Rod MacDonald, co-founder of the Greenwich Village Folk Festival, was born in Southington, Connecticut, and began his musical education as a slide trombonist at 11, switching to guitar in his mid-teens as he learned the popular 1960s folk songs. At the University of Virginia, he was managing editor of the student newspaper and toured statewide with the five-piece folk group The Lovin’ Sound. Graduating in 1970, he attended Columbia Law School and joined the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, US Navy. As a Newsweek reporter, he covered the Pentagon Papers trial. In 1972, while at Officer’s Training School in Newport, RI, he began working as a solo singer-guitarist at a waterfront bar. Honorably discharged as a conscientious objector in August 1972, he graduated law school in 1973 but did not take the bar exam, instead continuing his professional career in music.
He was in Greenwich Village in the 1980s, a major figure in that decade’s folk revival, playing such clubs as the Speakeasy, Folk City, the Bottom Line, and the celebrated Songwriter’s Exchange at the Cornelia Street Café. Rod is perhaps best known for his songs “American Jerusalem,” about the divide between the rich and the poor in Manhattan; “A Sailor’s Prayer;” “Coming of the Snow;” “Every Living Thing:” and “My Neighbors in Delray”, a description of the 9/11 hijackers’ last days in Delray Beach, Florida, where MacDonald has lived since 1995. His songs have been covered by Dave Van Ronk, Shawn Colvin, and Garnet Rogers, Joe Jencks, and others. His 1985 album White Buffalo is dedicated to Lakota Sioux ceremonial chief and healer Frank Fools Crow, whom he visited in 1981 and 1985, and who appears with MacDonald on the album cover. Since 1995, MacDonald has lived in south Florida. His first novel, The Open Mike, about a young man in the open mic scene of Greenwich Village, was published in 2014, by Archway Publishing.
October 4 @ 4:00 pm – 9:00 pm
The Greenwich Village Folk Festival: Live 40th Anniversary Concert