The String Band practice sessions are open to newcomers, and are held monthly on the second Saturday of each month, September through April. Those who are interested in playing with the band should be able to play their instruments at an intermediate level.
Folks who would like to play with the band at barn dances and in performances should attend the monthly practices regularly, become familiar with the music and practice at home.
If you have any questions, please call Jen at 630-518-2619 Or email: j.shilt@comcast.net
Every second Saturday 2-4pm (September through April)
First Church of Lombard
220 South Main Street in Lombard, IL (next to Maple Street
Chapel)
(Map)
Things to Bring:
The String Band performs at Plank Road barn dances and has performed for many community groups such as Lombard Historical Society and other living history museum events, barn dances for church groups, local area folk festivals, the Danada Fall Equestrian Festival, Civil War reenactments and more.
The music we play draws mostly from the traditional tunes of North America, which includes music from New England, Southern and Midwestern United States, Eastern Canada and the British Isles.
The origin of the Plank Road All-Volunteer String Band began with Cathy Jones, Mark Dvorak, Marianne Mohrhusen and Marvin Lensik. Marianne wanted to learn how to call dances, so Mark and Cathy decided to have a volunteer band with whoever wanted to play. It grew from primarily Plank Road members to incorporating many of the Jones Family Music School students.
Additionally, "barn dance dynamics" classes and workshops (that included Plank Road members) were held by Cathy for students who wanted to get more involved in the specifics of performing old-time music as a band. Over the years, as the Jones Family Music School started to wind down, the band began meeting at the First Church of Lombard.
Today, the String Band remains, a passionate, committed group of musicians whose common goal is to perform traditional old-time music. Our leader is Betsy Anderson.
Below are tunes that we play or are working on: Sound files for listening and chords or sheet music for learning. This symbol indicates tunes we are currently working on or play regularly. So now, rosin up the bow or get a grip on your pick, and get to playing.
For those of you who want the entire repertoire, we have compiled our current tunes into 2 zip files, one for Sheet music and one for the Chords. Latest Updates: Chords - April 2023; Sheet Music - April 2023. We will update this page whenever we add new tunes!
Currently, the Chords Zip file is about 8 mb in size and the Sheet Music Zip file is about 58 mb. When you extract the contents of each you will have a separate PDF file for each tune so you can just print off what you need at the time. The individual PDF files can also be imported into sheet music apps like forScore for iPads or MobileSheets for Android tablets.
NOTE: The zip files currently contain a few tunes that we are not currently playing as well as multiple versions of a few of the tunes. We are working on separating out the duplicates and unused tunes to pare down the size of the zip files; in the meantime, apologies for any confusion. Please refer to the Tune List web page if you have questions on which is the current version of a tune.
Download ALL Chord Sheets Download ALL Sheet Music