Hudson Valley and Woodstock stalwarts joined with Woodstock Day School students to honor Pete Seeger in a three-hour concert which included Seeger songs, classics from the folk music catalogue and their own originals. Funds raised benefitted the Woodstock Day School and the Hudson River sloop The Clearwater. Performers’ ages ranged from six or eight into their 80s, and the styles ranged at least that far, from grammar-school chorale to both Guthries and lap steel guitar to Louis Armstrong.

Happy Traum (introductions: “I’m Suzanne Cadgene from Elmore.” “Hi, I’m Happy.”) emcee’d the event, which boasted perhaps 20 working musicians and 30 students. Onstage, the world’s foremost lap steel guitarist and Woodstock native Cindy Cashdollar, multi-instrumentalist, producer and Bob Dylan/Levon Helm bandleader Larry Campbell, multi-instrumentalist, composer and poet David Amram, and another multi-instrumentalist, Eric Weissberg (who gained fame with “Dueling Banjos” from the film Deliverance), joined other well-known Woodstock artists who performed in the professional but intimate manner familiar to anyone who’s been to a house concert.

For this grateful audience member, highlights included the “What a Wonderful World” with David Amram on piano and Larry Campbell on jazz guitar, and the heartbreakingly beautiful harmonies of Elizabeth Mitchell and Dan Littleton, who led Toshi Seeger’s revised version of “Turn, Turn, Turn,” five verses specifically written for children of all ages. The finale, with the entire cast and Cindy Cashdollar’s inimitable lap steel licks, sent us home—appropriately—on the “Midnight Special.”

– Suzanne Cadgene