Mike

Ball

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March 3, 2008

Lost Voices – Feel Like an Angel With a Broken Wing

This past week my friend Kitty Donohoe and I wrapped up an eight week Lost Voices program at an alternative high school for kids who have not been able, for one reason or another, to thrive in normal high schools. Five days later, I’m still a trying to catch my breath.

I think by now that a lot of you have at least heard of Lost Voices, for the simple reason that I never stop babbling about it. But it seems that most people simply know that we work with troubled kids, and have no idea what actually goes on. Well, here’s your chance to find out.

This last program was a little different for us than the ones we’ve done in the past, for two reasons. First, the kids in this group are not incarcerated. Now I, for one, have always done better with audiences who have abandoned all hope of escape, so this presented quite a challenge for me.

I think the bigger issue, though, is that at the end of the day, incarcerated kids are locked up in their rooms with their thoughts and their journals, while many of the young people who attend this alternative school finish each day by returning to the environments that had at least something to do with getting them into trouble in the first place.

This means that each day they have to go back to school and scale the same mountains they had to conquer the day before. At this particular school, the kids find an atmosphere nurtured by an incredibly talented and motivated faculty and staff to help them climb.

The second difference is that this was the first co-ed group we’ve dealt with. Now I’ve done a lot of work with teenagers over the years, including coaching a high school boys hockey team – which was kind of like paddling a canoe through a testosterone tsunami.

And I can vaguely recall my feelings of suicidal desolation back in 1968 when Mary Womack had other plans and couldn’t go to see the brand new Steve McQueen movie, Bullitt, at the Granada Theater with me. Even so, I had seriously underestimated the level of pure hormonal insanity that bubbles up when high school boys are in the same room with high school girls.

The way our programs operate, I go into a school along with a professional roots musician and conduct workshops to help the kids learn to express themselves through the storytelling traditions of folk and blues music. To date I’ve worked with folk music icon Josh White, Jr. and singer/songwriter Kitty Donohoe, with help from acoustic blues master Robert Jones.

First we put on a one-hour concert introducing the kids, who mostly think of Snoop Dogg as a minstrel poet from a bygone age, to the idea of folk and blues music. Then, with the help of the staff at the school, we recruit a group of kids to participate in six weeks of music writing workshops.

In the workshops we develop our song material by exploring what the kids have on their minds. Sometimes it’s not all that much – here’s the beginning of the modern ballad, Puppy Poo:

I woke up this morning

Got out of my bed

What’s that squishin’ between my toes

“Aw, poo,” I said . . .

Other times, their thoughts are a little deeper, like the morning they were speculating on what might become of them after they got out of school:

It’s dark out here, can’t find the road

Feeling my way, through the bitter cold

I was safe and warm before

When I walked out that door

Nothin’s gonna be the same anymore

I’m movin’ on . . .

We also work with poems written by the individual students:

A broken heart is a painful thing

Feel like an angel with a broken wing

Feel like a song no one can sing . . .

On the eighth week we put it all together into a professionally staged concert for all the students and staff in the school, with the kids participating in the performance as much as they are able.  The look on their faces when they hear their peers and their teachers laughing at their silly ideas, or applauding some of their most deeply held thoughts and feelings, is beyond anything I can describe. It’s like watching a garden of roses bloom to the beat of an acoustic guitar.

Like I said, I’m still trying to catch my breath.

The song lyrics abstracted here were all written in the Lost Voices Roots Music Workshop at the Renaissance Alternative School in Howell, Michigan during January and February 2008.

Copyright © 2008, Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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