Loving Austin | Music For The City

Today I partnered with Music For The City's "Art of Giving" program to bring some music, smiles and love to some kids on Austin's East side.

Austin has the oldest housing project in the nation...yes the oldest. Single story apartments arranged neatly in rows of dull gray brick with sea-foam green trim. Each apartment had its own large antenna-like clothesline outside each front door... some things must be done the old fashioned way. Aside from an occasional drying towel, t-shirt or cheap-plastic chair nothing about the outside of the apartments distinguished one from the other. It was 3:15 in the afternoon and signs of life were minimal.

The children aged 6-12 years old were equal in numbers of boys and girls... all either African American or Hispanic (though I know that other races live in the complex). This is an after school program...similar to the kind that I went to in elementary school. Sometimes there are 5 kids and sometimes there are 30 kids... today we had about 8. The two teachers help the kids with their homework, they do crafts and eat dinner. My first assignment was to help an 11-year-old girl with her homework, looking up definitions to 15 words and writing them in a spiral notebook... F-U-N (insert sarcasm here). She couldn't have been less interested in the definition to "refill"or in this hipster white-girl trying to help make it seem like fun... it took some encouraging and some team work... but we managed to get some work done.

Next we sat in a circle and talked a little about their favorite kind of music - "Rap" and "Taylor Swift" (which evidently is now a genre). I sang portions to a couple of my new songs off my upcoming album, "Prodigal" & "Too Late", even did a little of Patty Griffin's MLK tribute song "Up To The Mountain"... which they all really liked a lot. They sat attentively and piped in with song requests like "Smooth Criminal" which caused me to pull out the big guns... BEAT-BOXING...and I must say... I'm pretty legit. At this point my homework assistant was pretty interested in the white-girl with the guitar :) If the beat-boxing & singing didn't win them over... my next trick was going to make me go down in East-side After-school program HISTORY... thank you Michael Jackson for... the MOON-walk... when I pulled out "The Golden Ticket"... you would have thought that I was the King of Pop incarnate!

It was 45 mins of my day, a few party tricks and a sharing of the gift I have been given. These kids are worth this and so much more. Lets be honest... the odds and many other things are against them.

For more information about Music For The City and the "Art of Giving" program go to www.musicforthecity.org