Godfrey Daniels seats about 90 people. That is the whole point of the place, and it has been since March 19, 1976, when a folksinger and a friend opened a listening room in a former doughnut shop on Bethlehem’s South Side. Fifty years later, the room is too small for its own birthday party.
So the anniversary has spilled across the city. Part of it went to Macungie Memorial Park. Part of it went to Liederplatz during Musikfest. Part of it went to Foy Hall at Moravian University. And part of it went down to Sand Island, to a stone building that spent most of the 20th century full of ice.
That is the Godfrey Daniels Presents: 50th Anniversary Series Live at the Ice House, a run of concerts at the Charles A. Brown Ice House booked for acts whose reach has outgrown a 90-seat room. The venue describes the series as a way of “showcasing legacy performers, emerging voices, and community partners,” carrying what it calls its Live Music Listening Room spirit onto a larger stage.
A Doughnut Shop, 90 Chairs and a W.C. Fields Joke
Dave Fry and Cindy Dinsmore opened the club at 7 E. Fourth Street in March 1976. Fry booked the acts as the club’s first artistic director. Dinsmore ran the house. The opening bill was Fry, the Shimersville Sheiks, Mary Faith Rhoads and a handful of local players, in front of what the club’s own history calls “a small, but enthusiastic, audience.”
The name is a joke almost nobody gets anymore. “Godfrey Daniel” was W.C. Fields’ preferred stand-in for a curse he could not say on film, and the coffeehouse took it, says the club, “after the euphemistic expletive favored by W. C. Fields.”
One decision from that first week has never changed: most of the money taken at the door goes to the performer. The club became a nonprofit in 1978, started a membership program in 1984, and grew from a small folk room into what its own history calls “an internationally acclaimed club on the ‘folk circuit.’” Tom Paxton played there. So did Townes Van Zandt, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Odetta and Stan Rogers. By its 30th anniversary the club was being credited with starting the South Side’s revival, years before anybody used the word renaissance about that part of Bethlehem.
Fifty years on, the calendar still looks like the mission statement: folk, blues, bluegrass, Cajun, Celtic, country and jazz, plus storytelling, poetry, comedy, monthly jams, open mikes and youth programs. The room’s stated purpose is to “create and nurture the appreciation of traditional and contemporary folk music and performing arts by providing an intimate environment where professional artists, amateur performers and audience members will be enriched by the unique experience of live performance.” Fry eventually wrote the whole story down in a book, Welcome to Godfrey Daniels, which the club still sells.
The Ice House Stopped Making Ice the Year Godfrey Daniels Opened
The series’ venue has its own 1976 coincidence. The Charles A. Brown Ice House on Sand Island opened in the 1880s as a working ice house. Bethlehem bought it in 1963 as part of a plan to put recreation back on the island, ice operations continued for a while longer, and then stopped in 1976. After that the building sat mostly empty, used for storage.
What saved it was Charlie Brown, then the city’s director of parks and public property, who wanted it turned over to youth theater, puppet shows and community events. That happened in the mid-1990s. In 2007 the city renamed the building for him.
Today it is one of the busier small stages in the Valley, home to the IceHouse Performing Arts Collaborative, Pennsylvania Youth Theatre and Moravian University Theatre, and a room that sees more than 800 local artists from more than 40 arts organizations pass through in a year. It sits at 56 River Street, a short walk from the Hill to Hill Bridge.
What the 50th Has Looked Like So Far
The Ice House series opened on March 21 with Bakithi Kumalo & The South African All Stars, the bass player whose fretless lines carry Graceland. It came back on Sept. 11 with Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams, the Americana duo who spent years in Levon Helm’s band and, in Campbell’s case, in Bob Dylan’s, with Andy Stack on bass.
Around those shows, the anniversary year has had a summer jubilee of its own: a showcase at Das Awkscht Fest in Macungie on July 31, a full day of Godfrey Daniels artists at Liederplatz during Musikfest on Aug. 9, and a Golden Jubilee concert at Foy Hall at Moravian University on May 23, with Campbell and Williams again. There is also a Martin guitar raffle, which is the most Lehigh Valley fundraiser imaginable.
Fall put the club back in its own room, with two-night residencies from Chris Smither in November and John Gorka in December, both already thin on tickets.
The Vanaver Caravan, 54 Years of Dance and Music
The year’s last Ice House booking lands this Friday, and it is the one with the most moving parts. The Vanaver Caravan, a dance and music company from New Paltz, New York, brings its newest production, America in Motion: The People’s 250th Celebration, to the Ice House on Oct. 16.
Bill and Livia Drapkin Vanaver founded the company in 1972, a year after they met, and ran it together for more than five decades. Bill Vanaver played guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, oud, pipa, tambura and most things with strings on them, and was deeply read in Appalachian, Balkan and Middle Eastern traditions. The company he and Livia built has performed at Jacob’s Pillow, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Biennale de la Danse in Lyon and the Sidmouth festival in England, and runs a dance institute for children and teenagers alongside the touring work. Bill Vanaver died in June 2025 at 81. The company, now in its 54th year, describes its work as promoting “peace, celebrating our shared humanity, and transforming people’s lives through the magic of music and dance.”
America in Motion, Set in a Diner
America in Motion was conceived and directed by Brian T. Lawton, the company’s associate artistic director of dance, and developed with its Artistic Visioning Committee. The staging is a single location: an American diner, with musicians and dancers moving through it as the workers who keep ordinary life running.
“America in Motion offers a small glimpse into the lives of often overlooked laborers, stories of pride, adversity, and the bonds that unite all workers,” Lawton said in the company’s program notes. “The full work is inhabited by characters from all walks of life, including miners, mothers, farmers, factory workers, railroad workers, and more. We explore the obstacles they face, the joys they experience, and the echoes of their stories today.”
The score is played live, on fiddle, guitar, banjo, vocals and percussion, with Chelsea Needham as music director. The movement pulls from American folk dance traditions, Appalachian clogging among them, and mixes in contemporary dance, body percussion and straight theatrical storytelling. The company lists the piece as drawing on its own back catalogue: Pastures of Plenty, its Woody Guthrie tribute, Turn, Turn, Turn, its Pete Seeger piece, and EarthBeat.
The company is blunt about what the work is arguing. It describes a piece about “humanity in the face of systems that too often place profit and productivity above human dignity and joy,” holding “the beauty, intention, and mythos of America alongside the harsher realities that have always existed and feel especially present today.” Framed against the country’s 250th anniversary, that is a less tidy kind of celebration than bunting.
Then Everybody Dances
The performance runs about an hour. What follows is the part that makes the booking a Godfrey Daniels booking rather than a theater booking: the floor opens and the company’s artists lead a community square dance, with live music. No partner, no experience, no prior square dancing of any kind required. The invitation, in the company’s words, needs nothing more than a willingness to join in.
The evening is being presented with WDIY 88.1 FM and with Lehigh University Art Galleries.
Friday Night, 56 River Street
The show is Friday, Oct. 16, at the Charles A. Brown Ice House, 56 River Street in Bethlehem. The performance starts at 7 p.m. and the square dance follows at 8. Tickets are $36.50 in advance and $41.69 on the day of the show, through godfreydaniels.org.
Parking on Sand Island is its own small adventure on a Friday night, so leave a few extra minutes, and wear something you can move in. The square dance is not a spectator event.
This Land Is Up at Lehigh Until Dec. 4
The other half of the evening is a mile and a half away, and the galleries are staying open late for it.
This Land: Reimagining The United States of America on its 250th Anniversary runs through Dec. 4 at the LUAG Main Gallery inside Zoellner Arts Center on Lehigh University’s campus. It opened Sept. 1, curated by Mark Wonsidler, Lehigh University Art Galleries’ curator of exhibitions and collections, with Florencia San Martín, assistant professor of art history.
The show takes its title and its argument from Woody Guthrie. In the gallery’s framing, Guthrie’s 1944 anthem “This Land Is Your Land” imagined “a place of true belonging, a landscape where people could move freely, unimpeded by rigid boundaries,” and the exhibition “resists strict definitions of ‘America’ and ‘Americans.’” It is built in six thematic sections, with maps, visual poetry, critical science fiction and sonic work set against received histories and myths of ownership, and it leans on documents, photographs and artwork covering immigration, labor, recreation, landscape and identity.
Two things in it are worth the walk on their own. The first is a selection of historic images and artifacts from the C. F. Martin & Co. Archives in Nazareth, which is a local guitar company turning up inside an argument about Woody Guthrie. The second is a listening room, plus an interactive library space, and a run of workshops, artist talks and community conversations scheduled through the fall. A companion exhibition, Unfinished Chapter: The First 250 Years of American Liberty, is up at Linderman Library on the same campus.
On Friday, Oct. 16, LUAG is running extended hours so that ticket holders can walk the Main Galleries before heading over to the Ice House for the 7 p.m. show. Regular hours are Tuesday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Wednesday through Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with last entry 15 minutes before closing. The galleries are closed Sunday and Monday.
What Is Left of the 50th
Friday is the last Ice House date on the anniversary calendar, which means the 50th year ends where it started, in the 90-seat room on Fourth Street: Chris Smither on Nov. 20 and 21, John Gorka on Dec. 2 and 3, a free Steve Brosky show on Nov. 27 with an RSVP, and the annual Hank Williams tribute on New Year’s Day. Fifty years in, the club is still booking its own birthday one night at a time.
At a Glance
- Who: Godfrey Daniels, 7 E. Fourth Street, Bethlehem, a nonprofit listening room seating about 90
- Opened: March 19, 1976, by Dave Fry and Cindy Dinsmore, in a former doughnut shop; nonprofit since 1978
- The name: W.C. Fields’ substitute for a word he could not say on camera
- The anniversary series: Godfrey Daniels Presents: 50th Anniversary Series Live at the Ice House, at the Charles A. Brown Ice House, 56 River Street, Bethlehem
- Series so far: Bakithi Kumalo & The South African All Stars (March 21); Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams with Andy Stack (Sept. 11)
- This Friday: The Vanaver Caravan’s America in Motion: The People’s 250th Celebration, Friday, Oct. 16, Charles A. Brown Ice House, 56 River Street, Bethlehem. 7 p.m. show, square dance at 8
- Tickets: $36.50 advance, $41.69 day of show, through godfreydaniels.org
- The company: The Vanaver Caravan, founded 1972 in New Paltz, New York, by Bill and Livia Drapkin Vanaver; now in its 54th year
- The production: Conceived and directed by Brian T. Lawton; music director Chelsea Needham; live fiddle, guitar, banjo, vocals and percussion; about an hour, followed by a community square dance with no partner or experience needed
- Presented with: WDIY 88.1 FM and Lehigh University Art Galleries
- Make a night of it: This Land: Reimagining The United States of America on its 250th Anniversary, LUAG Main Gallery, Zoellner Arts Center, 420 E. Packer Ave., Bethlehem, through Dec. 4. Extended hours on Oct. 16 for the Ice House crowd; regular hours Tues. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Wed. to Fri. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Rest of the 50th year: Chris Smither Nov. 20 and 21; Steve Brosky Nov. 27 (free with RSVP); John Gorka Dec. 2 and 3; Hank Williams tribute Jan. 1
- Online: godfreydaniels.org, vanavercaravan.org, luag.org
