Concert Themes for 2024

Every song tells a story

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         VintageMusicConcerts trace musical, romantic & historic themes with

         clever lyrics, memorable tunes & amusing anecdotes. Delighted adults

         and seniors find their favorite tunes graced with wit and warmth, while

         hosts say our themes are easy to promote.

 

Crooners, Swingers and Idols — Concert of hits & ballads popularized by heart-throb crooners, Rat Pack swingers & TV-dinner idols of 1950s & 1960s — hit songs for a generation that found pop music on record players, transistor radios, juke boxes, the movies & sock-hops in high school gyms.

 

Vintage Guitar Roadshow — One hundred years ago today's vintage acoustic guitars were new instruments. Program offers syncopated ragtime, early jazz & rhythmic swing from 1920s, 1930s & 1940s played on vintage acoustic guitars from the same era. You'll hear back-in-the-day tunes — most of them familiar — that people heard when musicians initially performed them as new music.

Poets of the Prairie — Concert explores impact of 20th Century's most talented musical artists – Midwesterners including Woody Guthrie, Gene Autry, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Jimmy Webb, and Canadians including Ian Tyson and Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell & Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Kingston Trio Redux — Concert of well-known, much-loved tunes by the most successful combo of the 1960s, a trio that stretched the pop music scene with their brand of folk, folk-rock, calypso and show tunes they performed in small clubs, coffee houses, colleges and hugely successful LPs.

The Moon, The Stars and You — Concert summons the moon and stars for romantic insight with such classics as Blue Moon, Pennies From Heaven, Fly Me To The Moon, As Time Goes By, Stars Fell On Alabama, Beyond The Sea, Stardust, Dream A Little Dream Of Me & I'll See You In My Dreams. 

Roots of American Jazz — Concert of jazz hits heard for the first time in the late 1920s and early 1930s in speakeasies, saloons, juke joints, live on the radio and 78 rpm records crafted by popular and obscure cats  —  from Isham Jones, Ruth Etting and Bix Beiderbecke to Mildred Bailey, Bessie Smith, Rudey Vallée, Paul Whiteman, Louis Armstrong and Hoagy Carmichael.

MidCentury Melodies — Concert of pop music from 20th Century’s heart – songs by Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Jo Stafford, Vaughn Monroe, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Eydie Gormé, Patti Page, Eddy Arnold, Perry Como, Dinah Washington and others. 

She Did It Her Way — Concert honors lives, careers & tunes of female composers, vocalists & pop recording artists of 1950s & 1960s. Program also touts previously unheralded songwriters, including Dorothy Fields, Claire Rothrock, Cindy Walker and Sadie Vimmerstedt.

He Did It His Way — Concert honors lives, careers & tunes of male song writers, pop vocalists and recording artists of 1950s & 1960s. Program also celebrates unheralded composers from Joe Kosma Bart Howard, Ned Washington and J.D. Loudermilk, to Johnny Black, Neil Moret & Richard Whiting.

My Achy Breaky Heart — Concert of tear-stained ballads, steamy pop standards and love-struck laments from the 1950s and 1960s written by N.Y., L.A. and Nashville songwriters for movie, folk, Broadway and country music fans. Everyone deserves an hour of musical heartburn.

Great American Cabaret — In 1950s and 1960s couples dated, dined & danced in cabarets, juke joints, hotel ballrooms and nightclubs with fine dining, live music & dance floors. We offer ballads, swing standards and pop hit tunes of jazz combos, saloon singers and dance bands. 

Folk Song Boomers — Concert of the folk, protest, traditional & ethnic songs that were sing-along anthems, radio favorites and hit recordings for the post-WW II teenagers known as Baby Boomers.

Broadway Song Mementos — Tunes that Great White Way producers used to push dramatic and comedic storylines, tout ingénues, spur media publicity and draw extra income. Others chose sheet music sales, radio airplay, cast recordings, jukebox selections and conversion to feature movies.

Great American Songsters — Song and stories of the 20th Century composers, vocalists and musical scamps who spawned genres now known by their marketing monikers: jazz, folk, blues, Americana, swing, boogie-woogie, hokum, folk rock, country 'n western, and Brill Building pop.

Hollywood Souvenirs — Concert of songs that enabled Hollywood moguls to capitalize on the background music and storyline tunes in celluloid dramas, torrid romances & screwball comedies.

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                                                  © 2024 - Kenneth Lelen - All Rights Reserved

       Celebrating  25  Years of Concerts

Singing great American tunes while playing

 vintage acoustic guitars for adults & seniors.

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This year marks my 25th year performing for adult and senior audiences. Hosts have included libraries, retirement villages, arts & culture councils, fraternal groups, senior centers, churches, museums, community colleges, social clubs, coffeehouses and many other venues across the East Coast and Midwest.

I launched VintageMusicConcerts in 1999 after 28 years of writing for magazines, catalogs, newsletters and newspapers in Boston, New York, Trenton, Philadelphia and Washington DC. The last nine years included churning out feature articles and a weekly column for the Washington Post. But I decided I wanted something more productive than dealing with the swamp creatures of Washington and the scalawags of publishing. I was ready for something fresh. 

I had abandoned a budding career as a singer and guitarist during college and now, 30 years later, I began looking for a musical niche to exploit. After a year playing open mics, smokey bars and radio shows for free publicity and something called "exposure," I was invited to perform for residents at a retirement village in Bucks County PA.

That night I discovered the joy I could bring an audience of adults and seniors. I also felt the modest glow of getting paid to play vintage guitars and sing great old tunes for an appreciative audience.

Vintage songs for vintage audiences 

I hatched a plan to produce concerts with me playing vintage guitars, singing vintage songs and performing for vintage audiences. That was the concept.

My events were never billed as "legacy concerts" or "tribute concerts," to name the clichés I sometimes heard. Nor would I offer "musical therapy" or "lifelong learning." In small venues people want entertainment with a side of education, so I knew they'd enjoy attending live concerts more than listening to the tinny noises on a cell phone. I also knew they'd like hearing songs they heard in their younger days. 

After minimal research, I began promoting this venture to activity directors who booked and paid for concerts with my target audience — seniors at continuing care retirement centers, libraries, arts & culture venues, museums, travel clubs, and associations of retired professionals with a budget for monthly programs. 

It soon was clear people enjoyed my stories and songs in the context of a 60- to 90-minute entertainment. Within five years, I averaged 140 one-night stands a year while I hauled my sound system, six to eight guitars and a small suitcase between Maine and Florida, and west toward Ohio and Michigan. No overnight sensation by anyone's measure, I was earning hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year with this enterprise.

 

Oh, the stories they'd tell 

Early on, I learned fascinating things about 20th Century Americans and their favorite songs. My audiences — folks in their 80s, 90s and 100s — would hum and sing and tap their feet to the music, especially if I was in sync with their mood. Then, afterward, they'd come up to me to talk about the music of their youth and about their younger days. 

They told me who they dated, their favorite songs, dance steps, where they grew up, places they visited and what they did with siblings, friends and beaus. The intimacy of these concerts led them to reveal what they saw, sensed and felt — private things that had happened to them back in the day when the songs I sang that night still belonged to them. 

One woman, she called herself a "Jersey girl," recalled it cost a quarter to get into RKO Paramount Theater in December 1942 to see a movie and hear Frank Sinatra sing a few songs to an audience of teen-aged girls. She didn't have the money for admission, so she climbed the fire escape to enter the theater from the roof.

Once inside, she had to fight for a seat because none of the other bobby soxers in the audience would give theirs up after one of Frank's sets. By late afternoon, the aroma in the theater was breath-taking, she added. 

Another woman, who worked as a soda jerk in her father's Indiana drugstore, remembered making milkshakes, lime rickeys and one-at-a-time sodas (syrup + ice + seltzer, five cents for a small, ten cents for a large) for teenage boys and girls who met after school at the drugstore, dropped dimes in the juke box or hid out in the phone booths. 

Yet another woman, a Rockette dancer at Radio City Music Hall in the 1940s, described an awkward date she had one night with a stagedoor johnny named Mickey Rooney. "He came to the back door looking for a date with a big bouquet of flowers," she told me. "So, I went out with the guy, but I didn't marry the S.O.B. You know he was married eight times?" 

One night, after a concert in Florida, I met the pilot of a Flying Fortress — B-17 bomber. He told me he had flown more than 25 missions and survived miserable ack-ack attacks over Europe in World War II. He could barely walk and eased his awkward gait with a cane. Yet he smiled as he recounted intimate details of a disastrous blind date his sister had set up for him. He also repeated the words to a few of the songs I sang that night. 

One time, to announce my next song, Herman Hupfeld's 1931 classic, "As Time Goes By," made famous in the 1942 film, "Casablanca," I told them, "It's about star-crossed lovers." People in the room giggled. They broke out in smiles. Then, they gushed with misty tears.

 

In memory's grip

My audiences revealed things to me they never told anyone else.

The stories they shared could summon a long-ago lover's tryst. Or unmask a lover's double-cross. Or embrace a torch that still shined for a misbegotten cad. As well, a story might summon from memory's depths the smile of a father, brother or son lost in the war or the perfume of a woman they once dated. 

I couldn't resist telling my latest audience about my encounters with the people I'd met at a previous concert. I began to fashion their stories, tall tales and secrets into anecdotes, humorous stories and pithy intros. Each concert would expand my repertoire of narrative accounts for the next concert.

Eventually, I spun these yarns into more than two dozen themes that traced musical, romantic and historic ideas. Each concert employed the memorable melodies and sophisticated lyrics of their favorite songs from back in the day.

But time marched on and audiences began slipping away. Concertgoers included younger and younger cohorts, folks who came of age during the 1940s, then the 1950s and 1960s.

Likewise, the stories and songs in my themes moved out from the 1920s and 1930s and into the 1940s and 1950s. Today, most of my programs are aimed at people who call themselves Baby Boomers — the folks who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s.

So, as I perform VintageMusicConcerts across the East Coast this year as I have for 25 years, new concert themes ideas continue to arise. So stay tuned. 

 

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©  2024  Kenneth  Lelen  —  All  Rights  Reserved

         2023  Concert  Schedule  —  FINAL

Date             Venue  /  Host                        Location                                     Concert  Theme
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Jan     30       Milltown Public Library, Milltown NJ                        —        Folk Song Boomers

                       ––––––––––––––––––––––      Women’s History Month      ––––––––––––––––––––––

Mar     1         Springhill, Erie PA                                                              —          She Did It Her Way

Mar     2         Concordia South Hills, Pittsburgh PA                        —          She Did It Her Way

Mar     5         Dover Public Library, Dover DE                                  —          She Did It Her Way

Mar   11         Bloomfield Public Library, Bloomfield NJ                —          She Did It Her Way

Mar   12         North Oaks, Baltimore MD                                               —          She Did It Her Way

Mar   18         Pines Village, Whiting NJ                                                 —         She Did It Her Way

Mar   26         Middlesex Public Library, Middlesex NJ                  —          She Did It Her Way

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Apr   12         Heath Village, Hackettstown NJ                                     —           The Moon, The Stars and You

Apr   22         Mahwah Public Library, Mahwah NJ                         —           When Love Was Nifty

Apr   29         Ardsley Public Library, Ardsley NY                            —            MidCentury Melodies

May   19         Concordia South Hills, Pittsburgh PA                       —            Crooners, Swingers and Idols

May   20         Homewood, Frederick MD                                             —            She Did It Her Way

May   30         Daughters of Miriam, Clifton NJ                                —            The Moon, The Stars and You

June     7         Ardsley Seniors, Ardsley NY                                         —            Crooners, Swingers and Idols

June   18         Searstone, Cary NC                                                          —            Vintage Guitar Roadshow

June   19         Penick Village, Southern Pines NC                              —            Juke Joint Jive

June   20         Springmoor, Raleigh NC                                               —             MidCentury Melodies

June   22         Arbor Acres, Winston-Salem NC                                  —            Crooners, Swingers and Idols

July      8         Old Bridge Public Library, Old Bridge NJ              —            The Moon, The Stars and You

July    14          Matawan Aberdeen Library, Matawan NJ            —            The Moon, The Stars and You

Aug    10          Sea Isle City Library, Sea Isle City NJ                      —              Crooners, Swingers and Idols

Aug    25           Kirkland Village, Bethlehem PA                                —            When Love Was Nifty

Aug     31          Wesley Enhanced Living, Doylestown PA             —             MidCentury Melodies

Sep     26          Westfield Public Library, Westfield NJ                 —             Poets of the Prairie

Oct       4           Greendale Mens Club, Worcester MA                     —             The Moon, The Stars and You

Oct       4           Elms @ Briarwood, Worcester MA                           —             In The Mood

Oct       5           RiverMead, Peterborough NH                                     —             Crooners, Swingers and Idols

Oct       7           Ventress Memorial Library, Marshfield MA        —            The Moon, The Stars and You

Oct       8           Fuller Village, Milton MA                                            —             Crooners, Swingers and Idols

Oct     19            Springhill, Erie PA                                                         —             He Did It His Way 

Oct     20           Concordia South Hills, Pittsburgh PA                    —             The Moon, The Stars and You 

Oct     21            Homewood, Frederick MD                                            —             MidCentury Melodies

Nov      4            Avalon Public Library, Avalon NJ                            —             The Moon, The Stars and You

Nov      8            Heath Village, Hackettstown NJ                                 —             Crooners, Swingers and Idols

 Nov    16            Pine Run, Doylestown PA                                              —             MidCentury Melodies

Nov    30            The Culpepper, Culpepper VA                                    —             Crooners, Swingers and Idols

Dec       2            North Oaks, Parksville MD                                          —             Great American Cabaret

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                             ©  2023 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved