Get your festival tix at folkfest.org – under age 12 admitted free
Folk festivals offer both a trove of traditional music and a built-in opportunity to encourage young musicians. Today’s practicing kids could be tomorrow’s main stage acts. To make a place for young musicians, fiddler and teacher Donna Hébert created the Great Groove Band at Old Songs Festival in 1998, expanding to include a band at Philly Folk Fest in 2006. She still organizes and arranges the music and daughter Molly Hebert-Wilson, a Philadelphia singer, Wee Folk teacher, vocal coach and songwriter, now directs the program. Our goal has been to foster a lifelong love of traditional music and a generation later, we know it’s working.
Who plays in the band?
School-age musicians (ages 5-18) bring acoustic instruments and voices. All instruments, all levels. In six hours of focused rehearsal over three days, they experience the joy of music – learning, arranging, and performing fiddle tunes and folk songs by ear. We welcome all participants regardless of learning styles.
Working cooperatively, they prepare three numbers for a Sunday afternoon performance on the main stage. Over the weekend, the band’s transformation from chaos to harmony is both remarkable and predictable, proving that music truly is our birthright!
Sight-reading music is optional. We post audio files, sheet music, and song lyrics online in spring but if you miss these, we teach it all at the festival.
The repertoire ranges from Amazing Grace to Norwegian waltzes to Irish jigs and Scottish marches and Old-Time reels and folk songs from traditions around the world. Players are immersed in melodies, chords, rhythms and lyrics, sometimes in a foreign language. They learn a lot, but there’s even more going on.
The goal is for them to feel connected to the music and to each other like a band, to have eye contact, to communicate with each other and the audience. This is not a recital. Teachers play with them onstage and our rhythm players support their performance only as much as necessary. We all played with our mentors as young people – that’s how we developed the traditional repertoire and styles that we teach. Our crew transforms even the youngest from shy newbies to band members in three days!
