By Isaac DeVille
For The State News
Amanda Shuler is proud of her Irish heritage.
So proud, in fact, that she was one of about 60 participants in an Irish folk-singing workshop Saturday at Hannah Community Center. Not even a recent surgery could keep her away.
"(The workshop is) about camaraderie," Shuler said. "Everyone makes a mistake, but everyone laughs it off. It's about accepting you for your mistakes.
"Maybe you can't sing, but everyone recognizes that everyone is learning themselves and aren't to be ridiculed."
The 2007 Mid-Winter Singing Festival was held this past weekend at Hannah Community Center, 819 Abbott Road, and featured workshops on different styles of music — including Irish folk music, 1970s folk songs and show tunes. For the fifth year, people both young and old showed their willingness to come back to the festival.
Julie Levy-Weston, membership coordinator for the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse, which put on the event, couldn't agree more.
"The community today doesn't have many chances to sing together," Levy-Weston said. "Music has become a passive activity for most people, and here it's still active. Here, we have the fun of making music an activity."
The event's organizers aim to keep it going next year so people may still have a place to sing as a group and enjoy the history of the community.
The event had four different rooms, each with its own eclectic take on folk music.
Every hour, people packed into rooms to try different styles of music. Established folk musicians invited the crowd to participate by dancing, singing and laughing.
Corrine Rockow, who has been a folk singer for more than 20 years, led a "Painting with Your Voice," workshop.
People joyfully yodeled as Rockow conducted the roughly 40 participants in song.
During one song, "Owl Moon," she had the roomful of adults hooting like owls, howling, whooping and even cooing with more conviction than an evangelical tent revival.
Rockow said her workshop "Painting with Your Voice" because of the "invisible canvas" she said we all can paint. People paint on canvases to release stress, Rockow said. And at the event, people "painted" on an invisible canvas through singing as a way to relax.
"(Singing) massages glands in the head, and it releases serotonin — there's a physical reason why it is so therapeutic," she said.
By 2 p.m. Saturday, the once-quiet hallway became a hall of music. In one room, listeners enjoyed the twang of a ukulele and the thumping of a portly heftone — a combination of a banjo and cello — from the husband-and-wife duo The Fabulous Heftones. In another room, the bittersweet music of Wanda Degen's "Songs of Hope and Remembrance" workshop could be heard from the hallway.
One of the more popular events featured singers Pat Madden and John Bragle, a 2005 MSU alumnus, who sang their renditions of old Irish songs to a gleeful audience.
"Anyone got a beer?" Pat Madden asked, as the revelry grew louder. Bragle then offered an invitation to those who were reluctant to sing.
"The only wrong notes are the notes you don't sing. It's a metaphor for life," he said.
As women danced with their babies and old men tapped their feet, everyone seemed to agree.
