On a cold winter day in 1961 Alan Chartock and Norm Adler, prompted (some say threatened ) by their very musical but low academic achieving friends to start a club that was dedicated to "ethnic (any acoustic folk music except the Kingston Trio) music on the Uptown campus. You see a 3.0 GPA was the minimum needed to become a club officer and crazed folkies looking for something to do on those long Wednesday club hours, besides studying, needed a room to bring and play their instruments. Thus the Hunter College Folk Music Club began.

    

  Alan and Norm established the first Hootenanny charging the exorbitant fee of $0.25. The hoots and the Hunter "Hoot" (short for "hootenanny"), in particular, were highly popular amateur musical events in which college and high school students used the performance of folk music as a medium for expressing their shared social and political concerns and no less importantly, just for pure entertainment. More often than not, the performers and audience were friends from the same communities. Not only did they come from the Hunter student population, but from all over the metropolitan area. Because the music was basically very simple and easy to learn and perform, it gave many young people an opportunity to try their luck in front of a fairly large audience, an experience that they might never have had under more formal circumstances.  The prime objective of any hoot was to have a whole lot of FUN! Some of the performers actually did begin to excel and later make their mark on the music world at large.

     Young, gifted performers came up to the Bronx and they included many who would later make their mark in all areas of music: Blues; Singer/songwriters; Choral Music; and Music Education.

 Gil Turner;The New World Singers; Peter Wernick; Danny Kalb; Eric Kaz; Artie and Happy Traum; David Grisman; Andy Statman; Norma Tanega; Bob Dylan; Jody Stecher; Winnie Winston; Bob Cohen

     Along with Alan Chartock The Folk Music Club’s the past presidents Gerry Segal and Bill Schneiderman have gotten together and are working hard to get many of these not so young gifted performers back.

    A main purpose of this event is that it serve as a reunion of a community of friends who have not gathered together for almost a half century. We also want to encourage our friends, most of whom who left the Bronx decades ago, to return to the borough and to take a look at the changes and developments that have occurred there in the many years since their departure. In doing so, we hope to rekindle their curiosity and interest in their old home borough and their old neighborhoods as they currently exist.  We would also like to expand our concept to welcome the communities of people who currently live and work there. We would like the former residents and the current ones to meet, and we think that the musical "hoot" format is a good way of facilitating this interaction. This is where we'd like to enlist your knowledge and resources. We feel that it is most important that young  musically talented people, their friends and families currently residing in the Bronx will be given the encouragement and opportunity to attend and participate in our event. Our hope is that sharing the music will begin to bring us all a little closer together.

     We are calling for your help in getting the other half of this equation to attend: the ever patient, encouraging audience to come back to the campus and to the borough.

    This will be a college reunion like few others. No dances, no testimonials No affiliation to a year. All years are welcome. This is a pot luck reunion...This is a call to everyone who loved the music and the time and the people the music represented We will have a  great Friday evening concert; a Saturday picnic in the park canoeing, jamming and schmoozing..A chance to see your old friends and their families...A chance to see the wonderful positive changes the Bronx is going through. All proceeds will be donated to a great organization that is changing the face of the borough: The Bronx River Alliance.

We're calling you all back for one last concert. This is an ongoing working web page. You can help build the weekend and track it as it grows.