Si Kahn 80th Birthday Celebration
Sunday, April 14, 2024
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM EDT
Online Event
From John McCutcheon:
April 14th will be a very special show. My dear friend of over 50 years, Si Kahn, turns 80-years-old on April 23rd and I’m throwing a Si Kahn 80th Birthday Party. Besides being a frequent partner-in-crime, Si and I co-wrote five consecutive Grammy-nominated albums, toured our Signs of the Times tour (with sign language artist, Susan Freundlich). Not incidentally, Si is the godfather of my son Peter. I was the first person to record a Si Kahn song, even before his incredible debut album New Wood.
So, I’ll reprise that first song, along with lots more of his great music. But, most wonderfully, there will be over a dozen artists, including Billy Bragg, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Tom Chapin, Jane Sapp, Holly Near, and Kathy Mattea, who’ll be chiming in with tales about Si and singing some of his classic songs. This will be an incredible evening and a chance to not only hear some great music, but honor the guy I declared, “The best damn songwriter in the South…in his spare time!” back in 1975.
100% of ticket sales will go to support the official launch at the concert of the Si Kahn Living Legacy, a new non-profit project that will make available in perpetuity those of Si’s songs, stories, song cycles for children and adults, poems, unpublished books, musicals, and other creative works that have never before been available to the public, and ultimately keep them alive and easily accessible after he’s gone.
Many people who know long-time FMO member Si Kahn’s music don’t know that he has Canadian roots. Sometime in the early 1900s, his paternal grandfather Gabriel Kahn deserted the Czar’s army, walked across Europe, and in England indentured himself to the Canadian Pacific Railway, a year’s work in exchange for passage to Canada. Gabe spent that year as a pick and shovel laborer for the CPR, then went to Winnipeg where he helped build the Royal Alexandra Hotel, carrying 50 pounds of brick or mortar on a board on his shoulder up a dozen flights of stairs to where the bricklayers were working. He and Si’s paternal grandmother Celia Leibovitz Kahn were married in Winnipeg around 1905. Heartbroken after their first child died shortly after birth, they moved to the States to be closer to family. Si often says that had that child not died, today he would be a proud Canadian.
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