At 68, Chicago folk songwriter Mark Dvorak still has plenty of stories to tell

Folk is in the air with the inaugural Evanston Folk Festival this weekend. Dvorak, a longtime teacher, organizer and songwriter, takes the stage Sunday.

By Mark Guarino

Sept 3, 2024, 4:05pm CST

Anyone who has spent time listening to folk music knows that it is less about the notes and words and more about the community it fosters between the performers and audience.

Few exemplify that more than Mark Dvorak, one of Chicago’s primary catalysts of the city’s folk music tradition, which goes back more than a century. A performer and songwriter, he has built a career as a longtime teacher and organizer. He sees himself as someone who uses music to connect with people, not just in clubs and theaters, but in places that typically offer little access to live music: hospitals, libraries, senior residences and elementary schools.

“I’m not really in the music business. I don’t make a living by selling CDs. I make my living by performing,” he said. “Pete Seeger always described himself as a cultural worker. In the same way I think of myself more in the cultural arts. That’s where this stuff has led me.”

Dvorak plays the inaugural Evanston Folk Festival on Sept. 8 and is part of an eclectic lineup that also includes Patty Griffin, Madi Diaz and Robbie Fulks. (WBEZ, which is co-presenting the event, will host an interview stage at the festival on Saturday and Sunday.) Beyond the fest, he has documented his life in a new book, 31 Winters, a collection of short essays, and a new album, Live and Alone, which he recorded by himself at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Unitarian Church of Hinsdale.

The book, his second, is not a typical memoir; it moves back and forth over time as if culled from memory banks that were left out of order. In it, he writes about traveling for a living, collaborating with musicians such as the late songwriter Michael Peter Smith and taking lessons from the classroom. He also meditates on a life in music.“When I got down to collecting this stuff and started working on new stories, this image of a kaleidoscope came into my mind. This long journey is not chronological. I almost wanted it to read like a mythic tale. It jumps around,” he said.

The new album features many originals like “Every Step of the Way” and “It’ll Be Better When It’s Better,” which sound like timeless folk classics from as far back as Woody Guthrie, as well as his interpretations of songs by Big Bill Broonzy, Townes Van Zandt and Joni Mitchell.

For 31 years, Dvorak was known as one of the most beloved teachers at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Square, where his songwriting classes immediately filled up every session; twice a month on Tuesdays, Dvorak also led a popular folk music club in the back room of the Grafton Pub, next door to the school. For 15 years, students and teachers gathered to learn new songs and perform informally, and the club became an extension of his classroom.

But COVID-19 ended that chapter in his life. He contracted the virus twice, the first in 2020 and the second the following year. That time, pneumonia followed, and his health worsened. The pandemic era brought other hardships: bookings dried up so he couldn’t work, a computer hacker drained his bank account, his mother died unexpectedly and he tore a back muscle when moving furniture out of her house. “It was a rough year,” he said.

Time took over. He mourned his mother, the bank reinstated his finances, his health returned but the prolonged time spent at home forced him to reconsider his future priorities. Teaching, he discovered, was no longer in his heart. “I don’t miss it,” he said. “I was lucky to have spent so much time working at the Old Town School and I tried to pass along what I could. But there comes a time to move on.” Instead, he spent time reorganizing years of his writing and, as pandemic restrictions lifted, contacting venues around the country to start booking shows.

“What I really wanted to do was sit in my little room upstairs where I do my practicing and recording. I wanted to dig in with music,” he said.

Dvorak hit the road. He now plays between 150 to 200 shows a year. He also became more fully involved in his role as resident artist with Music and Potlucks, a non-profit organization that raises money for charities through concerts throughout the Chicago area. “I have a clearer focus on what I want to do and how I want to get there,” he said. The destination, he found, is to find ways for the music to serve people in ways that go beyond entertainment.

“I stopped thinking of myself as a musician looking for a gig and more as a one-man arts organization looking for collaborations [beyond traditional venues],” he said. “It changed my mindset.”

Dvorak’s gift is how he uses music to immediately summon kinship among strangers in a room. He can directly engage anyone into singing with him, no matter their background or skill. For some audiences, just the sight of a guitar and long-neck banjo is a revelation. Dvorak recently played a festival for elementary school children in western Illinois. The school administrator told him how mesmerized the kids were by the sight of a grown man singing while playing guitar. “Kind of a foreign thing in our digital times,” he said.

Also on a recent itinerary: a south suburban venue for people living with Alzheimer’s and related dementias and their care partners. “It’s not a group you’ll get a lot of feedback from, yet I think that kind of work is essential,” he said.

Dvorak, 68, grew up in Cicero and later unincorporated La Grange. He played sports while two of his three brothers picked up guitars. He liked the instrument’s sound when they played. One day a banjo showed up. He took to the sound of that too. But playing music seemed improbable so he later took a job at a warehouse where he ended up developing a friendship with another budding guitarist. Dvorak finally gave in and purchased one of his own.

Open stages in the city beckoned. Dvorak was coming up near the end of a folk music boom that persisted throughout the 1970s, a time when folk music clubs lined the North Side producing names like John Prine, Bonnie Koloc and Steve Goodman. Dvorak played once at the Earl of Old Town before it closed and eventually made his way up Lincoln Avenue to Holstein’s, co-owned by Eddie Holstein, a songwriter whose songs have been covered by Bette Midler, Steve Goodman and Tom Rush, and by his brother Fred Holstein, a pivotal figure since the 1960s who helped popularize traditional songs. Others like the late songwriter Art Thieme and Old Town School co-founder Win Stracke were still around to pass down what they knew.

It was then that Dvorak learned another important tenet of the folk tradition: mentorship.

“I studied them,” said Dvorak. “Fred knew so many great songs. He would say, ‘I don’t play bad songs, I play great songs.’ I said I want to do that too.”

These days, Dvorak is fully aware that he is now that elder statesman positioned to share knowledge, which he does often at folk conferences and festivals, or even through email with former students. COVID-19 sparked a renaissance of young singer-songwriters in Chicago, which Dvorak says is leading to “something the world is going to need.” But he warns against the growing trend of confessional songs that double as diary entries. “I’m an old melody and harmony guy,” he said.

The most timeless songs, he said, are structured in a way to give people an opening so it reflects a shared experience, opposed to a one-way conversation.

He learned that from the Holsteins, too. “I remember listening to Fred and I had the realization that he was singing my story. I identified so deeply with the narrative that was coming through that music that it was almost like looking in a mirror,” he said. “That’s the beauty of this music.”

If you go: The Evanston Folk Festival runs Sept. 7 to Sept. 8. Mark Dvorak performs at 12:15 p.m. Sept. 8. Tickets from $59.50.