Sometimes farming yields a lot more than crops. The long tradition of agrarian music that includes everything from “Old MacDonald” to the musical “State Fair” now includes “Agrimusic” by the local historian and musician Seth Hedquist. He wrote a dozen new songs and plans to perform them with a nine-piece band on April 4 at Noce.
Hedquist dug into Iowa’s agricultural history for his master’s degree, in 2015, and started writing the songs about three years ago. They’re inspired in part by rural Iowa musicians who performed at state and county farm bureau events in the 1920s and ’30s, when farmers had an especially tough row to hoe. A few songs riff on melodies from Thomas Mann, an Adel farmer and musician who played his hammered dulcimer for a recording for the Library of Congress.
