Main fundraiser photo

Joy for Frankie

Frankie Hargrove  exited the prison system at the age of 70 to a world that is very different in ways both big and small from the one he left at 36. The people seem less friendly and more suspicious—particularly toward a Black man. D.C. itself has “shifted”—not only favorite places are gone, but entire neighborhoods. And then there is new technology: No more flip phones and CD players. They’ve been replaced by programmable TVs and “smart” phones that make him feel dumb.

But the biggest challenge has been the re-entry process itself.  Frankie exited the halfway house to, basically, nothing: no relatives to take him in, no home, no job, no support network ready to guide him through a world that could and would be very unkind to a Black man who had spent almost half his life in prison and with a sex-offender label that might as well be tattooed on his forehead. 

Simply put, everything is hard. But there are times when he experiences the flashes of happiness that should come from freedom.  That is when he is playing his guitar and singing. And guess what? He is GOOD. He's been offered an opportunity to perform for pay at one of D.C.'s well-known blues clubs: Madams Organ. But he needs his own back-up equipment to do that. Here's what he needs:

Boss VE8 acoustic singer pedal: $309
Fender 100 acoustic electric guitar amplifier: $400
Fender amplifier foot switch: $44 
Boss SY-100 guitar synthesizer: $1,033
Bluebird SL microphone: $300
GoPro kit (to shoot video & create a portfolio): $360

It's not much. We can do this. And who knows? Maybe in addition to bringing Frankie some joy and a bit of self-earned cash, we can one day say "we knew him when."


The backstory

Frankie’s father gave him his first guitar when he was 5 years old—"a plastic thing with the Lone Ranger riding all over it”—as a distraction to keep him away from the older man’s more professional instrument. But it was two years later, when Frankie heard Elvis play at a concert and the legend shook his hand, that his real love of guitars bloomed. When he ran away from home for the first time at the age of 10, he received a pasteboard guitar to lure him home. From that time on, Frankie began to learn how to sound out music. He never did learn how to read music but can hear it in his head.

Over the course of his 35 years behind bars, most of the institutions in which he was confined had musical instruments—including guitars—prisoners could check out. But the quality declined when the institutions replaced the strings with poor plastic imitations (a collective punishment when some prisoners used guitar strings as “needles” to make tattoos or, in one case, to kill someone).

Frankie was deprived of this simple pleasure during his last two years in prison, then nine months in a halfway house. One of the first things I did after learning of his talent was to remedy that wrong by buying him his own guitar. One day, a chance man he met invited Frankie to the D.C. blues bar Madams Organ. When the house band began to play, Frankie (being Frankie) shouted out to the lead guitarist that his D string was flat. The man looked at Frankie and retorted, "You a musician?" Frankie answered, “I play guitar." His next words: "Ladies and gentlemen, we got a guitar player here. Come on up." And while he fixed his D string, Frankie did. He was uncertain at first but aided by a literal push from people in the crowd, he borrowed one of the group’s other guitars and played one of his own songs: “I Believe.” (“I believe,” he sang, “that there is someone out there for me.” And a woman in the crowd responded, “I’m right here, baby!”) The band manager introduced Frankie to the club’s booker, and now he’s been invited to play regular gigs for Madams Organ. 







Organizer

Pam Bailey
Organizer
Washington D.C., DC

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