Loud-talking and warm, Rita Ruby heads every Wednesday evening from her corporate day job to teach a singing class called “Desperate Love Songs” at the Old Town School of Folk in Chicago. Her 12 students come into a small room at 8 p.m., shake Rita’s hand and sit down on chairs with backs shaped like guitar frets. Then they start to sing. Some of the songs — old gospel, country and bluegrass tunes about heartbreak and adoration — they know from memory. Some they read from a lyrics sheet and pick up the melody from Rita.
During each class, Rita chooses a handful of students to harmonize on their own in front of the class. One Wednesday, she asks three students to try a 70-year-old bluegrass song called “Don’t This Road Look Rough and Rocky.” In the middle of the refrain, Rita tells them to stop and asks one student to sing her part alone. A dark-haired woman in her early 20s faintly intones:
Don’t this road look rough and rocky
Don’t that sea look wide and deep
Don’t my baby look the sweetest
When she’s in my arms asleep
The woman stops and looks apologetic. “This is the first time I’ve ever sang melody,” she says.
Rita shakes her head and holds up her hand. “It’s the confidence,” she says. “If you weren’t right, I’d be making faces. You’d hear about it.”
The trio sings the refrain again. This time, the dark-haired woman’s melody is loudest.
“Music is for everyone”
Outside the classroom, Emily Walsh, 24, sits on a bench, waiting for her basic guitar class to start. She had never played guitar until 3 weeks ago. A data analyst for the University of Chicago, she keeps a list of things she wants to accomplish in her life. For five years, learning to play guitar had been on that list.
“I was getting sick of working all the time,” Walsh says, so she joined the Old Town School. She didn’t have to audition or apply; she just paid $150 and signed up for the school’s Wednesday night “Guitar 1″ course. “It’s very non-intimidating,” she says, “People are friendly.”
The Old Town School of Folk Music might be misnamed. Some call it a community center rather than a school. Its students don’t take tests and anyone can pay to take a course. It doesn’t just teach music, but also dance, art and theater. And some might argue that “folk” has little to do with some of the things practiced at the school’s two locations; everything from beat-boxing to Aztec ceremonial dance to children’s improv to Beatles’ covers takes place in its halls each night. Old Town hosts three concerts a week, runs two music stores, employs more than 200 teachers and works on a budget of nearly $10 million.
If the school teaches one lesson, it’s this: Music is for everyone. Regardless of training or talent, anyone can walk into the Old Town School and sing in a group, learn to play the banjo or attend a concert of African pop songs. “We [as a society] have got too much into celebrity and too much into performance, where it’s, ‘Well, I’m not as good as Christina Aguilera, so I’m zero, so I should do nothing,’” Ruby says. “Baloney, you should get up and sing, for crying out loud. That is the great thing about this place, because it gives the opportunity to do that.”
That’s how musicians Will Stracke and Frank Hamilton wanted it to be when they founded the Old Town School 50 years ago. On Dec. 1, 1957, they led a few hundred people through classic folk songs on guitar in a rented-out bank office on North Avenue. “We wanted to make music accessible to everyone,” Hamilton told the Chicago Tribune in 2007. “We wanted to bypass the formal educative type of note-reading you’d get in a music academy and emphasize the social aspects of music. We wanted to see involvement by people who wouldn’t normally think they had musical talent and bring out whatever they had.”
What is folk?
The school’s founding came right on time for the popular folk revival of the early 1960s. As Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell mined rural guitar traditions and used honest, down-to-earth vocals to reach mainstream success, students flocked to the Old Town School to learn to do the same. Some of the school’s first students became famous in their own right: Jim McGuinn of the Byrds took lessons in the school’s early years and contemporary folk singer John Prine raved about Old Town to the Chicago Tribune on the day he received his Grammy nomination.
After operating out of a crumbling office on Armitage Avenue for 40 years, the school opened its new headquarters in Lincoln Square in 1997, in an old library. During the 1990s, enrollment swelled from a little more than 1,000 students to the 6,000 that now pass through its halls each week. With its teaching facilities filled to capacity, the school recently bought property near its main location and is looking to break ground on a new building in the next few years.
As the school has expanded, its definition of “folk” has expanded as well. Once the school began offering classes in non-American folk music during the late ’80s, the number of media embraced by the school ballooned: First came dance, then theater, finally fine arts. At the same time, the styles of music taught in the school’s instrumental classes diversified. Currently, you can take a traditional banjo class at 6:30 one night and then stick around until 8 for courses on didgeridoo, The Grateful Dead, or even emo-style guitar.
Ask most administrators and teachers the question, “What is ‘folk’?” and you’ll hear a sigh and then a qualified, convoluted answer. “It’s one of those questions that I think is nearly impossible to answer in agreement, but always worth asking, and worth struggling with the answer even if you can’t come to agreement,” says adult program manager Ari Frede. His definition of folk? Music made for reasons other than commerce. Ruby’s definition? Music that comes from a tradition. Education and program director Robert Tenge’s? Art available to all people.
From performers to CEOs
Like folk music itself, the kinds of people that frequent the Old Town School aren’t easily defined. The teachers come from various backgrounds: Some are big-name musicians and session players, while others work their way up from the school’s front desk. Many, like Rita, hold non-musical day jobs, using their teaching position at the school as a way to share their passion for music. Many others use the small salary from teaching as a way to help themselves make a living in the arts.
The school’s fame, size and feel lure talent from all over the world to teach and perform. Joni Mitchell helped christen the school’s Lincoln Square location by playing a rare solo concert there in 1997. Jeff Tweedy sometimes drops by sessions of the school’s class on Wilco songs.
“If you look through the papers, there is literally not a night of the week when there aren’t Old Town faculty members playing somewhere in Chicago,” Bau Graves says. “If all of those musicians disappeared from the scene here, the whole city would be a lot poorer for it.”
Chicago Tribune columnist Robert Zorn, who has been involved with the school for 20 years and heads up a charity sing-along there each December, says people underestimate the school’s impact on the city. “There are thousands of people in this town beating around on a guitar or mandolin or piano who feel like the Old Town School is a safe and reliable gateway into learning music,” he says. “It convinces a lot of people to take that first lesson.”
Chad Wulff, 32, came to Guitar 1 after finding private lessons he had elsewhere unfulfilling. He said his last teacher was more interested in tablature than actually teaching the essentials of guitar playing. At the Old Town School, Wulff says, he’s getting a grounding in what he actually needs to play the guitar — and not just from the teacher. “You’re learning from other students, too,” he says. “It’s a cool way to learn.”
“I expect to hear you SANGING!”
After classes are over, students assemble in the concert hall to play pieces from their songbook in unison, in an Old Town tradition called “Second Half.” On the Wednesday of Emily Walsh’s third guitar lesson, Second Half moves to one of the dance studios because of a meringue concert in the main hall. Other than that, little is abnormal. Students take a break after classes, resting with a coffee or a beer from the school’s café. They stand in the hallways socializing and then slowly file into the studio. Walsh comes in and sits in a chair towards the back of the room.
A few Old Town teachers stand at the front, telling everyone which page to turn to in their songbooks. They tell the Guitar 1 students how to substitute easy chords to play instead of the harder ones written in the book. One of the leaders, a blonde-haired woman with a twang in her voice, passes out a lyrics sheet with words for “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke. She tells the group they should take Vocal Techniques next quarter, and that “You Send Me” is a perfect song for them to practice — “So I expect to hear you SANGING!” she cries out.
Most of the students play guitars, but in one corner, a woman sits on the floor and cradles a mandolin. At the front of the class, a man holds a stand-up bass and another woman plays piano. The guitar players strum together, their hands moving across the strings simultaneously. They sing softly at first. But as the song goes on, the strumming gets more forceful and the combined voices get louder:
Yooooooooou send me
Yooooooooou send me
Honest you do, honest you do, whooooaooo!
The song ends, but the smiling around the room doesn’t. Someone calls out another page in the songbook and the pages turn together. People sing out the words written down, for fun, for friendship and because, here, there’s no reason not to.