Reluctant Santa is eager educator

Looking at him now, it seems obvious: Bay View singer-songwriter David HB Drake is impish, full of smiles, and sporting a bushy white beard. However, the red suit came reluctantly.

“For many years, I didn’t do Santa Claus,” he said. “It’s so commercial. But given the times…” He shrugged, a what-else-can-I-do sort of gesture.

Drake has made his peace with Kris Kringle. Speaking of his background in theater, he said, “I’m used to taking on a character.” Now he is a singing, dancing, lore-spinning Santa-”I’m not a throne Santa!” he insisted-throughout the holiday season.

No Child Left Behind, the federal education law that mandates standardized testing, is somewhat responsible for Santa. Before that law and other budget cuts began narrowing schools’ curricula-and taking music teachers out of schools-Drake would do as many as 200 shows of his “Wiscon-Sing” history program per year for schoolchildren.

Using guitar, banjo, sailor’s concertina, and native flute, Drake sings the history of Wisconsin, following the state standards and flashing slides through a projector hooked to a foot pedal. “I could do several days’ worth of lessons in an hour,” he said. His trio, Dangerous Folk, has even released an album called No Child Left Behind? in response to the law’s effect on schools.

As the school dates began to dry up, his beard started really going white. “I looked in the mirror. ‘Now you can play this role and do it right,’” he told himself. He takes Santa as seriously as any other role. “I’m not doing the music, but being the music. Magic is what it’s all about.”

Falling into a character as he did Santa is nothing new; it seems like Drake’s folk-singing life has been a series of such moments. He began his minstrel ways at the Bristol Renaissance Faire-then called King Richard’s Faire-in the early 1980s, when his dancer training led to a job as a swordfighter with the group Ring of Steel. Between shows, he took his guitar and strolled the grounds as “Carrie O’Tunne.”

When one of his former Ring of Steel mates was in Milwaukee with the replica HMS Bounty some years later, Drake found himself singing sea shanties from the deck while the crew rested. And so was born “Graybeard the Ancient Mariner,” a pirate-festival favorite.

Whatever his character, he’s always teaching. Aboard the tall ship S/V Denis Sullivan, he teaches kids to literally dance with waves to avoid seasickness. As Santa, he explains how the red and green colors of Christmas come from sailing (The red and green relate to the lamps on the port and starboard sides of boats, and St. Nicolas was the patron saint of sailors). He even writes an advice column for Pirates Magazine.

He and a half-dozen other arts educators started the Organic Arts collective, which promotes “grassroots art” and connects arts education with social justice issues. Thinking again about the recent economic turmoil, Drake joked, “We really ought to be teaching classes [in] hard-times survival. We’ve all lived on nothing all these years.”

From his modest Delaware Avenue home, decorated with the props for his shows, surrounded by “Peace” signs and a rain garden, Drake connects his whole career to Christmas. Reflecting on why he majored in theater to begin with, he said, “I became a stagehand because of Christmas. I wanted to play with the lights.” Now, as Santa, he does more than just play with the lights-he brings Christmas to life.

See David HB Drake as Santa at the BVNA KK Holiday event Saturday, Dec. 6, 6-9pm at 2262 S. Kinnickinnic Avenue (formerly Schwartz Bookshop). His annual holiday concert at the Mitchell Park Domes is Sunday, Dec. 21, at 3pm.

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