Hard Luck Café: Lonesome Traveler + Bill Lauter

Lonesome Traveler — a narrative musical about legendary folk groups The Weavers and The Almanac Singers and featuring the songs of iconic folk singers Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger — will be performed by Long Islanders Ira Perlman and Denise Romas during the monthly Hard Luck Café concert series co-presented by the Folk Music Society of Huntington and the Cinema Arts Centre (423 Park Avenue, Huntington) in the Cinema’s Sky Room on Wednesday, January 15, from 7pm-10pm. Huntington-based singer and guitarist Bill Lauter will perform a short opening set featuring his renditions of songs from that era.

An open mic, for which sign-up is at 6:30pm, precedes the concert.  Tickets are $20 ($15 for Cinema Arts Centre/FMSH members) and may be purchased online at cinemaartscentre.org or at the box office through the evening of the show.

Hays, Guthrie and Seeger performed together with The Almanac Singers beginning in the 1940s. Their songs were part of the musical soundtrack for the American labor movement and the struggles for social justice, influenced generations of other musicians, and have been popularized and taught in public schools throughout the country.  In Lonesome Traveler, you’ll hear and might even sing along to such classics as “Goodnight Irene,” “If I Had a Hammer,” “Talking Union Blues,” “Tzena, Tzena,” and “Union Maid.” The songs will be interspersed with narrative based on/excerpted from Doris Willens’ biography of Lee Hays entitled Lonesome Traveler, which was also Hays’ theme song.

A past president of the Folk Music Society of Huntington, Ira Perlman has appeared at numerous Long Island folk venues performing both well-known and obscure folk songs. Denise Romas — who immersed herself in the music of Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez at an early age — performs a repertoire of original songs and covers at venues across Long Island.