Second Friday series features the poetry and songs of Carl Sandburg
BARRINGTON IL - In celebration of National Poetry Month, “Chicago’s official troubadour” Mark Dvorak will present a special live stream concert, “The People, Yes” on Friday April 8 at 7:00 pm CDT. The program will feature Dvorak reading selections from Carl Sandburg’s epic The People, Yes, published in 1936, and performing songs from Sandburg’s 1927 collection The American Songbag.
The free event is sponsored by the Barrington Area Library, 505 N. Northwest Highway.
“Sandburg was of course a very prolific poet and author,” said the singer from his home in Brookfield, “but not everybody knows he was also a guitarist and singer, and song collector. Sandburg actually published the very first folk song collection in America, and was the first performer to describe himself as ‘folk singer.’ “
Sandurg was born in Galesburg, Illinois in January 1878. As a young man he worked in a butcher shop, as a traveling salesman, he was a fireman for a time and was accepted, then booted out of West Point Academy. All the while Sandburg worked at writing, a practice he referred to as “wearing out pencils.”
The People, Yes is Sandburg’s sweeping, three-hundred page epic which touches in literary terms, the breadth of the American experience. “I’m simply amazed how these poems and songs still resonate so beautifully some eighty-five years later,” said Dvorak.
The Chicago Tribune has called Dvorak “masterful,” and the Fox Valley Folk Festival describes him as “an archive of song and style.” Dvorak has won awards for journalism and children’s music, and was honored in 2013 with the FARM Lantern Bearer Award from Folk Alliance International.
In 2008 he received the Woodstock Folk Festival Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2012 The Midnight Special radio program named him “Chicago’s official troubadour.”
For information contact the Barrington Area Library at 847 382 1300. Registration is free. To receive the ZOOM link visit www.balibrary.org. Learn more about Mark Dvorak at www.markdvorak.com.
###