Looking Beyond (or Among) the Big Stones

Green River Cemetery 56 Wisdom Way, Greenfield

In this free workshop participants are invited to join Carol Aleman for a visit to Green River Cemetery where she will expose a small slice of Greenfield’s less documented history. Over the past three years of researching the history of Greenfield’s Black community, Aleman has made her way past numerous stones and monuments in local cemeteries. She has collected more than 150 dates of death and 130 obituaries (or death notices) relating to the then town’s residents. Using her former mother-in-law’s introduction to “the Black section” of the cemetery as a frame of reference, she will lead participants to several selected grave sites and share highlights from the lives of those who quietly enriched the community and left a vibrant mark on Greenfield’s past. Free and open to the public, but RSVP is requested at https://www.gcc.mass.edu/events/looking-beyond-or-among-the-big-stones/.

Free

MARY GAUTHIER WITH SPECIAL GUEST JAIMEE HARRIS

Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center 289 Main St, Greenfield

Every day. Every single day, which means some days are better and some much worse. Every day, on average, twenty-two veterans commit suicide. Each year seventy-four hundred current and former members of the United States Armed Services take their own lives. Every day. That number does not include drug overdoses or car wrecks or any of the more inventive ways somebody might less obviously choose to die. It seems trivial to suggest those lives might be saved — healed, even — by a song. By the process of writing a song. And yet. And yet there is nothing trivial about Mary Gauthier’s tenth album, Rifles and Rosary Beads (Thirty Tigers), all eleven songs co-written with and for wounded veterans. Eleven of the nearly four hundred songs that highly accomplished songwriters have co-written as part of Darden Smith’s five-year-old SongwritingWith:Soldiers program. None of the soldiers who have participated in the program have taken their own lives, and there’s nothing trivial about that. Something about writing that song — telling that story — is healing. What Smith calls post-traumatic-growth. Gauthier’s first nine albums presented extraordinary confessional songs, deeply personal, profoundly emotional pieces ranging from “I Drink,” a blunt accounting of addiction, to…

$20 – $25