By Marilyn Delk
DCCA News
Cincinnati based singer/songwriter Zak Morgan brought his energetic performance to our community this past week as Darke County Center for the Arts presented the first of its 2024-2025 Arts In Education performances in local schools. And to say that students had a good time would be a vast understatement; but they also were learning language skills as well as the value of persevering and practicing kindness and more, all without realizing that they were being taught while having fun!
Zak uses his humorous story songs to teach life lessons and more, to the great delight of his young audiences. Students react with glee, squealing and laughing as they participate in the informative and silly back and forth between artist and audience. Last Monday afternoon, I had the delightful duty of accompanying Zak to Bradford for the first of his DCCA AIE performances, watching his skillful interaction with the first- through third-grade students assembled in the school’s cafetorium.
The performance began with Zak saying that that he has a big imagination, stating that he loves books and good stories, and then singing a song about friends. At song’s end, most of his audience believed that they had found a friend in the zany guitar-playing artist. Next, he launched into his vast catalogue of enchanting stories told in silly songs.
“Going to Sea Island” relates the excitement surrounding a childhood attempt to “pilfer some candy” and “sneak a soda pop” from a goodie-packed cooler while en route to a family vacation, stealthily adding descriptive words to the kids’ vocabulary (such as pilfer and stealth.) Following one fun song with another, Zak launched into “The Funny Farm” which is filled with misinformation about goats going “Oink!” and pigs going “Bleet” and misnomers such as “the farmers got fins and the fish have feet!” After being noisily told by his audience that he had it all wrong, he informed them that what they had just heard and enjoyed was “fiction,” a literary form with which they had just had some fun.
Zak pulled out his “pet frog,” a stuffed animal named Marty, who the audience was told had just gone through his metamorphosis, introducing another concept and word that the youngsters found fascinating and exciting. After telling a knock-knock joke that induced groans from the students, the visiting artist sang a song with the intriguing title “Tiodnaci.” which when turned around says “I Can Do It,” encouraging kids to practice worthwhile behaviors and new skills, because “even if it doesn’t make perfect, it makes progress.”
Then he introduced those assembled to Fiona, the lovable hippopotamus born prematurely at the Cincinnati Zoo in 2017 who captured the attention and hearts of the residents of Cincinnati and the world. As Zak performed his song “Fiona,” relating the tale of how medical practitioners usually working with humans as well as practicing veterinarians labored to feed and nurture the fragile animal, a video of the popular semi-aquatic mammal ran on a nearby screen. In the video, the entertainer is shown actually standing in the water beside the healthy three-year-old Fiona, who remains adorable and adored by fans even to this day.
After announcing that his last song would be “a scary one,” Zak launched into “The Case of the Dry Markers,” which featured references to apparitions, ghouls, dybbuks, spectres, and ghosts and also introduced the students to coleoptera, a fancy way to say beetles. In addition to surreptitiously teaching about synonyms, the not-very-scary song offered opportunity for the audience to sing/shout “Boom, boom, boom” at each iteration of the chorus, which may not actually have raised the roof in the cafetorium where they were assembled, but sounded as though such a reaction to the decibels generated was well within the realm of possibility.
Zak Morgan highly entertained and subtly taught local students throughout the past week, singing his award-winning songs filled with sophisticated wordplay and literary devices in performances filled with warmth and a positive message that stealthily encouraged children to read, to imagine, and to believe in themselves. And a good time was had by all!
