The Catskill Mountain Foundation (map) will present folk musician Jim Planck in a solo performance on Saturday, May 22, at 8 pm at the Doctorow Center for the Arts (map), Main Street, Hunter. Planck will perform selections from his 2010 debut CD of original material—All Creation—as well as material from an as-yet untitled forthcoming CD.

“Folk music has such a wide range of meanings,” says Planck, “which is why I use the term ‘topical folk’ for what I write. My material tries to focus on concerns, problems, issues of the day—and perhaps bring a note of attention to them from the perspective, to use the phrase, of the shortness of life and the length of eternity. So my songs are an assortment of faith-based social commentary—the state of politics, environment, religion—things in those three areas that I am concerned about, and which I feel might benefit from being placed before the listener.”

“I spent a lot of time in my teens in the early ‘60s listening to artists who sang about the need for social change, and for a while it looked like positive results were going to come from all that. But by the end of that decade, acid rock had essentially supplanted folk, and partying replaced activism.”

“By the time I got out of the Marines in 1969 after a four-year hitch, the Summer of Love, peace, love, happiness, and the let’s change the world attitude was long gone—despite Woodstock.”

“That was the cultural after-image of a dream that hadn’t yet vaporized.”

“Some people kept it musically alive—most notably, for me, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick. Even during the commercial phase of Starship there’s always a song or three on each album that’s as relevant as their classic Blows Against the Empire album or the Airplane material.”

“And they held right with it on to the end of Airplane—anyone who’s never checked out Airplane’s Bark or Long John Silver is missing some great counter-culture material.”

“Not that my stuff sounds like that—hah, I wish.”

“But Airplane, Kantner, Slick—they were and remain a very, very strong influence on where my thoughts go when I write.”

“Kantner holds a Doctorate in teaching PoliRock 101, and he still out there doing it. Check out Starship’s Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty CD.”

“And certainly, it also goes back to the root folk commentary writers and performers of the early ‘60s—Seeger, the Kingston Trio, Baez, Dylan, Ochs, Peter, Paul and Mary, Trini Lopez, Tim Hardin, Tom Paxton, Donovan—you name them.”

“And then if you trace it back even further, where else can it land but with Woody Guthrie?”

“Good God, they used to teach every class to sing ‘This Land is Your Land’ in the 3rd or 4th grade back in the ‘50s. What did they think was going to happen when those kids became teenagers and young adults in the ‘60s?”

“Who knows, maybe they’re still teaching it, so we’ll see what happens.”

“Anyway, I try to use imagery that honors the legacy of all those people—not in the same class, obviously, but for what I can do, it tries to say something.”

“So All Creation is ten songs—well, actually, eight—that are too calm to be called protest songs, but are certainly songs expressing concern.”

“The two that aren’t are ‘Wiccopee’ and ‘Maplecrest Hoedown,’ which are essentially tributes to geographical areas instead. I spent my teen years in Wiccopee, in southern Dutchess County, when it was still all corn and hay fields, Black Angus pasture, and apple orchards. Sometimes you could walk down the center of the state highway in the middle of the day for 15 minutes at a time and never have a car come along. IBM wasn’t there. John Jay High School wasn’t there. That all changed when Interstate Route 84 got built. It went right through the center of fields that no one except the farmers and the local kids cared about or ever saw. So Wiccopee was a real innocent time—Beatles and all that—and the song is a look back at those years.”

“Maplecrest is a small hamlet in the Town of Windham, in Greene County’s Mountaintop section—now often also called the Catskill High Peaks. We had a dairy farm there when I was born at Greene County Memorial Hospital down in Catskill, and when we moved about four years later down to Dutchess County—not to Wiccopee—it was to Willowbrook Heights, a beautiful dead-end road just off Vassar Road, and where the backyard was Wappingers Creek, with forest on the other side.”

“That’s where I got hooked on nature and the environment—painted turtles, crayfish, garter snakes, snapping turtles, sunnies and rockies, purple loosestrife, dandelions, white pines, autumn leaves, blue jays, robins, cardinals—great stuff for somebody just starting out in life.”

“Anyway, both sets of grandparents were still back up in the Maplecrest and Hensonville area, so we were always going up there, and it was like a time out of time when we did.”

“Maplecrest was like nature camp—no matter the time of the year—so I have a lot of fond memories of it from the ‘50s.”

“My father and his brothers and their father, Otis Planck—like a lot of rural people—were all self-taught on a variety of instruments—fiddle, mandolin, guitar, accordion, mouth harp, that sort of stuff—and I was always told my grandfather—he died when I was still fairly young—used to play fiddle at the Saturday night square dances that used to take place in the area, especially, I guess, before World War II.’”

“So Maplecrest Hoedown is a tribute to my grandfather and that era, along with all the players of the succeeding generation, as well as my own memories of Big Hollow Road, Maplecrest, and the Hensonville flats.”

“The other songs are easier to explain, and if I’ve done them right, hopefully explain themselves when they’re heard. Like ‘Krypton’ is a reminder that our world is fragile; ‘Presidential Briefing’ was written to reflect Viet Nam and Iraq; ‘Like The Free’ is to not let 9/11 fade; ‘One Way’ is about personal relationships to the Creator; ‘The Honey Bee Song’ is about what is ridiculously called Colony Collapse Disorder; ‘Eyes Open Wide’ touches on a number of political and economic issues; ‘Nothing In Between’ is about not clouding everything with shades of gray; and ‘The Sons of Abraham’ is about the fact that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all trace back to the patriarch Abraham and the worship of God that he instituted.”

Tickets for Planck’s performance at the Doctorow Center for the Arts (map) are $15, and are available on line at www.catskillmtn.org, at Village Square Bookstore, in Hunter, or by calling 518 263 2063.