"My goal is to make our stories real. Many people view history as a dusty collection of names and dates; not as the dramatic lives of real people who had tremendous impact on their families, their communities and their nation. These songs and stories are meant to be shared between classroom, parent, family and child. I am thrilled to help children discover this rich part of our culture.”

My love of both music and children has inspired me to share with children the kind of music that is timeless.  I want to share songs that tell stories, that inspire, that teach, and that arouse the imagination and creativity of both the performer and the audience.   I love to tell a good story and see how it affects the audience. Using my voice, guitar, harmonica, and my extensive experience performing for people of all ages, I offer something that is unique. 

Children are stimulated by songs that encourage their participation. I encourage acting out parts in a song, using hand gestures or getting involved in the rythm.  Music is completely subjective. This is particularly true for children and I incorporate their participation into each performance.

One of the things that is different about what I do is to employ songs that reach into America’s past.  I offer music from The United States as well as Ireland, Scotland and England.  The wealth of music from a culture as diverse as the American  cultureis truly unique.  Our culture draws influences from so many places, making something completely new. American songwriters such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger helped to shape American folk music and became an enormous influence on our popular music as well. You don't need to look very far these days to find quotes from Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen or even Christy Moore about the relevence of Woody Guthrie. Still other unknown sources have left us songs that have been passed down and become “traditional” over the years.  These are the songs of our childhood and the songs of our parents’ childhood. These are the songs I love to perform: songs of occupations, travel, growing up, and growing old; songs relaying stories about family, learning, dreams, friends and about us.  These are the songs about life!   

I like to present songs that a child’s parents or grandparents grew up with that they can share together helping to create important family time. It is important for a home to be filled with song. What better tool do we have than music to inspire storytelling about our own upbringing?  What better way can we share our memories of school life, of family members that have passed away and of reinforcing the concept that all of us were children?  We all have dreams and we all learned about ourselves by learning about those wonderfully influential people that are our parents and grandparents and what they thought and felt and sang. This family sharing time is invaluable.

Music offers an opportunity to change inhibition to self-confidence.  A child can offer ideas about harmonies, finger plays, gestures and even responses to questions in the songs.  As adults, once we encourage children to actively participate, we can then focus our attention on their suggestions.  This can be very powerful.

Music is universal. Music is meant to be shared, explored and re-interpreted again and again. Folk music offers the most easily shaped example of this.  One can write songs about absolutely everything, from historical events and families, to songs about driving in the car.  Through these songs, we have some fine examples of relating our own view of the world and how different experiences shape our attitudes about others and ourselves.     

In short, I love music and I love children; I am passionate about performing music for children. I would love to do my part to bring families together by bringing music into their homes.