Sunday
It was an Irish folk musician alongside his partner, a California multi-instrumentalist, performing a Sunday afternoon concert in the assembly room at the Pilgrim Church in Carlsbad. Just the photo of their instruments — hammered dulcimer, mandolin, mandola, bouzouki, banjo, North Indian sitar, guitar, charango, psaltery, ukulele, and bodhrán — made my blood pulse. He looked a bit like a mad scientist and she, a tie-dye, elder hippy.
I quickly bought tickets. On the day of the concert, I pressured those I had pressured into coming with me to arrive a half-hour early. I rushed to the venue. This will sell out, I had assured everyone, and it was all I could do not to run from the parking lot.
Inside, I covered the best seats with a couple jackets before the rest of my party were still entering. The folk musicians were milling about, engaged by a handful of people who saw them only when they passed through San Diego.
The room filled to about half capacity. I needed no more reminder that my tastes and passions are off the beaten path — but my heart was racing all the same.
Wandering Teachers
The husband-and-wife duo are Aodh Óg O’Tuama, from Cork, Ireland and Christy Martin, from California. “Aye” and Christy. They have been performing together since even before 1995, when they gave up having a house for a home. They pilgrimage through the United States and Ireland, living as the troubadours of old, performing at music festivals, theaters, performing arts centers, folk and historical societies, libraries, museums, and schools, carrying forward one of the oldest teaching traditions.
They opened with a hammered dulcimer accompanied by an Irish pennywhistle, and I was transported. I recalled vividly Jean Ritchie of Appalachia playing a hammered dulcimer back in 1973 at My Father’s Place in Roslyn at the Guitar Workshop Sunday morning series (hosted by Jeff Warner and Jeff Davis). It was there I would see Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee who rode the rails and the Highwood String Band on their way to the Smithsonian.
I saw the best of them all, Michael Cooney, as he travelled the country in his van with an American long-neck banjo and Irish squeezebox, before that terrible winter crash he was in. And he performed a Russian marching song on a 12-string guitar first owned by Lead Belly, “Song of the Plains,” that begins soft and crescendos into the whole age-of-nationalism world, not a note of which I have forgotten to this day. When he played “Waltzing Matilda” the way he learned it travelling through Australia, slow and doleful, I got a permanent sense of that continent that took me beyond any understanding I could ever gain in books or history classes.
On the Road
These were the troubadours: itinerant teachers who made me the kind of teacher I became. At home, I was using the appendix of Pete Seeger’s banjo book while I gathered fine woods from New England to build my own banjo in a neighbor’s workshop. Playing that banjo got me out of a ton of watch duty aboard the RV Westward when I left my first teaching job midstream to ship out, and maybe I was becoming a troubadour teacher then, though I was lost.
Musicians and poets were rovers long before surfers — the Romanian Gypsies, the Irish Travellers — the real teachers who gathered stories wherever they went and passed them along in the next town. To this day, I still connect their journeys to my own heritage as a teacher and lifelong student.
There is a whole, rich lineage of traveling teachers I never heard a word about in two graduate teaching degrees.
Last weekend at the Pilgrim, they opened with a gourd sitar and Hang drum duet, performing a 1,000-year-old raga with lyrics written by a 17th-century Dublin school founder and teacher. As I listened, I channelled the woven thread of teacher-poets — a heritage I hope to pass along.
At intermission, stirring, I approached the stage where “Aye” stood answering questions. I showed him a photo of myself accompanying Eoin Ó Riabhaigh on guitar as he played O’Carolan’s “Fanny Power” on the Irish pipes — a dream come true for which I had traveled halfway around the world. Eoin, a renowned uilleann piper and pipe maker from Cork, was a friend of his, Of course he was.
The real music — acoustic folk — has quickened my pulse for many years, all over the world. I remember the tiny chamber underneath the Bärengraben bridge over the Aare River in Bern. A ragtag band of guitar, fiddle, tuba, slap bass, and accordion played music that transported me to medieval fairs and crossroads — a sound 1,000 years in the making. I frequented that cellar.
In San Diego, living in Del Mar in the 1980s, I soon learned of Bill and Pearl, who were hosting folk musicians through San Diego Folk Heritage in a hole-in-the-wall in Leucadia. Over the months, I saw Taj Mahal, a young Tracy Chapman, and other lovers of the old ways — another month I failed miserably at learning contra dance. When Bill and Pearl moved to Oregon, despite the Don’t Californicate Oregon bumper stickers of the time, it seemed like the end of an era, a time of lost teachers. But the San Diego folk scene purred underground, much like the secret cafés of occupied Paris or the samizdat of the Soviet era — kept alive in whispers.
Though I never had time to be more than a background vamp while real musicians played, the greatest experiences of my teaching life have happened through musical travels:
- The time in the Nanwalek, Alaska, tribal hall when a parent handed me a Fender Telecaster — as their youth taught our students the Eagle Dance, Alaskan Native kids and our California students moved together in a circle, and I joined the local elder rock band to play the Rolling Stones, orchestrating the rhythm for the dancers — a moment as pure as folk music gets.
- The time Isaac and Tom assembled a student busking group along the Mississippi River in New Orleans, and we played until the police busted us, and I thought, Busted — this is one of my great teaching moments!
- Playing the drums with students in Lakota tipis, channeling the vast Native American history that had been completely left out of U.S. textbooks.
The list of Grauer students who have followed this tradition — at least for a while — is another story, but a heartening one. Some have postponed their straight lives, lived in vans, or struck out on their own in New York or L.A., becoming ragtag artists as a part of their education. I love them all.
In fact, when I first met Liam Murphy, our school technology specialist, he was running a folk music club called Brick 15 in the neighboring town of Del Mar. He and his wife hosted musicians from around the country as they passed through. When Brick 15 shut down from being half-full too often, I was building the Justice Center for performing arts on our own campus. And all the while building, I was envisioning the traveling folk musicians stopping by that very space on Sunday mornings — I was making a space for them. A place where our students and their families and neighbors could learn that this — this transmission of history, of art, of wonder — is what schools do, what happens at real school. Then we were hosting musical nights with our students and calling them “café nights” because this would be a better origin for homework. We were troubadour teachers.
If you want to know the origin of teachers, find the minstrels and bards, the wayfarers and griots, vagabonds and balladeers passing through your town — they are there for the searching.
The troubadours of old — poet-musician-teachers of medieval Europe, and their counterparts all over Asia, Australia, S. America, and Africa — share a deep, often overlooked connection with the school teaching tradition — though one stays put, the other on the road. The troubadours were not merely entertainers but cultural transmitters of the oral tradition, shaping how people understood history, values, and human nature. Oral traditions, like Socratic dialogue or indigenous teaching methods, are vital in preserving and passing down wisdom and the great schools are icons for this.
What if, for an hour, instead of the barrage of input, constant decision-making, breaking news layered over breaking news and political chaos, accountability, and the latest management updates from McKinsey, we centered our lives around the folksinger’s focus — on timeless truths, human connection, and the simple act of storytelling — unhurried, unpolished, and unbound by the relentless churn of data and directives?
The great teachers are lifelong learners with ever-itinerant minds, immersing themselves in enduring ideas, perspectives, and experiences to deepen their understanding and enrich their students. The roaming intellectual and artist traces back, I think, to the origins of teaching and the real purposes.
The greatest experience of my teaching life occurred when we traveled to Israel and risked crossing over intense military security and into Palestinian settlements. The day before, Israel had celebrated its 60th anniversary we my students and I danced joyfully with the Hand in Hand School students in Jerusalem. Across the border, at the Dar al-Kalima School, it was Nakba Day — Nakba, it turned out, meant: catastrophe.
In their music class, amidst this stunning paradox only children could transcend, some of my students and I now joined a student drum circle, hypnotized by an old Lebanese folk song, its lyrics conjuring up memories of lost lands and times past:
The girl over a grinding stone
Imagines the old days, so beautiful they were,
Green fields like a lullaby,
So romantic,
Memories of grandfather working the grinding stone.
We were troubadour drummers that day — where past and present blurred, where history was not just studied but felt, and where music bridged gaps that seem insurmountable in our day-to-day routines.
I have learned that the greatest teaching moment you can have is not when you are imparting wisdom, but when the generations are in perfect harmony — this is educational perfection. Afterward, the music teacher transcribed the tune for me, so that back home, we could play it, feeling the same ancient stirring.
Carrying the Tradition Forward
Whenever Isaac and students perform this piece, “The Grinding Stone,” at holiday gatherings or school ceremonies, I am once again transported back to that classroom and to the beautiful heritage that draws me to this profession. We are troubadours. It’s an unfulfilled dream, but if our own performing arts center, the Justice Center, can one day host folk musicians — the ancient teachers — making our school a milestone on the original teaching road, we will have succeeded in anchoring our institution more deeply to its true and precious roots
There are many ways to experience transformational teaching and the arts — you can hear a brilliant lecturer or TED Talk, or witness a headlining musician perform in a world-class arena with dazzling lights and sound. But the folk musician lives close to the earth and taps into something deeper, something timeless. In their presence, you don’t just listen — you are in a living tradition, a world where music is not just performed but passed down, felt, and shared.
There in the Pilgrim, the Irishman and the Californian made a final duet of old-time banjo and Native American flute set to the lyrics of “The Stolen Child” by Irish poet William Butler Yeats:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
And then we all filed out, spirits sad and full.
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