Iron Horse Music Hall

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (July 2007)

This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. (July 2007)

The creator of or a contributor to this page, Iron Horse Music Hall, may have a conflict of interest with the subject of this article.
Due to issues of maintaining neutrality and avoiding promotional articles, Wikipedia's conflict of interest guidelines strongly advise that editors do not directly edit articles on topics where they have a close personal or business connection. If this applies to your edits, you are advised to collaborate with independent editors via the article's talk page.

The Iron Horse Music Hall is a music venue located in Northampton, Massachusetts, west of Boston and north of Springfield, Massachusetts. Its motto is Music Alone Shall Live. The music hall showcases a wifde variety of musical genres and performing artists such as Richie Havens, Leo Kottke, Janis Ian, Livingston Taylor, Duke Robillard, Ellis Paul and Vance Gilbert. ^[1]

[edit] History

When Jordi Herold opened the club on February 24, 1979, his concept, as he describes it today, was "the Bohemian cafe, with candles and wine and cheese and bread boards with little peasant loaves on them. And foreign newspapers and magazines." Much of that homey atmosphere still exists in the daytime, but by night, every night, the club, which seats 85 people at a time and employs two dozen full and part time employees, is home to all kinds of music and talent ranging from top local players to artists of international repute. In college, Herold fantasized about opening a club and placed a bid on space in Amherst. His dream of "espresso, candlelight and people writing in their journals" didn't come true when the space fell through so he took his degree in American Social History and began teaching, ultimately in the Amherst public school system.

Herold finally acted on the vision and saddled up the Horse, it was hardly an impulsive decision, but rather a determined "let's do it and see what happens." Initially, he opened the club with a partner, John Riley, and it was Riley, who was bought out a few years later, who was responsible for bringing the first jazz shows into the club. In the early days, when music was really a complement to the room's ambiance as opposed to the Main Event, live music was limited to a strict format of classical chamber music (Thursdays), jazz (Fridays) and folk and classical (Saturdays) and the talent was mostly local. Ground was broken when national acts Dave Van Ronk and the Heath Brothers played the club during its first year.

By 1982, national acts played the Horse on a weekly basis, and today, even though the club features live music seven nights a week, over 80 percent of the names on any month's calendar are nationally known or serious up and comers. Herold takes understandable pride in having put scores of hot, quality artists into his club before they hit it big. His booking of people like Suzanne Vega, Stanley Jordan, George Winston, Michelle Shocked, Tracy Chapman and comedian Steven Wright before they hit the charts. The Iron Horse has shown a longevity most unusual for this area, where musical clubs rarely last more than a few years. The lineup has also included Cecil Taylor, from folk-blues legend Taj Mahal to folk rocking Steve Forbert, Chicago blues guitarist Jimmy Dawkins and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama.^[2]