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Upcoming Concerts

1-16-26 ~ Joe Jencks - PADS Benefit Concert - Elgin, IL

1-19-26 ~ Joe Jencks, Betsy Rose, Kemp Harris & More - Online MLK Concert

1-21-26 ~ Folk Alliance International Conference starts in New Orleans, LA

1-31-26 ~ Joe Jencks & Lisa P. Medina in Concert at Cafe Carpe, Ftl Atkinson, WI

2-6-26 ~ Joe Jencks in Concert - Heartland Friends Meetinghouse, Wichita, KS

2-7-26 ~ Joe Jencks in Concert - Lakeside Music - Manhattan, KS

2-8-26 ~ Joe Jencks in Concert ~ Salina, KS

2-9-26 ~ Three-day Community Artist Residency - Coffeyville, KS

2-12-26 ~ Joe Jencks at The Old Home Place Concert Series - Buffalo, MO

Dear Friends in Music,

However surreal it may seem, Happy New Year!

I am grateful for the privilege of continuing to travel and bring music to people and places where it is needed. And to affirm the deep and rich tapestry of community that I get to be a part of through the music. Thanks for your part in continuing to create the beautiful broad community that is Folk.

This Friday, January 16th, I will give a benefit concert for PADS of Elgin. This is a phenomenal organization helping the under-housed and unhoused make the move toward greater housing security. I offered a benefit last summer for PADS of Lake County. It went so well, we decided to do another, for a different branch of PADS. The concert will be held at the Highland Ave. Coffee House in Elgin. Details on the web. Please come out and support this needed and worthy cause. All proceeds go to PADS.

Next week, I will see some of you in New Orleans for the Folk Alliance International Conference. My showcase schedule is also on my website. But the performances are a small part of why I go. Folk Alliance is where this marvelous and geographically dispersed community we call Folk gathers to be in the village together for a week. And I need my people right now.

Later in February, I will be on tour in Florida. March will see me in MN, MA, NY, NC & SC. April will bring me to D.C., VA, WV, OH, IN and more, including some shared shows with my dear friend and colleague, Deidre McCalla.

Please check the site for full concert listings and updates: https://joejencks.com

And please read the essay below: A Dream In Progress.

Reflections on South Africa, the U.S., and the times in which we live.

I hope to see many of you soon.

In Gratitude & Song,

~ Joe

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A Dream In Progress…

Copyright 2026, Joe Jencks, Turtle Bear Music

When I was about 15, I saw a film that changed my life: Cry Freedom. The story of Steven Bantu Biko and the struggle for liberation in South Africa from apartheid. In the film, there was a scene where mourners and compatriots in the liberation movement were in a funeral procession carrying Mr. Biko’s coffin. They were singing, “Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika.”

This is a hymn written in the 1890s in South Africa. It was and remains an anthem of liberation in many parts of Africa. But the melody and the harmonic structures, captured my young musical mind and my tender big heart. I was determined to go to a place where people sang like that, and to hear that song sung in South Africa one day. Last year, that dream came true. I was sonically blessed to hear a group of singers, Soweto a Cappella, sing this hymn at a neighborhood restaurant, in Soweto. “Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika” is now the first part of the South African National Anthem.

I wept freely, for so many reasons. In part because it was a promise to self, fulfilled. In part because I was listening to a group of young men sing joyfully and beautifully in a FREE South Africa. “Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty I am free at last.” So goes the famous hymn of liberation in the African American communities here in the States.

But I also wept in part, because there are people here in the U.S. who would like to see a more entrenched form of racism and classism take hold. There are people here actively working to create a new apartheid state. I wept because while it is still very much a work in progress, the South Africa that Biko and so many countless others envisioned, continues to grow 31 years into that long sought after independence.

But perhaps most of all, I wept because it is still a piece of music that pierces the thin armor of my heart and reminds me that we are stronger in solidarity, in community, than when we suffer the illusions that we can go it alone and get where we are hoping to go.

In Soweto, I met an AMAZING painter (Sipo / Smok_y) on the street and bought from him a portrait of Nelson Mandela. It now hangs in my humble living room as a daily invitation to remain awake and engaged. In Soweto, I walked past the homes of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu: two Nobel Peace Prize recipients who lived a block apart for a spell.

Artist Sipo (Smok_y) and the painting of Nelson Mandela now hanging in my living room. A gifted artist in Soweto, reminding people of the dream... Photo by Joe Jencks

And then the choir I was traveling with went to Kliptown - a very poor community within Soweto. We gave a shared concert with the Kliptown Community Choir at The Kliptown Youth Program school. Young adults raising the roof with their songs and heart. Music that moved me beyond words, as I finally got to hear a soundtrack of South Africa, not curated by a film or documentary. I was just there, drinking it all in, present with the phenomenal beauty and heartbreak and hope.

One of our guides (Mo - pictured w/ me above) grew up in Kliptown. He said, “Call this an informal settlement, call it a shanty town, call it a slum, call it what you will, we call it community.” Amen.

It is my hope to return to South Africa this year. There are good prospects. I have a friend who runs a non-profit with projects running in all nine provinces of South Africa. Assuming we can wrangle all of the considerable details, I look forward to traveling with him as he goes to do site visits on a multitude of these development and empowerment projects. It will be very different than being on a tour bus with a choir. More intimate and off the beaten path.

Don’t get me wrong - the choir tour was AMAZING. And I offer my thanks to 2nd Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis for the invitation to be a guest on their journey last June. It was fun to sing challenging choral music again, and to trade sets with South African choirs. It was an honor to sing in the Anglican Cathedral that was the home pulpit of Bishop Desmond Tutu. And, I yearn for more time in this remarkable country. I yearn to have deeper conversations, and reconnect with friends I made this past year. I want to cultivate a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the present moment, and the amalgamated vision for the future in South Africa. It is a place of extraordinary promise, in spite of hundreds of years of colonial imperialism. And the spirit of the people is a thing of beauty.

I am still struck by the economic and class divisions in South Africa between whites, blacks, and people of mixed race and ethnicity. My hope is that more would have changed in the conversations and pragmatic policies around racism and classism, since the end of apartheid. And a lot has changed. But the journey toward a more equitable economic, political, and social system is multi-generational work.

And still, South Africa embraces the pluralities, the seeming contradictions, and the tensions inherent in the nation building process. And the people of South Africa are proud, adventurous, inventive, courageous, and committed to a better future. There is vitality in the air that is profound. Palpable.

My hope is that more would have changed in the conversations about racism and classism here in the United States since the 1960s, much less since our own independence. And still we struggle with our own contradictions. In a week when an innocent woman, doing nothing illegal was shot and killed by ICE in Minnesota, we see our leaders malign the victims of these illegal government actions, here at home. And we see them simultaneously condemn the suppression of human rights in Iran as “pro democratic” protesters are attacked.

If you are feeling the disconnect, you are not alone. If you are feeling the phenomenal contradictions around every corner and a sense of helplessness, you are not alone. If you are scared, if you are dealing with insomnia, depression, anxiety, and everything seems harder than it should, you are not alone. If stories of people being “disappeared” lurk around the edges of your consciousness, you are not alone.

We have not lost the Republic. But we do need to remember what it is we are working for: A truly free, truly inclusive, truly multi-cultural society, where the American Dream is still possible. Not the dream of wealth or privilege for an elite few. Not the dream of political power for a select caste of society. But the dream of a United States of America where hope is alive and where we are trying to make the table longer rather than limit who gets a seat at that table.

I don’t have answers, but I will keep singing. I will keep observing and writing and touring and offering concerts. I will keep being present in the world in all the ways I know how, in order to help us all fulfill the promise of building a more perfect union. And not just for Americans. Rather, building relationships as partners in process with the rest of the world. Not as imperial forces, not as colonizers, not as an elite people, but as actual neighbors in a global community.

That’s a lot to ask from a folk song. But we’ve seen that spirit move the needle here and around the world in the past, and I have faith that we will again.

In Solidarity,

~ Joe Jencks (1-15-26)

Sunrise over the Indian Ocean, Mosselbai, SA. Photo by Joe Jencks