Terry Kitchen Headlines PVFS October Song and Story Swap

Source: Pioneer Valley Folklore Society

Singer Songwriter Terry Kitchen will be featured at the Pioneer Valley Folklore Society’s October Song and Story Swap. The event will take place at First Church, 165 Main St. in Amherst, at 7 p.m. on Saturday, October 4. Parking is available in the lot behind the church. There is no admission fee – a hat is passed during the guest artist’s performance for donations, all of which go to the artist with a suggested minimum donation of $7.50.

Attendees at this Song and Story Swaps will be invited to contribute a song or story on the topic of
“Dreams” during an opening round of sharing. At song and story swaps, people of all experience levels gather to share stories and songs that are traditional, newly written, or of personal experiences. You can tell, sing, or lead everyone in singing, or request a song or story.  Listeners are welcome. The Song & Story Swap is open to members of the public of all ages.

Terry Kitchen is an award winning contemporary folk singer, musical storyteller, and song writer.. His keen eye for detail, fearless emotional honesty, and knowledge of and empathy for his subjects combine with his skills as a composer, singer and guitarist to take the listener on a journey to the heart of each song.

Terry Kitchen was born in New Jersey, and grew up in Easton, PA on the music of the 1960s before moving to small town Findlay, Ohio in the ’70s.  He attended Occidental College in LA (with Barack Obama) and G.I.T. in
Hollywood, then moved to Boston where he played in the ’80s rock band Loose Ties (the basis for his novel Next Big Thing) before realizing that acoustic music was the most natural setting for his distinctive narrative songwriting.

For the past twenty-five years he has performed on the New England and national folk scenes at clubs and coffeehouses including Club Passim and The Nameless Coffeehouse in Massachusetts, The Postcrypt Coffeehouse and Cafe Lena in New York, Godfrey Daniels in PA, and The Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, and at festivals including Falcon Ridge, the South Florida Folk Festival, VT Solarfest, and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.  He’s appeared in 20 states, and Canada.  He has released twelve CDs, and his songs have appeared in numerous films. 

His songs have won the Mid- Atlantic and USA song contests and been runner-up in the John Lennon Song Contest and have been recorded by Barbara Kessler, Mara Levine, Rebecca Lynch, Andrew Dunn, and Janet Feld. Terry also leads songwriting workshops and is the coordinator of the Nashville Songwriters Association International Boston workshop.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Craig Harris has called Terry Kitchen “One of New England’s best songwriters.”

For more on Kitchen, visit https://terrykitchen.com/.

The monthly Song & Story Swap, now in its thirtieth year, is sponsored by the Pioneer Valley Folklore Society of western Massachusetts. Visit the Folklore Society website at https://pvfs.us.