From a free concert by a top-flight guitarist in Concord to a folk festival in Golden Gate Park and a benefit starring Mrs. Doubtfire, there is a lot to see and do in the Bay Ares this weekend. Here is a partial roundup.
Fans of folk music — not just listening to it, but singing and learning about it, too — should have a grand ol’ time at the 48th annual San Francisco Free Folk Festival on Saturday in Golden Gate Park. The roots of the festival stretch back to the 1940s, when a group of self-described “idealistic and not very musically gifted high schoolers” formed the San Francisco Folk Music Club. The club staged the first festival in the late 1970s and it has been going strong ever since.
This year, performers include the Sauce Piquante Cajun-Creole Band, Americana trio Sugar Mountain, acoustic blues band Blind Lemon Pledge and — from across the ocean — percussion-dance group The Lions of Africa. There are also dozens of workshops with titles like Funny Songs and Jokes, Sea Shanties, Turkish Singing, Climate and Labor Sing Together, Quebecois Tune Jam and Beginning Fingerpicking Guitar. So come on down to the park and, in the words of the immortal Pete Seeger, learn how to “put songs on people’s lips instead of just in their ears.
” Noon-6 p.m. Saturday; Golden Gate Park Music Concourse and Bandshell; free; sffolkfest.
org. A concert featuring artists of the Merola Opera program, Spanish masterworks performed by the San Francisco Symphony, and a double bi.
