I have portrayed
our hill country way of life with my songs as well as with my photos.
I have songs about school buses and topdressing planes, ploughing and crutching,
courtships and back country weddings, murder
and Alzheimers, prefab postholes and eel attacks,
fire, flood and my new-born son. John's
songs
If your school-children are working on a particular rural or historical topic, I also have a range of other people's songs I could choose from for the occasion. Songs for school projects
I
was brought up at Mangamahu in the 1940s and 50s, did some secondary school-teaching
in big cities, and in the 1980s I wrote and sang a lot of "Mangamahu
songs."
I haven't sung them much in the past 15 years, but recently I have been getting requests to sing the best of them, and a bloke in Wellington wants to make a CD "for historic purposes." So I need some live audiences to get my singing up to the mark.
I am 67 now, retired and with plenty of spare time: I'm happy to come and sing without asking any payment. Maybe I could sing at your school in the afternoon and give a house concert to adults in the evening.
Our car is used by another family member Monday to Friday, but if you can put me up overnight, and pick me up at Taihape or Ohakune, I can catch a ride on one of the schoolbuses from Waiouru.
John Archer
Waiouru
Phone 06 387 6993
John.Archer@xtra.co.nz