September 10, 2007

A Small Victory for Some Lost Voices

Last week I was part of something remarkable. I stood on an improvised stage, surrounded by some of the most talented people in the world of folk and blues music today, and sang a song for a pretty good-sized audience.

Now singing is not all that unusual for me. I sing all the time – to myself, to cats, to mystified strangers, to concrete blocks. It’s not even the first time I’ve done it in front of a crowd.

I was also banging away on my guitar. I like to do this when I sing because the guitar gives me both a sense of self-confidence and something I can use to deflect any rapidly incoming musical critique.

The occasion was the Concert for Lost Voices 2007, an event that raised awareness (and money) for a group that reaches out to help incarcerated and at-risk kids find ways to make sense of their lives. You can get all the details about Lost Voices and the concert at www.lostvoices.org.

So there I was, singing and banging away, when I noticed a teenage boy sitting out in the crowd, playing enthusiastic air guitar right along with me. I knew the kid. He was one of the team of incarcerated youth from the maximum-security W.J. Maxey Boys Training School who had come to help set up chairs for the concert, and then had been permitted to stay and watch. This particular young man had participated in some of my creative writing and songwriting programs.

And he had helped write the song we were singing.

It’s a song called Eddie’s Choice. It tells the story of a young guy named Eddie, who is coincidentally a lot like the air guitarist. Eddie is getting released from a place that is coincidentally a lot like Maxey:

Eddie’s gone tonight at midnight

They’re about to kick him out that door

He’s got a sweatshirt, shoes and blue jeans

A plan and nothing more…

A little later we performed a song called “The ATS Blues” to the enthusiastic squeals and cheers of a small group of incarcerated young women visiting from the Adrian Training School for girls:

We’re countin’ the days

‘Till we can be free

So we can eat pizza and chitlins

And watch TV.

As you might have guessed, one of these girls was in another of our programs and helped write that song.

As I stood there and watched those two animated little clusters of teenagers, it occurred to me that they were going nuts over a type of music that most of their peers had never even heard of. Folk and blues music just doesn’t get a whole lot of play with kids that age.

But we were reaching them, and we were doing it not only because the music was for them and about them, it was from them. These kids had found a voice, a way to tell the world what they were thinking and feeling, most of them for the first time in their lives.

And each one of them could look around in wonder at the crowd who had paid to be at the concert that day, people who had donated generously to Lost Voices. They probably found it a little hard to believe that all those folks would really care about what was going to happen to a bunch of damaged kids, much less about the emotions they might have rumbling around in their wounded hearts.

When it was all over the kids helped clean up the concert site and fold the chairs, then they thanked me warmly and politely. But the moment when I really understood what an extraordinary day this had been came as they were scuffling and being teenagers, getting situated in their buses, and I could hear one of them singing;

In and out of locked doors

Same old song and dance

This time has got to be different

Ain’t gonna be another chance.

Please take a minute and check out www.lostvoices.org. I’d also like to use a little space here to thank the performers and my dear friends, Josh White, Jr., Kitty Donohoe, Robert Jones, Matt Watroba, Dave Budzinski, Matt Allen, Scott Clauser, Jack Kerwin, Nancy Ball, Mary Beam, Betsy King, Carla Margoulis, Sue Stribley and Julie and Tom Firth, along with all the amazing volunteer workers who made Concert for Lost Voices 2007 a complete success. And of course, thanks to everyone who reached into their hearts – and their wallets – to contribute so generously.

Some kids who are working hard every day, trying to earn their way into a world that you and I might take for granted, thank you too.