Folk musicians and students with acoustic guitars play to patrons in sweaters holding mugs of hot java at Uptown Coffee every Thursday night.
Longwood’s creative writing community gather at The Bakery’s Speakeasy “anything goes” spoken word to share their workshop pieces over craft Belgian beers.
The Healthy Living holistic foods store across from Longwood’s Health and Wellness Center hosts an open mic every season with crowds packed out the door, sharing vegan finger sandwiches.
Just what is an open mic and what is its place in the Farmville community?
According to Gary Hickman, owner of Buffalo Greek Guitar Company and host of Uptown’s open mic, “The whole idea of an open mic is to provide a performance opportunity. As an artist, you want to present your art. I mean, if you don’t share it, it’s gone.”
The open mic scene has been changing over the years – and impacting the town. When asked about how he sees the town changing, Hickman said, “I really felt a strong disconnect [between Longwood and the community at large] when I first moved into town…When Downtown Farmville as an organization started though, we started doing the open mics and change started happening….I drive downtown now and I see college students downtown. I hear people say, it used to be that way years ago.”
Hickman further elaborated, “Music is a powerful thing…I would love to see in this town, on a Saturday afternoon, to see five or six people on the street down by Charley’s patio playing music there. Why not the Crute Stage Lawn?”
“What that does is that it adds a flavor to the community. When people come from out of town with their wife to Green Front to shop for furniture and see music, they get out of their car and walk around – to the café, to the guitar store, to local businesses….I think music is good for [the] soul, for the community.”
Mark Mandeville and Raianne Richards, an original folk Americana duo that visited Uptown Coffee as part of the coffeehouse’s weekly concert series, shared much the same ideas.
“There’s a long history of people who walk their music in and out of areas,” said Mandeville.
When asked how they came to play together as a duo, Richards said, “I used to go see him play in places like this [Uptown Coffee]. Then he started doing an all-acoustic open mic sort of thing called Lone Microphones. I would go to that, when I had just started playing guitar in public. He liked my music and I really liked his – then we started hanging out and playing music together and it just became a thing.”
In this way, open mics provide a unique platform for people to find each other and express their creativity, “It just kinda shows the power of these sorts of spaces – the coffeehouse. It’s organic, it’s needed – because it’s a free space for creative ideas and sharing,” said Mandeville.
For Healthy Living employee Myron Owens, who hosted his first open mic in 2012 after performing for the first time in 2010 at the same venue, “Self-evaluating the impact that I can make made me realize that I felt that I wasn’t good enough to be out there to be with people doing poetry.”
“Just as I was able to start breaking that shell, I want to be able to give others the opportunity, the comfort, the therapy of self-expression. I wanted to be able to allow others to realize their art is just as good as the next person’s,” said Owens.
When asked about how venues might cater to different crowds, Owens said, “The atmosphere does play an impact on how comfortable the artists are and what they want to present. For example, The Bakery has the vibe of just spoken word and Uptown is a musical type. At Healthy Living though, I wanted to emphasize so much that it’s not just music, not just poetry, but a building factor.”
The open mic platform can be openly empowering, according to Owens, “I’ve had a comedian, spoken word, people talking about political things or even financial advising. I’ve had people as young as folks coming from high school and as old as people as old as my grandmother singing gospel songs.”
With open mics on the rise then in Farmville, it remains to be seen how the community might come together creatively.
