Join us for exceptional music, coffee, and dessert in an intimate setting at one of our Friday night Green Wood Coffee Houses.
Doors open one half hour before each performance. Performances begin at 8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted. Seating is unassigned.
At this time, tickets cannot be purchased online, so reservations are highly recommended! Call 734-665-8558 and leave a message with your name, number of tickets desired, and performance. Then (if there is time between your call and the performance date) send a check for the total (payable to "FUMC Green Wood") to: FUMC Green Wood, 1001 Green Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48105. Include name, address, and phone number. Tickets will be waiting at the door. Reservations made without payment may not be honored for sold-out performances.
Tickets are also available at the door. Kids 10 and under are 2-for-1.
Group discounts available — call 734-665-8558 for details.
2012 Spring Schedule ... Incomplete - Please check back for updates.
Friday, January 13, Michael On Fire, $12
His career spanning four decades, Michael on Fire has forged an eclectic path, having traveled millions of miles, playing original music all over the country, in every kind of venue - from bars to beautiful theaters, private homes to major outdoor festivals, in mines and on mountaintops; from playing in prisons to performing for Presidents of the United States. His audiences find food for the soul in his words, music, and expressive delivery..
Michael's sound grows out of the roots of American music, encompassing its broad range of styles – from country to blues, jazz to rock, rural to urban; vocal and instrumental, acoustic and electric. He’s been featured on Entertainment Tonight, CNN and FOX News, and his music has appeared in film, TV and stage productions.
In January, 2010, The Ventura County Star (Ventura, CA) named his performance from Oct. 2009 as one of its "Top Five Concerts of the Year" (others chosen were Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, Paul Thorn and Steve Poltz.)
“The music is unmistakably passionate, wedding Michael’s penchant for dust ‘n’ bones guitar arrangements with his classically-trained musical sensibilities. The result is a sound that is primal, raw and powerful. When I caught his live show last Sunday, his words seemed like gospel. He is an electrifying performer”. – The (East Lansing) State News
Friday, January 20, Juggernaut Jug Band, $15
You haven't heard "Pinball Wizard" or "People Are Strange" until you've heard it played on jugs and "various other sundries." Jug band music is blues, ragtime, swing and jazz combined in a strange concoction spawned in Loiusville, home of the Juggernaut Jug Band. Jug bands flourished in towns along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, as then, a jug band is the ultimate party band. The Juggernauts have been featured on the Today Show and radio's "Dr. Demento Show." Their current CD is You Mean We Get Paid For This?
Friday, February 3, "Un-Valentine" show, $12
Valentine's started as a day devoted to a saint, but nobody remembers that anymore. We're awash in a deluge of commercial sentimentality, forced attentiveness, chocolates and pink ribbon---an event as mercantile and manufactured as Sweetest Day or those nasty little candy hearts.
Had enough? Of course you have, and here's the antidote: an evening of laughs, healthy cynicism and fine music titled "The Un-Valentine's Show: Songs and Tales of Unforgiveness, Heartbreak, Dysfunction and Revenge."
What started as a one-off, themed evening in 2006 quickly formalized into an ongoing event, filling and selling out venues in an ever-widening area in Michigan and beyond. Presented in a relaxed, singers-in-the-round format, "Un-Valentine's" typically features multi-award-winning songwriter John Latini, singer-label queen-musical entrepreneur Jamie-Sue Seal, actor-comedian-songwriter Andre Villoch and Michigan songster Dave Boutette sometimes referred to as The Campfire Kid.
An Un-Valentine evening is a sparkling, freewheeling event that can veer from songs designed to tug at the heartstrings and tearducts to an original song about a love triangle at a gun-and-knife swap meet, Villoch's serio-comic "Day the Bearded Lady Died," Latini and Seal's politically incorrect "Stalker Song," a twisted retake on "Frankie and Johnny" and much more---as well as the sort of sharp, spontaneous interplay that can develop only among four such simpatico artists, honing "Un-Valentine's" over the years into a can't-miss event.
The immediacy, directness and sheer honesty of a singer, a guitar and a song---in front of a live audience---is the direct opposite of the prefab, mass-produced sentimentality of so much popular music regarding love and its many disappointments. Unforgiveness, heartbreak, dysfunction and revenge are with us always---but for that reason the "Un-Valentine's" musical revue has become increasingly in demand the year around, a lively evening of song and hilarity that's welcome in any season.
Friday, February 24, Sarah Masen, $15
As a songwriter and a performer, Sarah Masen has won the enthusiasm of critics and a committed, eclectic fan base for over 15 years. Whether immersed in electronica or as solo acoustic broadsides, her work speaks to all things awkward, political, dysfunctional, and seemingly mundane. She sings with a voice which is simultaneously adamant and ethereal.
Sarah Masen began her music career as the singer for acoustic folk-pop band The Art Institute, which released one album, The Holding, on TAI Records. Her self-titled debut in 1996 won considerable attention and its breakout single "All Fall Down" was included in the soundtrack for the TV show Party of Five and is a favorite spin on Contemporary Christian radio. After the release of The Dreamlife of Angels in 2001, Sarah took a break from recording and performing in order to focus on her growing family. In 2004 she contributed two tracks to Stars and Sirens, an album by Pristina, a collective of female artists teamed with producer Joey B. of The Echoing Green. She also continued to give occasional live performances, and offered new recordings through her website. In 2007, Sarah released three new EPs, containing a total of 15 songs. The new works debuted at the Festival of Faith and Music at Calvin College where she shared the bill with Sufjan Stevens, Emmylou Harris and Neko Case, among others.
Don't miss this chance to see and hear Sarah Masen in an intimate venue setting! www.sarahmasen.com
Friday, March 9, Lou & Peter Berryman, $15
Lou and Peter Berryman were both raised in Appleton, WI, and began playing music together in high school during the sixties. During the following nomadic decade, Lou studied classical voice and music theory in college while Peter continued an unfocused fascination with surrealist art, beatnik poetry, and jug band music. Early influences of American and British musical comedy and folk music fed a growing repertoire of original songs. A brief marriage in the early seventies resolved into a lifelong friendship, and by the late seventies and early eighties the two were honing their skills playing regular weekly concerts in Madison, becoming full-time musicians and songwriters in 1979.During those early years they wrote new songs every week, many about the history, cheese, beer and strange politics of their home state. By the mid '80s they were traveling all across the country, still writing and singing, but now with a broader perspective, finding that the quirks of their home state were not so much Midwestern as human. In twenty-five years of performing together, Lou and Peter have released twenty albums and four songbooks worth of hilarious, quirky, yet oddly profound songs, rich with word play and interesting images. Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton and Tom Lehrer count themselves among their fans. Their work has appeared in numerous compilations such as the popular RISE UP SINGING songbook, in periodicals like SING OUT! Magazine, and in many audio compilations. Berryman songs are being sung around the world by a legion of professional musicians including Peter, Paul and Mary, Garrison Keillor and Peggy Seeger. They have appeared numerous times on such national programs as NPR's A Prairie Home Companion and Weekend Edition. www.louandpeter.com
Friday, March 16, Jonathan Byrd, $15
In his own words:
I started touring full-time in 2000, realizing that I could do it as a solo performer and actually make a living. Of course, that's what every other singer/songwriter in America was doing, too, but I didn't even know what a singer/songwriter was, so that didn't bother me. I thought I was a folk musician. Over time, I realized that folk got cross-dressed and don't mean what it used to mean anymore. I think my friend Aengus Finnan said it better than anybody I've heard yet: "It's a style of presentation." Sit there on a stool and play your tuba, tell a story once in a while and wear some Birckenstocks. Everybody will think you're a folk musician.
In 2002, I went to the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, where there are lots of these folk musicians, only mostly songwriters. I wandered around for a week looking for the dance tent and the fiddle bands before I realized what I've already said about the word "folk." It ended up being an amazing and inspiring experience and I've been for all 18 days every year since. At the 2003 festival, I won the New Folk competition and got hired on as a performer for the next three years. I never took to Birckenstocks and my friend Anais Mitchell helped me find a great pair of boots in Austin. They're Fryes.
Texas is a huge influence on my writing. "The Law and the Lonesome" is what might have happened if Townes Van Zandt had made a record with Doc Watson. Tamara Kater of Canada's venerable folk mag Penguin Eggs called The Law and the Lonesome her "album of the decade." Co-produced by the brilliant Chris Bartos in Toronto, The Law and the Lonesome features a couple of co-writes with my friend Corin Raymond. We wrote the title track together, which was featured in a songwriting class at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Cackalack is my newest. I recorded Cackalack in six hours with a handful of the best musicians in Toronto. Ken Whitely, who has gold and platinum records to his name, engineered the record in his converted garage with Nik Tjelios. As of this writing, mid-January 2011, Cackalack is #1 on Roots Music Reports folk radio chart.
www.jonathanbyrd.com
Friday, March 23, Meg Hutchinson, $12
With a poet’s ease, Meg Hutchinson makes the personal become universal, allowing people’s stories to come alive through her unique vocals and haunting melodies. Since the release of her Red House Records album Come Up Full she has won high praise for her songwriting and has been featured nationally on NPR Music, XM/Sirius Radio and several times on the syndicated show Mountain Stage. Publications such as The Winnipeg Free Press have compared her songwriting with that of veterans Dar Williams, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Joni Mitchell.
Growing up in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, the woods and ponds were her childhood muses, as were songwriters like Greg Brown and Joni Mitchell, and poets like Mary Oliver, William Stafford, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost. When Hutchinson inherited her grandmother’s 1957 Martin guitar at age eleven, her love of words found an inspiring instrument, and there was no turning back.
After graduating from college with a degree in creative writing, Hutchinson settled in Boston. In between gigs at pubs, coffeehouses and train stations, she won a Kerrville New Folk Award (2000) and was nominated for a Boston Music Award for her first studio album Against The Gray. She went on to win awards at the Rocky Mountain Folks Fest, the Telluride Troubadour Songwriter’s Showcase in Colorado and The Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at Merlefest in North Carolina, all in the course of a year, causing national publications such as Performing Songwriter to take notice, calling her “a master of introspective ballads filled with understated yearning and an exquisite sense of metaphor.” She quickly became an integral part of the vibrant Boston songwriting community.
After recording her live CD Any Given Day in 2001, and continuing to build a fan base throughout the Northeast, she went into the studio with esteemed producer Crit Harmon (Lori McKenna, Martin Sexton, Mary Gauthier) to record The Crossing. Released in 2004, this album was enthusiastically received by critics and DJs across the country, catching the attention of renowned folk/roots label Red House Records. Knowing her songs could stand alongside those by Red House heavyweights Greg Brown, Eliza Gilkyson and John Gorka, label president and veteran producer Eric Peltoniemi signed Hutchinson to the label. Teaming up again with Crit Harmon, Hutchinson recorded Come up Full over the course of more than a year in Boston. An instant folk hit, the album was one of the most played on folk and college radio and landed her on many “best of the year” lists
Meg's latest CD is The Living Side. Combining her raw storytelling folk style with tasteful, intimate production, the album showcases her sweet, earthy vocals and her most powerful songwriting to date. It confirms that she is indeed one of the great voices of the next generation of acoustic musicians.
www.meghutchinson.com
Friday, April 20, TBA
Friday, April 27, Rita Hosking, $15
Sunday, April 29, Ronny Cox, $15
Friday, May 4 and Saturday, May 5, Don White, $17
Back by popular demand after his last sold-out Green Wood Coffee House show! Don White combines heartfelt, serious lyrics with side-splitting laughs to provide an evening not to be forgotten. This Massachusetts comedian/singer/songwriter/author is best-known in these parts for his radio gems, "Rascal," "Psycho Mom and Dad" and "I Know What Love Is." In 2009 Don released Christine Lavin and Don White Live At The Ark -- The Father's Day Concert, two hours of hysterical songs and stories recorded in June of 2009 from these two veteran performers with guest appearances by Matt Watroba and Katie Geddes. This recording is available only as an MP3 download here: http://www.cdfreedom.com/artists/donwhite. Don’s latest release is Winning Streak. A Don White show promises to delight new audiences and devoted "repeat offender" fans, alike.
Friday, May 11, Matt Watroba, $15
Matt Watroba brings a very special set of talents to the stage whenever he appears as a folk musician. His excellent guitar playing, mellow voice, friendship with his audience, and knowledge of his presentations is impressive. Add to that Matt’s own special brand of humor and you are in for a most entertaining and enlightening evening. You will feel his obvious love of folk music, both traditional and contemporary; its writers and performers, its heroes and villains. Matt sings songs of compassion, inner strength, humor, and everyday living. He sings songs that you will feel and remember for a long time. Matt's latest CD, Shine Right Through The Dark, receives airplay around the nation and has appeared on several folk DJs' "Best Of" lists for 2010. www.mattwatroba.com
Friday, May 18, Dave Boutette ($15)
Friday, June 1, Marshall Chapman ($15)
Marshall Chapman was born and raised in Spartanburg, South Carolina. To date she has released eleven critically acclaimed albums, and her songs have been recorded by Emmylou Harris, John Hiatt, Wynonna, Joe Cocker, Irma Thomas, Jimmy Buffett and Jessi Colter, just to name a few. She has toured extensively on her own and opened shows for everybody from John Prine and Jimmy Buffett to Jerry Lee Lewis and The Ramones.
Of her three rockin’ albums for Epic, the Al Kooper-produced Jaded Virgin was voted Record of the Year (1978) by Stereo Review. Following 1982′s Take It On Home (Rounder), Marshall released two albums on her own Tall Girl label: 1987′s Dirty Linen (A- in Christgau Consumer Guide, released in Europe on Line Records) and 1991′s Inside Job (voted Album of the Month in April 1992 Stereo Review).
It’s About Time… recorded live at the Tennessee State Prison for Women (Margaritaville/Island, 1995) drew rave reviews from Time, USA Today and the Village Voice. After its release, Marshall and her band (The Love Slaves) toured with Jimmy Buffett, playing for over a million people. The following year, they went in the studio and recorded Love Slave. According to Marshall, being a love slave is a way of life. “We’re all slaves to something,” she says, “….might as well be love!”
In 1998, Marshall began exploring new outlets for her creativity. One was theater. She and songwriting pal Matraca Berg contributed fourteen songs to Good Ol’ Girls, a country musical based on the stories of Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle. The New York Times called it a “feminist literary country music review.” Good Ol’ Girls continues to play theaters throughout the Southeast. On February 14, 2010, Good Ol’ Girls opened off-Broadway for a limited two-month engagement.
Marshall’s first book, Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller (St. Martin’s Press), was published in September 2003. Simultaneously, a companion CD was released. The book was a 2004 SIBA Book Award finalist, and one of three finalists for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A softcover edition was released in September 2004.
From 2004 to 2007, Marshall developed a one-woman show called “The Triumph of Rock and Roll over Good Breeding,” wrote commentary for The Bob Edwards Show (XM), and released Mellowicious! (Mello-WISH-us) – her first studio album in nine years. She’s currently a contributing editor for Garden & Gun, Nashville Arts Magazine, and Vanderbilt Magazine.
Most recently, Marshall has finished a new book, They Came to Nashville, a new CD, Big Lonesome, and acted in her first movie, Country Strong, where she plays Gwyneth Paltrow’s road manager.
www.tallgirl.com
Performers interested in bookings at the Green Wood Coffee House should leave a message at 734-665-8558.
