The circle has come full around for the Old Town School of Folk Music. Chicago’s venerable repository for songs of protest movements has become the target of a voluble one.
More than 100 students, teachers and alumni opposed to the potential sale of the school’s building at 909 W. Armitage Ave. gathered in front of that building Nov. 10 to voice their grievances through leaflets and lyrics. As the Tribune reported, protesters delivered speeches, held up signs — “Don’t let this be the day the music died!” — and joined in singalongs.
One song confronted the school’s administrators with its musical heritage.
“Give us a chance,” the crowd sang. “We’ll play together and sing soft and sweet, at the Old Town School up on Armitage Street.”
The rally’s organizers had found the song, “Bring A Banjo,” in a 41-year-old issue of the school’s newsletter. Tracking down the former student and songwriter, they asked permission to use it, and Jim Wearne posted his reaction on Facebook:
“I would have to search to find anything that’s happened to me that I consider more of an honor than to have a song of mine be part of an insurrection at the Premier Folk Music School in the country, and on the right side of that insurrection as well.”
In its explanation of why the Armitage Avenue building was up for sale, the school’s management has cited shaky finances and falling enrollment. That, they say, is dictating the consolidation of most class offerings to the larger art-deco structure in the Lincoln Square neighborhood that became the school’s headquarters in 1998.
But the school’s ledger books leave out one key metric: the intensity of the emotional tug felt by the thousands of aspiring guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle and harmonica players who have studied at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Its program director, Jimmy Tomasello, acknowledged that an “endless stream” of emailed protests followed the Oct. 22 announcement of the Armitage building’s fate.
“You walk into the building and there’s a feeling of magic because it’s been around for a long time,” he told the Tribune.
The Old Town School moved there in 1968. It had gotten short notice that its original quarters at 333 W. North Ave. were slated for demolition, and one of its founders, Win Stracke, had to make a quick decision.
“Many years ago I had attended an Italian wedding reception at Aldine Hall, 909 W. Armitage, and whether it was the vino or the beef sandwiches, I recalled the atmosphere as being congenial, and it was for sale at a moderate price,” he would be quoted in “Biography of a Hunch,” a history of the school published in 1992.
Buildings, no less than people, reveal their physical infirmities through the creaks and moans of an aging infrastructure. The Aldine was no exception, and so the purchase could be financed with a little help from the school’s friends and a $26,000 mortgage.
During one board meeting, someone touted the success of the school’s Friday night clog-dancing sessions. A board member who was also an architect asked where the classes were held and was shocked to hear it was in the same auditorium where they were sitting.
“Clog dancing!” he exclaimed. “You can’t do that! This beam will collapse.”
Yet despite the building’s structural liabilities, its location nicely matched the school’s underlying philosophy. Stracke was a professional musician — he’d hosted a children’s television show— with a college degree, and was passionately devoted to songs of workaday folks. But there weren’t many of those left in Old Town, a largely gentrified neighborhood. The Tribune had archly noted that the school’s older headquarters adjoined “the Proletarian Party, an organization so obscure one finds it well-nigh impossible to locate a representative.”
But Armitage Avenue west of Halsted Street ran through an ethnic patchwork quilt. Its human geography in the late 1960s and into the 1980s provided an answer to critics who saw cultural imperialism in a school where middle-class students learned songs born in the Jim Crow South and impoverished Appalachia.
Responding to that charge, Stracke told the Tribune: “Folk music doesn’t belong to black folks or white folks or blue folks, it belongs to people.” The year after the school moved to Armitage Avenue, he reported that 1 in 20 of its students “were born or bred back in the hills, back in true folk music country,” and that its classes enabled them to learn their forebears’ songs.
In “Biography of a Hunch,” a teacher recalled the school as a place where people of different classes crossed paths, a rarity in the 1970s.
“Just the other night I saw a doctor in a three-piece suit trading notes with a guy who has been out of work for a long time. At the break, I saw both of them in a corner drinking beer and discussing music,” he said. “Now take a minute and try to think of anywhere else that happens.”
Aldine Hall was a beacon for folkies nearby and far away. From 1983 to 1986 it hosted “The Flea Market,” a folk music show broadcast nationally by WBEZ. Its host, Larry Rand, had vivid memories of Queen Ida, a celebrated Zydeco singer, setting the audience to “tapping their feet on the shaky floors of 909 W. Armitage.”
Professional folk singers were among the school’s most ardent fans. In 1987, as the school faced a crisis — needing to raise $525,000 to restore the crumbling Armitage Avenue building — celebrated performers such as John Prine, Bonnie Koloc and Corky Siegel took the stage at Orchestra Hall.
Siegel told the Tribune why they were donating their services: “The concert is a benefit to help support the Old Town School of Folk Music. But more than that, it is a celebration of what the school means to the people of Chicago, and to the people who have benefited from it.”
Professionals were more than welcomed at the school — provided they honored its basic ground rule: “Win Stracke had a vision of a school of folk music, a giant meetinghouse,” Frank Hamilton, its co-founder, recalled. “Teacher and student would be partners in learning.”
One night folk icon Pete Seeger dropped in on a dance class. “He tossed his jacket somewhere, picked up a 10-cent ashtray and proceeded to play a great limbo rock rhythm,” a student recalled.
Those mores meant that from the start the Old Town School was wondrously anarchic. It will no doubt remain so, even if the Armitage Avenue chapter of the story ends.
Its neighborhood has long since been gentrified. For years, buyers have been paying big bucks for buildings they intend to knock down. Houses along the streets nearby regularly list for more than $1 million.
The school’s old headquarters probably won’t get torn down; it sits in a landmark district. But even landmark protections won’t keep the guitars and banjos hanging in the building’s front windows, hints of what an important role the school played in the transplant of folk music from rural to urban America.
If the Old Town School has to bid a musical farewell to Armitage Avenue, it might be in the bittersweet tones of a minor key. But history suggests the scene will be more like the mixture of playful democracy and amateur enthusiasm a Tribune reporter discovered at a long-ago recital:
“Anyone who wanted to perform did,” she observed. “They included the ex-rock ’n’ roller from Chicago Latin School, an English teacher from Marshall High School, a young Dartmouth graduate and his wife from Wilmette, father and son teams, family quartets, and a ballet dancer — most of whom came up with folk songs that even Stracke and Hamilton, whose collective repertoire is vast, hadn’t heard before.”
rgrossman@chicagotribune.com
