Old Folks Concerts

According to Steinberg (1973), though, some in New England missed the "good old tunes," giving rise to the Old Folks Concert which "revived the music and antiquated performance practices of the singing schools (p 602)."

What apparently began as an informal and amateur activity in the early 1850s became a popular form of entertainment under the leadership of Robert "Father" Kemp by the mid and late 1850s, whose professional troupe toured the United States and even England with featured soloist Jenny Twitchell Kempton.

Beale (1997) quotes a writer (writing in 1959) for the Cincinnati Enquirer to indicate the reasons for the popularity of the Old Folks Concert: Their music is of that kind which touches the heart and appeals to the sympathies of every one.

It calls to mind early associations long since buried in the "dead past," and revives the pleasantest recollections of the spring-time of existence, when "life was full of sunny years," and our hearts free from the "mountains of care" which weigh them down in after years.The Old Folks Concerts were an exercise in nostalgia.

For example, in 1872, the Diocese of Missouri's annual convention notes that "by the generous efforts of some warm hearted friends [such as] those antiquated ladies, who, in spite of the infirmities of age, came forth and at our request to assist us with an Old Folks' Concert, we have been enabled recently to reduce the accumulated debt under which [the diocesean-supported St. Luke's] Hospital has been struggling."