Event

WISCON-SING!

Join musician David HB Drake and the Friends of Boerner Botanical Gardens for a fun, educational, interactive musical journey through Wisconsin's history & heritage. From Native Americans & French explorers, to lumberjacks & Great Lakes Sailors, to our present day farmers, the concert features handmade & historic instruments, including Indian courting flute, mountain banjo, dulcimer, & concertina.
All ages welcome.

The 50 minute program presents songs that introduce Wisconsin from the original inhabitants through the European immigration up to our present day farmers and Great Lakes sailors. David plays a variety of handmade and historic instruments including Indian Courting Flute, Mountain Banjo, Dulcimer, and Concertina in addition to Guitar. He includes songs of people's lives, like "Lovely Agnes", who came to Wisconsin to join her husband, an atlas of our waterways in "The Rivers of Wisconsin, and ditties like Carl Sandburg's "Jon Jonson". The audiences can sing along, assisted by slides of the chorus parts while a travelogue of Wisconsin slides and historical photos grace the verses. In "When I first came to this Land", new verses are improvised to the audience's suggestions.

David HB Drake has toured the State of Wisconsin presenting his WISCON-SING! show in over a thousand schools, libraries, senior citizen homes, and community centers. The program was also the subject of a television program by Milwaukee Public Television. Mr. Drake has been heard on Wisconsin Public Radio's "Simply Folk" program statewide during rebroadcasts of area folk festivals and request shows through his cassette albums of original music. His song "Kingdom Come", which appears in the WISCON-SING! program, was used in the Heritage Ensemble's Sesquicentennial programs "Gather by the Waters" in Milwaukee and "Great Dane" in Madison. David's KIDSTUFF album was the winner of the 1990 Parent's Choice Magazine Silver Award.