Ron Franz at Grand Cities Art Fest

Ron Franz will be one of several entertainers at this year’s Grand Cities Art Fest on June 13-14 in Town Square in Grand Forks. Last year, the event brought 35,000 people to downtown Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, making it one of biggest street fairs in the region. The Grand Cities Art Fest features 144 artist booths this year, displaying jewelry, paintings, photography, woodworking, glass items, ceramics, metalworks, textiles, and natural soaps and oils.

Entertainment is being shepherded by James Feist, the frontman for the North River Ramblers. Refrain Magazine will post a complete listing of live music acts for the Grand Cities Art Fest, with set times as soon as it has been finalized.

In the meantime, here’s a closer look at Ron Franz, a Grand Forks singer/songwriter, who will return this year for his second Art Fest… …….

Ron at Cash v Dylan

For forty years, Ron Franz has been writing and performing in clubs, coffeehouses, festivals, and benefits, all over the Upper Midwest. He’s opened for Nashville country singer/songwriter James Talley, and shared the stage with jazz great Duke Robillard. He was a regular at the Urban Stampede and appeared often at the Greater Grand Forks First Night, the Heritage Festival (East Grand Forks), Bluegrass Sundays, Winterthing, Summerthing, and KidsThing. Franz has performed at the Heart River Folk Festival near Mandan ND, the Sioux River Folk Festival in Canton. SD, and at the Sioux Expo in Sioux Falls, SD. He was also a finalist in the Minnesota Folk Festival Songwriters Contest two years in a row. Franz’ first first full-length CD, With My Eyes Closed, was released in 2004, and a new one will be out later this year.

Like many songwriters, Franz started out on the piano, beginning lessons when he was in fourth grade. “That lasted until about seventh grade,” he said in an interview. “I stopped liking the piano. I think it was because the piano wasn’t tuned. I didn’t recognize the problem and neither did my parents, though my mother played.”

His mother, however, was determined that he continue music, encouraging him to play French horn in high school, eventually buying him a guitar. He took acoustic guitar lessons for two years, mostly out of obligation, not realizing at the beginning just how important that instrument would be.

“I listened to folk musicians like the Limelighters, the Kingston Trio,” Franz said. “My brother Jerry and I watched ‘Hootenanny’ on TV. We lived in Chicago, and WMFT played roots music on The Midnight Special program. I also bought a few albums and practically wore them out. I had The Roots of Lightening Hopkins, and albums by Big Joe Williams, Pete Seeger, early Duke Ellington, the Beatles, and Donavan. I had a couple of Dave Von Ronk, Gambler’s Blues and Dave Von Ronk Sings the Blues.”

Franz also listened to Chicago performers like Bob Gibson, Hamilton Camp, and Steve Goodman, sometimes seeing them live at the Old Town School of Folk Music and clubs like the now defunct The Earl of Old Town, Somebody Else’s Troubles, and Holsteins. These stellar writers soon had young Franz writing his own verses.

“Over the years, there’s been a lot of bad writing. One of my first songs had an Up With People feel,” he admitted. It was heavily poetic and typical of much of the popular folk writing at the time that tried to emphasize the positive. A renewed interest in Woody Guthrie brought what Dale Ann Bradley calls story songs to the genre. Tom Paxton followed with sweetness mixed with social consciousness, and Dylan brought the political to the music scene. All of these components eventually found their way into Franz’s body of work. But for every keeper, there was a stack of starts and throw-aways.

Franz spent the 1970s playing traditional ballads and folk covers in small clubs in Chicago and Cincinnati. He sat in on folk jams in peoples’ homes, especially when he started playing at the local coffeehouse, The Station, in Loveland, Ohio. This community of people encouraged his songwriting and offered a forum for his new work. When he moved to North Dakota, it was much more difficult to find coffeehouses and other venues in which to perform. He accompanied singers and played in churches and at community functions.

During the late 1980s and 1990s, active songwriting took a backseat as Franz concentrated on playing lead electric guitar and singing with Crosswire, a locally touring country/rock dance band. They did covers with one or two of Franz’s originals thrown in.

Franz continued to write and work on developing an acoustic act that often included his young son Scott, who played blues harmonica and hand drums. By the time Scott was fourteen, he was in his own band, Zen Mothers, and chose not to play with his father any more. (Scott and his band eventually cut two CDs and mounted two national tours.)

Ron Franz continued to tour regionally with Crosswire for ten years. When one of the members of Crosswire died suddenly, the band dissolved. Franz then focused on his own work. With few distractions, he let the process unfold, and a wealth of songs came pouring out.

Over time, Franz’s songs evolved from lyrical poems meant for the head to song portraits that touched the heart. One of the first of these musical portraits was “Catherine,”a song about a woman whom society says had diminished capacity who used to care for babies at a state facility until someone in power felt that she should be paid, and the program was dismantled. Sitting in front of the television at a group home, watching children on the shows, she quickly told anyone, “I once had children.” Franz elevated her response to poetry, showing her unfathomable ability to nurture and to love the children in her care, displaying wisdom that many parents fail to see, the ability to let go and let a child grow even if it is away from her. Franz’s words rang out:
“I once had children, much like these,/Many, many children not my own./I fed them, clothed them, taught them all I could./I gave them up as they moved on.”

Franz wrote another song about a schizophrenic father taking his son to a noisy, busy arcade and how he desperately tries to keep it together so that his child can have a good time with him. And then there is “The Virgin Mary,” a song that calls into question the effects of modern mental health strategies.

And, “Denny and His Guitar” not only tells of the Crosswire band member’s positive nature but has a verse depicting all of his favorite songs. “He was ‘Crazy’ for ‘Georgia;’ it was ‘Always on (His) Mind,’/And we loved to hear his harmony to ‘Wonderful Tonight.’/Though ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ always had his sympathy,/Denny’s left us on his way to find that ‘Unchained Melody.’” Franz recorded that and gave it to Denny’s family and members of the band.

Franz has also written funny songs about couples not listening, people driving and multitasking, and the inability to plan ahead. Other songs are openly romantic like his bluesy “Mama, Put a Slow Record On,” and “The Light On the Bed Table” and “Now Evening Is Here.”

But it is Franz’s “This Kitchen Floor” that may be the song that he leaves for posterity. Written after hearing an NPR broadcast about grandparents raising their grandchildren, Franz wrote a ballad about just such a grandmother and her whole life history. It starts: “This kitchen floor, it’s felt the feet of children, come running home from school and out to play./My old man laid it; it’s made of good linoleum/It’s held up all these years, though it’s now begun to sway.” The song ends with: “The time I didn’t have for mine I’m giving to her daughter/For them both I wash and wax this kitchen floor.”

Though these songs and more came out of regular writing sessions, Franz said he’s always written even when they were nothing more than spontaneous little ditties about things that happened to his children, about making chili or how cold it was or playing in the sandbox. “It was good practice, keeping the skill of rhyming phrases sharp,” he said.

Today, his writing sessions are almost daily and require larger blocks of time. “Mozart claimed that the whole work, the whole symphony, would come all at once,” Franz said. “That’s not at all the case for me. There are certain flashes, then you fill it in. Sometimes, it comes very quickly. Sometimes I wake up with a tune in my head…. Once, I was dreaming about Dave Von Ronk, and I woke up with the tune and a phrase for a song called, ‘Bringing Johnny Home.’ I wrote the verses and finished it that night. I consider it a gift, sort of channeling Dave Von Ronk so I figured I’d better put it down.”

In the summer of 2004, Ron recorded and produced a 14-song full-length CD, With My Eyes Closed. It was a CD that was long overdue and one that his daughter had kept asking for, afraid that playing the two taped performances she had recorded years ago would break and those songs would be lost forever.

The CD was, of course, sent to family and friends and to some radio stations. “A lot of them were sent to my labor union and area Democrats,” Franz said. “And one even found its way to the Democratic National Convention as North Dakota’s gift to their silent auction.” Others went to Peter Rowan, JJ. Grey of Mofro, Cameron Tapp of Bourne, Jeep Rosenberg, and Bob Bovee & Gail Heil. “I know that Bob Bovee at least listened to it because he sent me a note about it and so did Jeep Rosenberg.” Dale Ann Bradley and Kelly Richey also have some compilations of material.

A union activist, Franz has kept in touch with other political songwriters. “I’ve shared songs with Paul McKinnon, who writes union songs, too. I think political songs are hard to write in a sense. You have to feel deeply about an issue to do it at all. You need to be accurate about an issue or it’s pointless to do,” he said. “Having done a couple, I’m just not sure where you’d sing them, except at rallies.”

Open heart surgery a year after With My Eyes Closed was released spurred Franz to write more and keep recording. “I expect to be doing this indefinitely. It feeds me,” he said. “The only trick is getting an audience for it….Maybe when I’m 85, some twenty-year-old will discover me like they did R. L.. Burnside and say, ‘This man has lived!’ Then I’ll have a year’s worth of fame and die from too many women.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Issues, June 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.