He is a folk singer, Mark Dvorak is. He has been since his teenage years when, growing up in a Cicero house with three brothers (two older, one younger), their parents and grandparents nearby, he read Anthony Scaduto’s 1971 book “Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography.” In its pages, he met not only the compelling title character, but such other colorful giants as Pete Seeger, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. He also discovered, though he didn’t realize it at the time, a way of life that has been filled with rewards beyond riches and fame.
It started with that book and, oh yes, there was soon a guitar involved.
“I was the last of my brothers to get a guitar and I used the money I was making working at a xylophone factory to buy one for $40,” he says.
His father worked for a chemical company and his mom was, with four active boys to care for, more than a mom. “Oh, she worked very hard,” he says, a smile crossing his face. “It took her a lot of work just getting us all through (Lyons Township) high school.”
He and his brothers and many neighborhood pals were all creatively inclined, one brother forming a band that played such clubs as the Kingston Mines. Dvorak and a friend spent a summer riding their motorcycles around the country and when he returned home, he walked into the Old Town School of Folk Music.
“I didn’t really have any thought of being able to make a living with music. I just wanted to learn how to play better but the minute I walked in the school it felt so right,” he says. “What I found was a community, a life.”
His job unloading trucks and stocking shelves at a Jewel grocery store was paying the bills then. He worked the night shift and during the days began offering lessons at his apartment. “I didn’t charge anything,” he says. “It was sort of a leave anything you can. I didn’t want to feel that pressure.”
He began teaching formally when hired at the Old Town School in 1986 by the great banjo artist, teacher and composer Michael Miles, one of many that Dvorak admires, as do I. He has tender memories and words for Win Stracke, the co-founder of the Old Town School and one of the city’s most influential if largely forgotten artists. Though Dvorak did not meet Stracke until he was aged and living in a retirement home in Evanston, he became a friend and writes that he feels, walking around the Old Town School today, that it “is difficult to imagine you are someplace other than inside Win Stracke’s dream.”
He has equal fondness for such people as Art Thieme, Fred Holstein and Michael Smith, who asked Dvorak to join Smith’s wife, Barbara Barrow, and Tom Dundee, to form a re-creation of the 1950s folk group the Weavers with “Weavermania!” an immensely popular group for a time.
Dvorak’s latest book has a lively, intimate chapter devoted to the formation of that group. The book has so much of his life with all sorts of stories filling the 350-some pages of his “31 Winters: Finding the Folk Way.”
“As it was for many musicians, the pandemic gave me a lot of time,” he says. “I used it to go back into my notes and notebooks to see what was in there, and what I might be able to come up with.”
He found many things and added some new writing to compile what is a delightfully personal book. It is part memoir, part philosophical treatise and part instructional manual, as in the chapter devoted to “notes on teaching,” 55 notes such as, “If you aren’t the most talented or knowledgeable, be the funniest” and “You are not training dogs for show here. You are helping people become more complete human beings. You are helping students become themselves.”
Born in 1956, Dvorak is a few years too young to have been part of the Steve Goodman-Bonnie Koloc-John Prine crowd that sparked and sparkled during folk’s golden age here, but for decades now he has been an important, popular and influential part of that scene.
Though he has written and recorded many songs, he has never been drawn to the commercial side of the music biz. “By the time I started recording, LPs were out,” he says. “I concentrated on community projects, live performances.”
July 23 in Brookfield, July 25 in Berwyn and July 27 in St. Louis. “]He has a new album, “Mark Dvorak: Live & Alone.” It is his 21st.
“Or maybe it’s the 20th,” he says.
He and his wife, Marianne Mohrhusen, live in a west suburban home. They have been together since the mid-1980s and she, after retiring from a long career as a kindergarten teacher, is now a yoga instructor. Sometimes the two of them perform together.
He is a folk singer, Mark Dvorak is, and that’s just fine. He has won awards, such as the Woodstock Folk Festival Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, but in talking to him you’ll quickly learn that his world is bigger than such honors.
Or as he writes, “Our music is a bearer of history and custom, and has grown by being needed and used. … (It) represents something so much larger and far-reaching than what the iTunes store or a CD bin can hold.”
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
Upcoming performances include 7 p.m. July 25 at Friendly Music Community, 6733 Roosevelt Road in Berwyn; 1 p.m. Aug. 2 at Sandwich Public Library, 925 S. Main St., Sandwich; www.markdvorak.com
