Today is Make Music Day. Wherever you are in town — your porch, your yard, the sidewalk, the creek bank, a parking lot — step outside and play.
Sing a song. Pick a guitar. Bang a drum. Blow a harmonica. Or bring a chair and just listen. There is no stage, no ticket, no schedule to keep. The whole idea is simple: music everywhere, for everyone, free.
Nothing is organized. No sign-up, no host, no plan. Show up if you want, bring an instrument or just your voice, and see who else turns out. Stay five minutes or stay the whole evening. Come and go as you please.
It began in France in 1982 as the Fête de la Musique, dreamed up by culture minister Jack Lang and musicologist Maurice Fleuret. Fleuret had learned that one young French person in two played an instrument, and wanted a way to bring all of them out into the streets.
The French name is a pun: Fête de la Musique ("festival of music") sounds exactly like Faites de la musique — "Make music." That double meaning is the whole spirit of the day.
It is now held every June 21, the summer solstice, in more than 1,000 cities across some 120 countries. In the United States it goes by Make Music Day, coordinated since 2014 by the Make Music Alliance. Every kind of musician, amateur or professional, young or old, is welcome. All of it is free and open to the public.
This French celebration lands well here, because Smackover itself is a French inheritance. French hunters and trappers worked these piney woods along the Ouachita River in the 1700s, and they called this sumac-covered ground Sumac Couvert — "covered in sumac."
English-speaking settlers heard those French syllables and reshaped them into the name we say today: Smackover. So when we make music on a day born in France, we are, in a small way, answering an old French echo already buried in the name of our town.
The music everywhere, and the concert nowhere. — Maurice Fleuret, on the idea behind the day
Because a town sounds better when its people are playing in it. Because your neighbor has never heard you sing. Because somebody walking past might stop, smile, and remember it for years. Music shared in the open is a small, free gift to everyone within earshot — and you only have to step out the door to give it.
No skill level is too low and no instrument is too humble. The point is to be heard outdoors, among other people.