Reach Out Your Hand

As a descendant of German and Irish immigrants, I have sympathy for those seeking a new life here in United States, and wish our politicians could somehow come together and establish a functional border policy which actually works. In 2018 I started this song while thinking about the migrant caravan coming up from Honduras to seek asylum. I made a demo and sent it off to a few friends.

Right away my old friend Dartanyan Brown recognized it as a special song, and he invited me to perform it with him at a retrospective concert he had coming up at Grinnell College. We performed it there on March 20, 2019 and he made a video.

I sent a copy to Karen Impola at Iowa Public Radio and she aired it on her Folk Tree program on July 28, 2019. In August Dartanyan recorded a new bass part for an updated studio version and in September he invited me to perform it again with him at the Iowa People’s Presidential Forum which was held in Des Moines at the Iowa Events Center. My wife Debbie took a few pictures at that event.

Please check out the audio versions on my Songspace page.

https://song.space/6n7l7p

Dartanyan and I first met on the Iowa Arts Council Touring Arts Team in the early eighties, and discovered right away that we both had rather eclectic tastes in music. We have performed twice at the Blanden Museum in Fort Dodge as “Billy Buffalo & Dr. Jazz”. He is the one who suggested I try out Substack, and has a great page of his own started which includes his autobiography My Integrated Life. Please check it out sometime.

1981 The Blanden Museum Fort Dodge, Iowa

Photo by Fred Larson

I release Reach Out Your Hand as a single on the streaming services via DistroKid. The cover looks like this:

I also included it on my Reflections album project in 2021 with eleven more original songs. Also streaming everywhere.

Thanks for listening.