Mark your calendar. Calais' “Tom Banjo” Azarian joins Tim Jennings and his band Sanctuary Mutts, for a family-friendly evening of music and storytelling on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 30, 7-9 PM, in the historic Four Corners Schoolhouse in East Montpelier. 

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​If you don’t know about Tom’s hand-cranked cranky show, where have you been?  His engaging personality, high lonesome tenor, ringing old-time banjo, and colorful illustrations bring ballads and broadsides to vivid life. He has (in the words of a recent Seven Days cover story) “achieved something like folk legend status, performing his brand of eccentric homemade theater— a folk art all on its own— at nightclubs, theaters and birthday parties from Burlington to Austin, Texas."​​​​

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Tim Jennings has been a leading folk storyteller for over 40 years, working in schools, libraries, theaters, coffeehouses, first nights, colleges, and festivals around New England and across the country. He has a special tale to perform, one that he heard fifty years from an older lady who got it from her grandmother;  a transplanted Irish tale of three brothers, a kidnapped princess, and a little man with a red cap on his head. Hearing a traditional tale in unbroken oral tradition is vanishingly rare, and exciting, and that got him started on the his quest to “tell’em right.” 

 

Tim’s current music project is the trio “Sanctuary Mutts:” songs and instrumentals from a variety of traditions,  featuring Tim’s English concertina, Calais’s Grant Orenstein on guitar, and St. Johnsbury’s Barry Moore on Mandolin. Tim’s previous music group was the Irish duo “Sheefra,” with his late wife, Leanne Ponder playing harp.

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This is the fifth, and possibly final, such Thanksgiving variety show in this pleasantly intimate one-room-schoolhouse venue. Don’t miss it, if anyways possible.

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Saturday November 30, 7-9 PM. Four Corners Schoolhouse  945 Vincent Flats Rd. East Montpelier, VT. 
(Pass East Montpelier Elementary school, bear right at the fork, it’s on your immediate left.)
$10 admission. Info: folktale@mac.com