Dave Rowe and friends
to fill church with sounds
of acoustic folk music

AUBURN — The vestry of the First Universalist Church, Unitarian-Universalist of Auburn will be filled with folk music at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 16.

Dave Rowe will be joined by some friends “from away,” Leslie Lee and Steve Gretz. Both acts will be pulling out all the stops playing their own brands of uplifting acoustic folk music — handmade songs for a distracted world.

Auburn native Dave Rowe is the music director at the church. He grew up with folk music flowing through his veins. The son of a member of a popular folk trio, Schooner Fare, there was always a sort of expectation that Rowe would enter the music business, which he did at the tender age of 15. With 13 critically-acclaimed recordings under his belt, by himself and with his various bands, and a career in the music business that has endured for some 26 years, Rowe is a force to be reckoned with. A long-time staple of pubs and music halls throughout New England, he has spent more than half his life playing sing-alongs and having a rollicking good time for himself, getting audiences singing and clapping along. His folk music is the type that brings people together and reminds entire audiences that music is a fundamental and necessary part of the human experience.

Leslie Lee and Steve Gretz have been performing together for more than a decade in coffeehouses, festivals and churches throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Their music draws on folk, bluegrass, country and gospel roots, featuring beautiful harmonies and lyrics that encourage and uplift.

Gretz, an American Baptist minister, was born and raised in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. He has been involved with music most of his life, from childhood lessons (piano and trombone), to years of singing in choral groups, to his midlife debut in folk music. One of his songs, “My Dad Told Me,” was selected as one of five finalists in the 2003 Boston Folk Festival Songwriting Contest. Another song, “Who Taught These Idiots to Drive?” was featured on NPR’s Car Talk radio show and also appeared on their compilation CD, Car Tunes Volume 2: Born Not to Run.

Lee was born in Orange, Calif., and grew up in the Kansas City, Mo., area. She started singing in 2003 when she and Gretz recorded their first album, Recovered. When she isn’t performing or writing songs, she works as a freelance graphic designer for musicians (and regular people, too).

Rowe and Gretz met in the 1990s when Rowe was touring with his dad, Tom, and Denny Breau as Turkey Hollow. Gretz liked their sound and booked them into the Mosaic Room Coffeehouse at the Avon Baptist Church in Avon, Mass., which he was running at the time. Rowe returned to the coffeehouse two other times with his Dave Rowe Trio before Gretz was called to his current church in Rochester, N.Y.

Looking for new collaborations for his duo with wife, Leslie, Gretz contacted Rowe and they agreed to do concerts at each other’s churches. Gretz and his wife would join Rowe at his First Universalist Church of Auburn in October and Rowe will travel to Rochester, N.Y., in April to Gretz’s Greece Baptist Church. The concert will be the first of a mini tour of UU churches for Gretz and his wife as they will travel for a benefit show at First Parish Church Unitarian Universalist in Billerica, Mass., the following day.

This concert will include sets by both acts as well as never-before-witnessed musical collaborations.

Tickets are $13 in advance, $15 at the door and can be purchased on Brown Paper Tickets at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2194628.

FMI: 207-619-3655, [email protected].