can play whatever I want. I made up my own genre.”

Kirchen keeps truckin’ with ‘dieselbilly’ soundOn stageCommunity Stage:

Sunday, 12:15

p.m.

Main Stage:

Sunday, 3:30 p.m.

Bandleader Paul Cebar really wants the audience to get up and dance. “I’m certainly happy to play for people who are sitting,” the Milwaukee-based musician said. But he pre-fers when they get out of their seats.

“There’s a sweet exchange going on. The music gets richer. There’s more interaction.”

Cebar is returning for his third turn on the Main Stage following perfor-mances in 2002 and 2012.

The leader of Tomorrow Sound said back in 2012: “I learned to dance when I went away to college. It made me a much more relaxed gentleman. I’d like to help other people lose their inhibitions and foster some kind of com-munity.”

The band draws from a broad swath of Afrocentric terpsichorean influences from Cuba and the Caribbean, New Orleans

and Africa.He started out as a

Dylan-influenced folksing-er, who moved into jazz and blues.

Then on a trip to New Orleans for that city’s Jazz & Heritage Festival, he was inspired by the lively, danceable sounds of the Big Easy.

Back at home he was playing rhythm ‘n’ blues in a dance hall.

Over the years the focus of the band, even as the personnel stayed more or less constant, switched over to originals.

“In the course of a live performance, you start improvising and find the way you do some part of the song can stand on its own.”

Paul Cebar bringsdance grooves

to festival stages


6:30 p.m.

Howard’s Club H:

Friday, midnight

18

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Safe to say, The Infatuations’ relationship with music lovers in Bowling Green is not a fling.

The Detroit-based rock band has entranced local music fans with appear-ances at Black Swamp Arts Festival (on the family stage after a storm forced cancellation of its main stage set) and at Grounds for Thought last fall for the shop’s 25th birthday party.

The band returned to Grounds earlier this year to lay down live tracks for a forthcoming live vinyl release, the latest in a series of LPs produced by the shop.

The shows and record-ing give the Infatuations the chance to get their new singer Kendrick Hardaway on record, as well as wax-ing some new songs.

“The people in Bowling Green are super supportive of us,” Draheim said. Coming to BG “is like your favorite aunt and uncle.”

The gig was the band’s first since December. They’ve been laying low while they work on new material, and giving some newer Detroit bands a chance for some of the exposure that helped launch The Infatuations.

The sets prominently featured “#TheBeep,” a light-hearted number about an obsessive girlfriend who keeps calling.

It’s a song that just begs the audience to sing along. That’s the kind of response the Infatuations — also

featuring bassist wolf, gui-tarist Nick Behnan and drummer Bobby Myers — have come to expect.

Other new songs are “Monster,” “From Here” and “A Girl Like You.”

All are worked up by the band as a whole, with everyone sharing ideas and credit.

From the rehearsal tapes, Draheim is confi-dent the band won’t disap-point.

The band has been gig-ging for four years, after it came together around songs written by Draheim

and founding Infatuation Marco Lowe.

“Playing all those shows,” Draheim said, “makes you a tighter band. We can feel each other’s instincts.”

Draheim said that after playing so much in Detroit the band has decided to back off in their home mar-ket, concentrating instead on a few prime gigs such as the Detroit Music Awards show where the band scored a best urban recording award for its “Detroit Block Party” and its own Detroit Block Party.

Infatuations love BG




Kendrick Hardaway, lead singer for The Infatuations, performs with bassist The Wolf at Grounds for Thought in March.


8 p.m.

Family Stage:

Saturday, 1:10

p.m.

In 2014 the California-based rockers Patrolled By Radar got to spread their wings on several stages.

They worked out in the mid-day sun on the Main Stage and then in night lights at Howard’s Club H for an after hours show.

They were back at noon for a Sunday show on the Community Stage in the middle of the art show, tamping down the volume, but not the vigor of their pub rock sound.

Patrolled by Radar got started about five years ago, evolving from the remains of the band Five Cent Haircut.

Songwriter and guitarist Jay Souza and his “main guy” guitarist Bosco Sheff were joined by drummer Ben Johnsen and Preston Mann on keyboards.

The band’s sound, Souza said last year, is rooted in rock ‘n’ roll.

“It has all the underpin-nings of the earliest rock ‘n’ roll... country, the blues, a good backbeat, rockabil-ly. Those are the sounds I’m drawn to, tube amps and minimalism, that the song being what carries it all.”

Souza is a student of the craft of songwriting. “It’s amazing to me you can listen to a song and it’s so satisfying in the journey it’s taking you on, you’re

astonished it’s only three minutes long.”

He was inspired to start writing by a stack of 45s belonging to his cousin. He was living with the family, he said, but he and his broth-er weren’t part of it. He took refuge in the music.

By the time he was 15 and playing guitar in a punk rock band, he had become the guy charged with writing the lyrics.

Souza is equally invest-ed in the music he sets his words to. “It’s exciting when you can create a change in the song whether the bridge or the break down and it goes so far away from the song you don’t expect it to be able to come back. And if you’re able to make it come back in a way that’s pleasing and rewarding, it takes the audience away from the melody and refreshes it in a way that’s perfect.”

Patrolled by Radarkeeps focus on songs

On stageMain Stage:

Saturday, 2:50

p.m.

Community Stage:

Saturday, 5:15

p.m.

Howard’s Club H:

Saturday, mid-

night

19

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Studebaker John Grimaldi was born in an Italian-American section of Chicago in 1962 and started playing harmonica at age 7.

Under the spell of music he heard on Maxwell Street, Chicago’s famed blues melting pot, Grimaldi began perform-ing as Studebaker John and the Hawks in the ‘70s.

The band name refer-enced the Studebaker Hawk, a car Grimaldi still owns today, and was also intended as a tribute to his friend, J.B. Hutto and the Hawks.

John began playing guitar after a life-chang-ing experience of seeing Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers per-form. “.Hound Dog start-ed playing, hitting notes that sent chills up and down my spine.

“He was versatile and

powerful and would play rhythm as well as leads. I left there knowing what I wanted to do. I had to play slide guitar.”

A fixture on the Chicago scene he was tapped as a sideman for a number of bands, includ-ing recording with the remnants of The Yardbirds and the Pretty Things.

But Grimaldi realized playing other people’s music was unsatisfying, so he set about writing his own songs, and putting his own stamp on the music he loves.

Studebaker John brings personal touch to blues

On stageMain Stage:

Friday, 5 p.m.

Howard’s Club H:

Friday, midnight

Family Stage:

Saturday, 2:30

p.m.

Mike Love will play solo at the Black Swamp Arts Festival, but he won’t be making music alone.

“I always refer to it as making music with peo-ple,” the native Hawaiian said. “The crowd is as much as part of the music as the people performing it.”

The energy of the musi-cians joins the energy of the listeners. “Everybody becomes connected instant-ly,” he said.

He’s looking forward to performing a Sunday solo show — just him, his high tenor voice, his guitar and loop pedals — Sept. 13 at 2 p.m. on the Black Swamp Arts Festival’s Main Stage.

“I always prefer to play outdoors,” he said. “It just always seems more condu-cive to the flow of ener-gy.”

But the music some-times overcomes even the most dingy, dark venue. “I’m always grateful for the opportunity to play,” Love said.

He grew up on the east side of Oahu surrounded by music. “My music has always been my family,” he said. His father and

grandfather, a pastor, were musicians. And he started playing piano almost before he could remem-ber.

His father played some gigs before settling in as a teacher. His grandfather incorporated music in his ministry.

Love said the Islands are inundated with all kinds of music from around the world. What caught his attention was reggae.

His music “has its foun-dations in reggae but it’s infused with a lot of differ-ent styles.”

The uplifting message of reggae “clicked with

me,” Love said. “It had a more spiritual nature, music that was about some-thing deeper.”

Maybe, he said, this comes from his religious ancestors.

That spiritual side “has become the most important part to me. ... The idea of the music as a tool for healing and growth.”

Love said: “Music is the easiest way to connect us all. I can walk into a room with people I’ve never met and make music with them. When I realized that ele-ment, that’s when it all changed for me.”

Mike Love reaches out through reggae

On stageMain Stage:

Sunday, 2 p.m.

Photo provided

Mike Love brings his Hawaiian bred reggae to the Black Swamp.

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Growing up in the swampy regions of south-ern Georgia, Randall Bramblett got an early start in music — piano at 4.

And he sang in church.

Saxophone and guitar came later. By junior high he was playing in a band “making a little money on the weekends” something he continued well after he’d moved north to Athens, Georgia for col-lege.

He’d already tapped into the soul and blues sounds coming over the airwaves, the black radio station. “This amazing stuff was coming out at night,” Bramblett said in a recent telephone interview.

Much later he heard Dylan and other folk song-writers. By then he was in college, nearing the end of his studies in religion and psychology, and it all jelled.

“It had never known that you could write about anything as long as it was powerful,” he said,.

With those streams — toss in some Beatles to boot — flowing through his imagination, it‘s not surprising he’s harvested a career’s worth of powerful songs.

The religion wasn’t abandoned, not with songs like “John the Baptist” and “God Was in the Water,” a song covered by one of his biggest booster’s Bonnie Raitt.

Bramblett fashioned a career as a solo artist but also as a much sought after sideman, playing sax, gui-tar and keyboards with Steve Winwood, Gov’t Mule, Gregg Allman, Widespread Panic and

Levon Helm.Now he’s focusing on

his own work.

His forthcoming “Devil Music” digs deep into those mysterious sounds wafting into his south Georgia bedroom. “It’s dif-ferent from anything I’ve done,” he said

It’s another step his exploration of songwriting “It’s the mystery and awe of the thing coming togeth-er,” he said. “It’s kind of

like being an archeologist and discovering something you didn’t know was there, and it’s turning out to be a little jewel.”

Bramblett said he gath-ers “feelings, vignettes and phrases. .. I don’t know where it comes from I just have to get in the mode of receiving different kinds of information.”

The mystery remains even after the song has come together. “A lot of time I don’t know what the song is about.”

Saints & devils meetin Bramblett’s songs Violinist Jason Anick

thinks the Black Swamp Arts Festival is just the right venue for his band Rhythm Future Quartet.

Both he and his co-leader Finnish guitarist Olli Soikkeli have played the festival before — Anick with guitar master John Jorgenson and Soikkeli with swing gui-tarist Frank Vignola.

The festival, Anick recalled was “kind of a perfect model” for such an event. The music covered a range of styles and had “all the other artistic endeavors. ... The overall presentation was great.”

“It’s great to come back to a venue with familiar faces,” Anick said. “You build a rapport.”

Even better, he added, “especially if you have

new material.”

The quartet is recording a new album. And those new pieces will get aired out at the festival.

“I think it’s really important to showcase new material because you really get a sense of how

it’ll work. They really start to take form as you per-form them live.”

This new album, Rhythm Future’s second, will continue along the path they’ve blazed since Anick and Soikkeli found-ed the band a couple years ago. While devotees of the gypsy jazz created by Django Reinhardt in the 1930s, Anick and Soikkeli have taken the style in a new direction. They bring in more contemporary tunes, including blending Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” with the standard “Summertime.”

They also compose new music for themselves. “We’re branching out and taking acoustic jazz set-ting ... and using that as a palette and seeing what textures we can create.”

Taking gypsy jazz new places

Photo provided

Randall Bramblett

On stageMain Stage:

Saturday, 4:30

p.m.

Stones Throw:

Saturday, mid-

night

Family Stage:

Sunday, 1:10

p.m.

On stageMain Stage:

Saturday, noon

Community Stage:

Saturday, 2:45

p.m.

Stones Throw:

Saturday, 10:30

p.m.

Family Stage:

Sunday, 11:45

p.m.

21

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Since forming in 2000, Tal National have been on a quest to make it known to the world that Niger is not in fact Nigeria.

Besides everything else, musically, the land-locked Sahelian nation never went through the same kind of cosmopolitan musical

explosion that many other West African nations did in the 1960s post-indepen-dence era. Only around the turn of the century have some artists from Niger broken into the interna-tional market.

While Tal National’s 2008 sophomore album “A Na Waya” made them the most popular group in Niger, their following album and first interna-tional release “Kaani” offi-cially established them outside the continent. Led by band leader Hamadal Issoufou Moumine, Kaani was a joyful barrage of traditional Hausa and Zarma vocals, soukous guitars, reggae synths, and percussion, all rolled up into a decidedly rock aes-thetic.

Tal National took great pride in representing the ethnic diversity of Niger in their music and in their large rotating cast of band members.

Tal National celebrates sound of Niger

On stageMain Stage:

Saturday, 1:20

p.m.

Community Stage:

Saturday, 4 p.m.

Family Stage:

Sunday, 2:30

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David Luning had an epiphany while attending one of the best music schools in the country.

He wasn’t in class at Berklee College of Music in Boston; he was hang-ing out with a couple friends drinking beer.

They played music by John Prine and Old Crow Medicine show.

Until then, he said, “I didn’t particularly care for folk music. I didn’t know much about it.”

He was majoring in film scoring.

These records, though, caught his ear. “I was blown away.”

Now Luning had a new musical direction. “Almost immediately I talked to my parents and said this is what I wanted to do with my life,” he recalled in a recent tele-phone interview. He told them: “I want to be a singer songwriter and sing Americana music.”

And to do that he wanted to return home to northern California.

His parents did not agree, not at first at least.

When he went back for winter break, Luning played them “a song about my trials and tribu-lations in Boston. It was kind of a sad song.”

The New England winters, he noted, were “extremely difficult for someone who grew up in the moderate climes of northern California.”

The song was called “Northern California,” and that’s where he stayed.

“My parents are amaz-ing and unbelievably sup-portive and let me do this, this job.”

With the support of his

parents he started work-ing on his songs. “I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote,” Luning said.

Now the 28-year-old has a catalog of original songs, and is slowly stretching out his per-forming opportunities. Playing open mikes, recording a CD, “Just Drop By.”

His mission to spread the word on his songs, he even ventured into the “American Idol” scene, and performed on the show in early 2014.

“I knew I was different than their typical ‘American Idol’ contes-tant. I didn’t know how far I would get,” he recalled. “All I wanted to do is get some exposure for my music.”

The experience was “weird.” He was in his late 20s hanging around with teenage pop singers.

It’s a reality show, he noted, so what appears on the screen “is not really real.”

Still he got a good response from the judg-es.

“I love it,” Jennifer Lopez said. “He has a really, really beautiful tone.”

Keith Urban told him: “You have stanch origi-nality, no one’s doing what you do ... You’re a good singer-songwriter, story-telling guy.”

Luning finds way as songwriter Laura Rain knew early

on that she wanted to be a Motown performer.

Growing up in the Detroit metro area, she was exposed to a wide range of pop and rock sounds at home, and her parents who “patronized the arts” brought her to hear music in the city.

“The music just grabbed me,” she said. “I think it’s in the water ... the music that’s particular to Detroit. We produce this kind of soulful sound.”

Rain knew she wanted to be part of that. “I saw myself singing,” she said.

Still it took her a num-ber of years and a couple residencies in California to realize that dream.

“Sometimes it was so far away I didn’t know what I could do to make it.”

Then a few years ago family issues called her back to Detroit, and she picked up where she left

off.On June 6, 2012 — she

has that date pinned down— her keyboard player couldn’t make a res-taurant gig, so she called a musician who’d reached out to her.

Within a week of first meeting George Friend, they were writing music together. “What I lacked he picked up. I never had such success working with someone,” Rain said. Now fewer than three years later they have released a third album, “Gold.”

Those new tunes will be heavily in evidence when Rain and her backing group the Caesars take the Main Stage at the Black Swamp

Arts Festival. Later in the day the

band will close out the Community Stage with a set at 4 p.m.

Even working as a duo, they deliver a full-throat-ed, throbbing Motown sound. Adding the Caesars’ drums, organ and some-times a bass fattens up the groove.

The core is the collabo-ration between Friend and Rain.

“Sometimes we just sit there and out of the blue George starts playing. I start singing and we better have something record-ing,” she said. “Sometimes the songs come out com-plete. ... The way I write is almost automatic.

“I never really know what the songs are about. I try to write something that will uplift people. I hope to make them feel better when they leave.”

Rain’s Motown dream comes trueOn stage

Main Stage: Sunday,

12:30 p.m.

Community Stage:

Sunday at 4 p.m.

On stageMain Stage:

Sunday, 11 a.m.

Community

Stage: Sunday,

1:30 p.m.

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Local Author Anesa Miller is now a

Finalist for Best Regional Fictionfor OUR ORBIT

a novel set in 1990s Ohio

Available in BG at

Grounds for �ought CoffeehouseCalico, Sage and �yme Giftshop

At discount for Black Swamp Festival weekend!


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Black Swamp Arts Fest 2015

Art & Photos

Transcript of Black Swamp Arts Fest 2015