Saturday, March 9, 2013 at 8:00 PM
People’s Voice Cafe
The Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist
40 East 35th Street, New York City, New York
Benefit for Peoples’ Music Network
About Bev Grant
http://www.bevgrant.com
Bev Grant is a veteran social activist, feminist, labor singer/songwriter, “cultural worker” from Park Slope Brooklyn, where she has lived for over 30 years. She is the co-creator of a women’s labor history multi-media presentation entitled “We Were There!” and has recorded five albums, including a companion cd and songbook for the show, called “We Were There!”, a solo cd entitled “IN TUNE”, a 7-song ep with her current group, Bev Grant & the Dissident Daughters, called “CHEEKY WOMAN”, and two albums with her former band, “Human Condition”. She has appeared on numerous compilation recordings, including the recently released Grammy-nominated Smithsonian/Folkways “Best of Broadside” album. Rolling Stone Magazine calls THE BEST OF BROADSIDE “topical songwriting [as] holy warfare” and “a grand tribute to a stubborn ideal” (David Fricke, Rolling Stone, August 31, 2000). “Virtually every important singer/songwriter of the American folk revival is heard on the collection…” Billboard.
Bev is an award winning songwriter and has used her music as an organizing tool in both community and union organizing, often writing songs for specific issues or campaigns and facilitating the creation and use of music by others. The most recent example is a song called “Take A Walk In My shoes” written for a domestic violence survivor’s advocacy group called Voices of Women Organizing Project (VOW). (Link to song and website – www.vowbwrc.org/) Another example is called “No Sweat!” and was performed by Bev and co-writer, Pat Humphries, at the University Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) conference in the summer of ’99. It can be found on Hands, released in 2001, by Pat Humphries, and on the 2003 album “Power of Song” by the Brooklyn Women’s Chorus. Bev’s work is described in Sing Out! Magazine as “unhesitatingly fervent, unflinchingly personal and reflecting the diversity of a real person’s musings.”
In 2006, Bev won the Honorary BAXten Arts and Artists in Progress Award. The BAXten award honors “individuals in the arts who have revealed and transformed our creative world by instigating enduring change deepening the definition of their field and paving the way for others.”