North House Folk School

John C. Van Orman will sing a selection of traditional sea shanties, lyrical sailor songs, and nautical ballads while accompanying himself on concertina, guitar and hurdy-gurdy.  Such songs are the narratives of countless laborers who have worked on water, sailors of every kind and the people with whom they interacted, heroically or not-so-much-so. They form a mythology of life on, in and along the water. It is the stuff of dreams.

John C. Van Orman is a multi-instrumentalist and singer who has performed regionally in the Midwest and in the Ozarks.  Van Orman’s original songs have won him Minnesota Music Academy awards, and have been recorded by Boiled in Lead, Bill Hinckley and Judy Larson, Sherry Minnick, and the Flash Girls. He served on the board of directors of Minnesota’s Midway Folk Festival, was Music Director at the Ozark Folk Center, and currently serves as the children’s folk music interpreter at Folklore Village, in Dodgeville, WI