Bob Franke at the Me&Thee Coffeehouse Feb. 28, 2003

WHAT BETTER PRAISE COULD A FOLK SINGER RECEIVE than having Tom Paxton say this about him: “It’s about Bob Franke’s integrity. I always think of Bob as if Emerson and Thoreau had picked up acoustic guitars and gotten into songwriting. There’s touches of Mark Twain and Buddy Holly in there, too.” Franke’s career as a singer-songwriter began in the mid-1960s when he was a student at the University of Michigan. He was one of the first people to perform at the famous Ark Coffeehouse. Bob moved to Cambridge after graduation and the rest is folk music history.

Franke’s songwriting skills are well-known in the folk community. Peter, Paul and Mary, David Wilcox, Garnet Rogers, and June Tabor (among others) have performed Bob’s songs— complex, captivating, and full of warm-hearted spirituality. When listening to his very personal lyrics, you often feel like you’re eavesdropping on a private conversation or reading his diary.

“The Desert Questions” is Franke’s latest collection of songs about loss, love, courage, and compassion. It features pioneering folk-rock drummer Dave Mattacks, master guitarist Duke Levine, bassist Paul Bryan, and superb vocalists Julie Dougherty and Ellen Groves. Reviewer Scott Alarik had this to say in the Boston Globe: “It is possibly [Franke’s] most musically exciting record and finest vocal performance. The ballads about the collapse of a marriage at midlife are devastatingly vivid, a different mood from the romantic brooding found in youthful love-gone-wrong songs.”

One of Bob’s signature songs, “Hard Love” has a special Me&Thee connection: Ellen Wittlinger, a longtime volunteer at the coffeehouse, used the song as a basis of her award-winning young adult novel of the same name. And Franke’s ties to Marblehead don’t end there. He has composed three cantatas and several hymns for the Church of St. Andrew and he also wrote a Harvest Cantata for the Marblehead Eco-Farm.

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