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Sarah McQuaid

An evening with Sarah McQuaid

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, Delaware Friends of Folk will present a very special coffee house concert in the Dover Art League, 21 W. Loockerman St. in Dover, beginning at 7:30 pm. Admission is $15 for members of Delaware Friends of Folk, $20 for non-members, teens are half-price, and those 12 and under are admitted free. Fresh-brewed coffee, baked cookies and other snacks will be available. Seating may be limited.

     The featured act will be international singer-songwriter Sarah McQuaid presenting an entire evening of stories and songs. Born in Spain (to a Spanish father and an American mother) and raised in Chicago, Sarah was taught piano and guitar at an early age by her folk-singing mother, and remembers being inspired by meeting her distant cousin, well-known singer/songwriter/storyteller Gamble Rogers, at her grandmother’s house in Indiana.

     From the age of twelve she embarked on tours of the US and Canada with the Chicago Children’s Choir, and at eighteen she went to France for a year to study philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. In the mid-1990s Sarah found her way to Ireland, where her authorship of The Irish DADGAD Guitar Book (published in 1995, still in print) led to an invitation to write a weekly folk music column for the Evening Herald.

     In 2007 Sarah moved to rural West Cornwall, England, and in 2008 she released her second album, I Won’t Go Home ’Til Morning. Over the next ten years, Sarah met many local musicians and toured widely in Britain and Europe. In April 2017, Sarah was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Ards International Guitar Festival in Newtownards, Northern Ireland in recognition of her innovative use of the DADGAD tuning and her authorship of the Irish DADGAD Guitar Book. She regularly presents workshops on the DADGAD tuning (as well as on songwriting, tour booking and more) at festivals, music schools and venues around the globe, and is working on a follow-up book on DADGAD song accompaniment. Having survived several years of limited touring, Sarah will embark on a multi-state tour in the fall, Dover being one of her few stops in the mid-Atlantic.

     Some Delaware Friends of Folk events are supported in part by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. The Division promotes Delaware arts events on www.DelawareScene.com.

Links:

www.delfolk.org

https://sarahmcquaid.com/

https://sarahmcquaid.com/