Getaway

Register for 2021 Getaway Online

If you love good music and good fellowship, you'll love the Getaway! 

Getaway 2021 will be online this year via Zoom (Oct 8th to Oct 11th)  

Because Covid-19 is still around and we want our geographically distant friends to be able to attend easily, we’re having the Getaway online again — but even bigger and better! We will have up to six simultaneous sessions in Zoom breakout rooms.

Be sure to set aside the long weekend of October 8 to 11 for an extravaganza of participatory singaround sessions, mini‐ concerts, instructional workshops, storytelling, children’s activities, evening sign‐up concerts, and presentations on topics of interest—all coming to you on Zoom! If you’re insecure about Zoom, rest easy. There will be an instructive session on Zoom covering updating Zoom software, getting the best sound, navigating breakout rooms, and more. It will be available both before and during the weekend. 

Here are just a few program highlights:

• A whole Saturday afternoon of ballads, led by balladeers like Saro Lynch-Thomason, Lisa Null, Colleen Cleveland, Lorraine Van Buren, Tim Radford, Julie Henigan, and Sally Rogers, plus one more chance Monday afternoon, led by Michael and Carrie Kline.
• A presentation on the History of the Blues, with Pete Kraemer and Phil Wiggins. Blues fans won’t want to miss this! There will also be a blues singaround led by Eleanor Ellis and Mike Rocke, plus a What Makes It the Blues? guitar workshop with Elly Wininger, and a mini‐concert by Rick Franklin. 
• A session of harmony singing – Duets, Trios, and Beyond, hosted by those wonderful harmonizers, Darriel and Jocelyn Day. Since Zoom doesn’t do well with long‐distance harmonizing, we’re hoping those of you who can gather in one room to sing together will come and satisfy our hunger for harmony. 
• A singaround session of Maritime Songs – chanties, forebitters and more – led by Geoff Kaufman and Deirdre Murtha, and a presentation on the Multicultural Roots of Sea Chanties, with Bob Walser, Bonnie Milner, and Stephen Sanfilippo, all experts in the field. Also, Julia Lane and Fred Gosbee (Castlebay) will bring us a selection of songs from Julia’s new book of Maine sea songs. 
• We’ll get lots of laughs with singarounds on Parodies, led by Joe Hickerson and David Diamond, and Humorous Songs, led by Steven Levine and Murray Callahan.
• Take a trip out west with Cowboy Songs and Songs of the West led by Steve Cormier and Larry Hanks.  
• For kids, we’ll have a session of Songs for Children, with Kim Wallach and Deirdre Murtha. In addition, there will be a kids’ treasure hunt, SummerQuest, with Getaway favorite George Rathbone, consisting of three sessions on consecutive days. Kids 6 and up should register in advance for this, so George can send them materials. 
• Instrumentalists will enjoy several sessions: In addition to the blues guitar already mentioned, Elly Wininger will present a workshop on slide guitar techniques for those who pre‐register. Rob Van Sante and Allan Carr will demonstrate and give pointers on that percussive guitar style typical of such British artists as Martin Carthy.  John Roberts and Bill Destler will help us all with tips on accompaniment in How to Play Well with Others.
• If you’re looking for help with singing, you’ll want to check out Ken Schatz’s Vocal Clinic. Ken will personally coach four pre‐registered singers, and the rest of us can watch and learn. 
• Devotees of Irish and Irish‐American music will find a lot to love, with several singarounds, led by such wonderful singers as David Ingerson, Amelia Hogan, Connie McKenna, Melissa Weaver Dunning, Peter Brice, and Brian O’hAirt. We’ll also have a mini‐concert by  Thomas McCarthy, and a presentation on the amazing variety of Irish musical styles by David Ingerson. 
• For those interested in the spoken word, we have a lot to offer: a session led by Don Stallone where you can present poems, recitations, and other spoken pieces, plus a whole track of storytelling from artists who perform regularly with The Grapevine. 
• In addition to those already mentioned, we'll have mini-concerts by Andy Cohen, Ed Trickett, and the duo of Jane Rothfield and Alan Carr. and presentations by Judy Cook, and Michael and Carrie Kline. Steve Winick and Jennifer Cutting will guide you in using the Library of Congress’s Online Folk Collections, and Nora Rodes will introduce you to Emma Dusenbury, a prime source of old songs from the Ozarks.
• If all of this makes you wonder how you will navigate through Zoom to catch the sessions you particularly want to see—and participate in!—you’ll definitely want to tune in to Casey Casebeer’s Getting the Most Out of Zoom, which will be presented a few days before the Getaway weekend, as well as early in the Getaway itself.
• This is just a small sampling of the offerings available. There will be much more—Labor Songs, Gospel, Chorus Songs, Trades and Occupations, Classic Country, a Songwriters’ Showcase, Songs of Social Justice, Songs of the Supernatural, American History Songs, a Quiet Sing, Scottish Songs, Old‐Time, and a chance to show off your pandemic songs with 2020 Hindsight, just to name a few. And there will be appearances by, among many others, Bruce Baker, Magpie, Janie Meneely, David Jones, Cecilia Eng, and Jeff Warner. 
  

You can view the whole 2021 schedule here.

If you have problems reading tables try 2021 Schedule Without Tables

Several sessions, Vocal Clinic, Slide Guitar Basics, SummerQuest for kids, and the Saturday and Sunday Evening Concerts, will require advance sign-up. When you register for the Getaway you will receive an email that has the code word needed to register for these sessions.

Register for 2021 Getaway Online

This undertaking will require a good deal of tech help to pull off; last year we were the first of the folk weekends to use Zoom, and folk societies and gatherings around the country and the world have refined our work. We’ll be using breakout rooms this year—they hadn’t yet been invented in time to use last year. We need people to greet everyone in the main room, to help people with Zoom technical issues, or just to help session leaders keep track of who needs to sing next (which doesn’t require much expertise in Zoom at all). If you’d like to volunteer to be part of the tech staff that pulls this thing off, contact Charlie Baum at chbaum@earthlink.net, or give him a call at 301‐589‐6855. 

Once again, registering for the Getaway will be free, but once again, we'll welcome your donations. 

Donations will support:

• FSGW's overhead for the Getaway--such as the cost of Zoom accounts and our other incidental expenses in bringing this weekend to you.
• The FSGW Getaway scholarship fund which is used to assist people with the cost of attending future Getaways.
• FSGW's offerings of a wide range of folk events and programs throughout the year.

You may donate using this link: Donate to the Getaway 

Questions?  Contact the Getaway Chair

Previous years schedules

2020 schedule 

2019 schedule (pdf)

2018 schedule (pdf)

2017 schedule (pdf)