Dave Howard
And the Louisville Folk School
A big part of the reason many of us enjoy bluegrass music is because of the tight-knit bluegrass community. Getting together with other bluegrass fans to listen to, or play, bluegrass music is part of the appeal. People gathering together to play music in a private home; at a school, church or community center; or at a bluegrass festival campground is an aspect of the music that has kept it alive for over seventy-five years.
Thus far, this “Learning to Play” column has focused on individual instruction through private in-person lessons, or group and/or private online lessons, or group learning events like weekend workshops. Now that the pandemic restrictions are starting to lift a bit, it is time for us to also include learning centers that help gather people together to learn how to play in groups and offer opportunities for jamming, concerts, and performances on a regularly scheduled basis. There are various such establishments and programs across the country and we will begin to add them to the mix in this column. This month we will start by introducing you to the Louisville Folk School.
In 2010, while touring the country with The 23 String Band, Dave Howard discovered folk music schools—The Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, The Folk School of St. Louis, Swallow Hill in Denver, to name a few. He said, “When I saw that groups of people were coming together to learn to play the banjo, it blew me away.” His next thought was, “I can’t believe that there is nothing like this in Kentucky.” He felt like a folk school would work in a place like Louisville, but he waited a few years for someone else to start one. By 2014, he was tired of waiting and decided to explore the possibilities of opening a folk school in Louisville on his own.
Howard’s desire to create a hub for folk and bluegrass people led him to start working on a business plan in 2014 and by 2015 the Louisville Folk School was up a running. He said, “My goal was to find a way to connect all of the disjointed groups of traditional music forms in the Louisville area and gather a community around the music traditions of Kentuckians.” The rich cultural history of the bluegrass state allows for Dave’s musical community to include traditional bluegrass, old-time, Celtic, Cuban, African, and Canadian forms of music. He said, “We are bluegrass and old-time centric, but we also wanted to be more inclusive and diverse. Monroe was an innovator and drew on a lot of different influences. In that spirit, folk music traditions can grow into something exciting. It is a living, breathing, changing art form.”
Howard continued, “The Louisville Folk School is now a 501C3 not-for-profit. I started the school as a social enterprise as a way to give back to the community, but it wasn’t until 2018 when we formed a board and began writing articles of incorporation. Since then we’ve launched some initiatives that enrich our lessons and classes, such as the 2021 conversation series ‘Exploring the African-American influence on Kentucky music’ that included Dom Flemons, Leyla McCalla, Dr Richard Brown, Michael Jones, and Rachel Grimes.”
In order to initially launch the program back in 2015, Howard contacted friends in the area who were great players who he knew to be good teachers or, if they were not already teachers, he knew them to be good communicators who would have empathy for beginning students. When the teaching resources were in place, he found a location, opened the doors and started holding group classes for adults.
Background
Dave Howard grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky. By middle school he was playing guitar and bass, but was more interested in rock and roll than bluegrass. He said, “Bluegrass was always around because back then the IBMA offices, the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and the World of Bluegrass conference and festival were all in Owensboro.” But as a young teen, David was more interested in Nirvana than Bill Monroe.
When Howard was in high school he was given a mandolin, but struggled to find someone who could teach him. The bluegrass banjo player Bill Evans was living in Owensboro at the time and gave Dave a few lessons to get him started, but it wasn’t until he went to college in Louisville and started studying with Jeff Guernsey and attending a weekly jam session that he got serious about the mandolin. After college he started playing in regional bluegrass bands, volunteered at the IBMA World of Bluegrass every year from 1996 through 2010, and worked at a music store. Just prior to opening the school, he also received a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council to study old-time fiddle.
By the mid-2000s, Howard was performing with The 23 String Band. They put out albums in 2008 and 2009, but it was their 2011 release, Catch 23, that propelled the group and led to national tours and performances at festivals like Grey Fox, Rockygrass, and the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s annual ROMP festival. Regarding his relationship with ROMP, Dave said, “ROMP is my hometown festival. In addition to participating in workshops at ROMP as an artist over the years, I’ve been programming the workshop stage for ROMP since 2019. Louisville Folk School will be presenting the workshop stage at ROMP in 2022. My relationship with Bluegrass Hall of Fame and Museum is something I really value.”
Learning at the Louisville Folk School
Today the Louisville Folk School offers group classes, private lessons, virtual classes, weekend workshops, jam sessions, and a concert series. Lessons are offered for voice, bluegrass banjo, clawhammer banjo, fiddle (bluegrass, old-time, and French Canadian styles), mandolin, guitar, Dobro, bass, ukulele, jug band ensemble, African drumming, African music ensemble, and west African dance. Specific repertoire classes are also included—for instance, this past fall classes such as the Grateful Dead repertoire and the Gillian Welch and David Rawlings repertoire. There are currently a corral of seventeen instructors who teach for the school. Classes are designed to be eight weeks in length and the school holds five semesters per year.
Each session at the school offers a unique variety of classes. For example, this winter the school will add practical music theory for fiddlers, Snake Chapman fiddle tunes for clawhammer banjo, harmonica, ballads of the British Isles, and an intro to playing for square/contra dances. The class schedule is continuously changing and evolving.
Although the Louisville Folk School started out with adult group lessons, they have expanded into private lessons and then—during the pandemic—virtual lessons. Prior to the pandemic, the majority of the school’s students came from Louisville area, although some students drove as much as two hours to attend classes. During the pandemic, the student body grew to include students from thirty-six states and a few foreign countries. Feedback from many of those students pleaded with the school to “please don’t stop these online classes after it is safe to teach classes in person.” Today some classes are virtual only, while other are a hybrid of the in-person and virtual formats. David said, “We have equipped our teaching rooms with Mac Computers, HD cameras, quality microphones, and ethernet cable so that we can live-stream from each classroom.
In addition to the virtual classes allowing students from all over the world to join in, the online format also allows the Louisville Folk School to bring in teachers who don’t live in the Louisville area. For instance, Lauren Price Napier, of the Price Sisters, has taught mandolin lessons through the school as part of the virtual lessons program.
As the school grows and moves forward, Dave Howard maintains his original mission. Dave said, “As adults, the way we make and maintain friendships is through proximity, repetition, and similarity. This is why the folk school has been successful. It is not a bar, it is not a church, but we offer the similarity of interests, the repetition of interaction, and the proximity of location, and that even transfers, somewhat, to Zoom.”
If you are interested in learning more about the Louisville Folk School, you can visit their website:
louisvillefolkschool.org.
