Old Town School of Folk Music

The Old Town School of Folk Music is a Chicago teaching and performing institution that launched the careers of many notable folk music artists. Founded by Folk musicians Frank Hamilton and Win Stracke, and Dawn Greening, the School opened in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago in 1957 (the original location has since been demolished). It began by offering guitar and banjo lessons in a communal teaching style and hosting performances by well-known folk musicians. Currently the school is led by executive director Bau Graves and has an enrollment of about 6,000 students per week, 2,700 of them children.

"We wanted to make music accessible to everyone, we wanted to bypass the formal educative type of note-reading you'd get in a music academy and emphasize the social aspects of music. We wanted to see involvement by people who wouldn't normally think they had musical talent, and bring out whatever they had."

The Old Town School was founded by musicians Win Stracke and Frank Hamilton and opened December 1, 1957. Stracke was a classically trained singer and Hamilton was a young multi-instrumentalist and teacher of folk music; Hamilton had previously studied under Bess Lomax Hawes, daughter of folklorist John Lomax. Stracke and Hamilton met at the Gate of Horn nightclub in Chicago where they were both performing. Together Hamilton and Stracke developed a classroom technique based upon traditional oral and folk teaching methods: listening, watching, trial and error, and playing by ear. Where other music schools taught sight reading and performance, Stracke and Hamilton wanted the Old Town School "method" to retain its emphasis on participation and development of aural skills. Early Classes were held in a dining room at the home of co-founder Dawn Greening

Several of the early faculty at the Old Town School were past members of Win Stracke's the "I Come For to Sing" review. A folk review performed by a rotating group of artists, the program was a variety show in which each program revolved around a particular topic, the songs and readings presented would all deal with that topic. Win Stracke, Studs Terkel, Big Bill Broonzy, and Fleming Brown were all members of "I Come For to Sing" at different times. The school would also publish a folk magazine by the same name from 1975-1987.

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