The WFPA is a member supported music community and educational effort. Our mission statement: To gather the global community of front porch minded musicians and help them do good work, bring roots music education into schools free of charge, and enhance communities by redirecting the tremendous energies of local musicians. We call our members “SongFarmers.”
A “SongFarmer” is any artist who uses their music to make their families, their hometowns, their careers better. Join the WFPA, become a SongFarmer, start a hometown SongFarmers Music Chapter, support roots music education in schools and so much more. Visit our website for information: www.songfarmers.org
BECOME A MEMBER and get FREE TICKETS to the 2019 GATHERING OF SONGFARMERSCLICK HERE
SONGFARMER iPHONE Album: The full-length CD was recorded completely on an iPhone 6P with a special recording app and Ear Trumpet mics at the log cabin studio in Kentucky. The CD has several new compositions like Hippy Luv, Sunday Afternoon, standards like Little Maggie (on the banjo) … plus the story song written in the tradition of Alice’s Restaurant called “Pamper Creek” based on an actual experience MJ had while living in Mousie KY.
SongFarmer iPhone CD – 2018 Roots Album of the Year
RECORD REVIEW BY BOB EVERHART, President, National Traditional Country Music Association
MICHAEL JOHNATHON
SongFarmer: Pickin’ & Peckin’ on a Porch
A lot of my followers remember when Michel Johnathon came to our National Old Time Music Festival. He was an astonishing folk singer at that time, and still is however he is much much more successful.
He went on to establish WoodSongs, an incredible ‘live’ folk music radio show emanating from the east. He became so well established with this program, he is now working hard to bring home-spun music back to the front porch. In other words, he wants to gather the global community of front porch minded musicians and help them do good work, bring roots music education into the schools free of charge, and enhance communities by redirecting the tremendous energies of local musicians. Pretty much what we’ve been doing with a festival the last 43 years, trying to keep the front-porch sound of ‘real’ old-timey, country, folk, bluegrass music as a destination.
This new adventure by Michael Johnathon’s is also part of his WoodSongs creation. This new SongFarmer CD is a very nicely done folk album, with all the requisites of a super good folk artist, utilizing only his own acoustic guitar and/or his own drop-thumb banjo. Very nicely done, and certainly a good representation of what ‘front porch’ picking would be like. How cool is that? He calls the banjo a song farmer’s plow. So are guitars and mandolins and banjos and fiddles, all of those down-home front-porch instruments that were so incredibly important to rural life, when rural life was really rural.
Today ‘rural’ is thousands of acres of corn and soybean, and all those other very profitable pursuits, but in Michael Johnathon’s mind, it’s also the ‘music’ that saw the rural folks through their hard times, and it’s also the music that should still be not only recognized, but esteemed. Super good CD Michael, I especially liked your ‘modern’ approach to what folk music used to be all about, namely writing and singing about ‘problems’ as well as ‘cures.’ Your song “Gun” is exactly that, and so needed in your age group these days, well any age group.
Henry David Thoreau “To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of Arts.”
WoodSongs Front Porch Association
MICHAEL JOHNATHON
No Comments