GREENSBORO – On Saturday, July 18, at 7 p.m., Vermont’s musicians Patti Casey, Jess O’Brien, Will and Dan Lindner, Christine Malcolm, Don Houghton, Roy MacNeil, Krishna Guthrie and others will gather at the Highland Center for the Arts to celebrate Woody Guthrie’s birthday with songs of “resistance, solidarity and hope,” to raise money for Migrant Justice and the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project.
Folk music has helped shape American history. From the early songs of the Hutchinson Family Singers who toured with Frederick Douglass to the Fisk University Choir breaking race barriers at Carnegie Hall, music has played an elemental role in America’s struggle for freedom and civil rights. In the Twentieth Century, with the music of Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, that tradition played an important role in the Civil Rights movement and then the anti-war movement of the sixties. And the songs of musicians such as Holly Near, Bruce Springsteen and Vermont musicians like Patti Casey and Christine Malcolm are still shaping the American character.
