North Valley Music School hosts free summer concert

North Valley Music School invites the community to attend “Tall Tales & Tall Songs,” an evening of Montana music performed by local musician Bill Rossiter.

The free event is Thursday, June 22 at 6 p.m. at the Northwest Montana History Museum. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. with light refreshments; music begins at 6 p.m.

Rossiter taught literature and folklore for 25 years at Flathead Valley Community College and at The University of Montana. He currently rambles around the Northwest, singing songs of the railroad, heroes and outlaws, Irish immigration, Civil War, the frontier, cowboys and sodbusters, mines and miners, the Great Depression and other eras of American history. He also received the 2015 Montana Governor’s Award for service to the Humanities.

For the June concert, Rossiter will focus on Lewis and Clark and how they wandered through Montana looking for a dream. While they went home, many hunters, adventurers, homesteaders, and gold-seekers following a different dream wandered into the West, too. And they stayed.

Braving the wilderness with hand tools, ox-drawn wagons, and hope, these travelers started singing hopeful songs about the land of milk and honey. By the time they settled on their claims, they were singing more homemade and often hilarious songs about alkali water, grasshoppers, chickens, and leaky sod huts.

Rossiter accompanies these songs with the guitar, banjo, autoharp, tonsils, and various ungainly kitchen and laundry utensils.

About his singing, critics have raved “Yikes,” “Hmmm,” and “What the …?”

The event is free and open to the public thanks to a grant from Humanities Montana.

More information can be found at northvalleymusicschool.org or by calling 406-862-8074.