Willow Creek Folk School

Bringing back the ballad on the Great Plains of North America

The Willow Creek Folk School is a monthly livestream devoted to ballads and folksongs of the Great Plains. Composed and presented by Tom Isern, produced from the Salon on Willow Creek by Dr. Suzzanne Kelley.

The usual monthly date for a session of the WCFS is the third Friday of the month, 8pm Central, on the Facebook timeline of Plains Folk (facebook.com/plainsfolk). Also see the Willow Creek Songbag, a developing canon of balladry on the Great Plains.

What you are reading here is a landing page for the WCFS, providing orientation and links. Events for individual folk school sessions are created at the Facebook page of Plains Folk. We appreciate it if you like the Plains Folk page and tick “Going” for the individual events. The livestreams do not happen on this landing page, or at the event pages, but rather on the main Facebook timeline of Plains Folk. Find the session at the scheduled time there; we try to go live a few minutes early and get started around the top of the hour. If there is a snafu and connections are delayed, we post advisories. Say hi to Dr. Kelley on the chatline and join in the conversation around the video.

Although the third Friday of the month is our usual date, sometimes we have other fixed commitments. In such cases we reschedule and post notices.

A session of the WCFS normally comprises an opening theme, three feature ballads, a calendar ballad (original, appropriate to the season and circumstances), and a closing wrap. Every session has new material–newly discovered forgotten ballads, new texts of old standards, new light on old songs. Plus a certain amount of easygoing cvommentary about life on the plains. Canine members of the family commonly wander in and out.

This is your invitation to join us in an exploration of folk balladry on the Great Plains of North America: the Willow Creek Folk School.

Bringing back the ballad on the Great Plains of North America