New band MannaFest, featuring minister as vocalist, serves organizations that are doing good in the community
By Lisa Klionsky
News Staff Reporter
Tracy Huffman used to sing Top 40 and Motown dance hits with bands that played weekend stints in Toledo, Atlantic City, and Boston. Then she became the Rev. Tracy Huffman and starting spending Sunday mornings in the pulpit.
Those weekend gigs are no longer an option in her pastoral position, admits the busy West Side United Methodist Church minister. But she says music is so important to her - really an extension of her person - that, she, along with her husband, Bob, and a few of their friends, started a new band a year ago: MannaFest.
"We'd talked about wanting to do music sometime together. What I thought would be neat was to play for benefits. That to me was the best of both worlds - to do music and do it for a good thing," Huffman said.
It meant Huffman could express herself through the music she's always loved and had to put, willingly, on the back burner when she began at West Side - yet still extend her ministry by helping other people.
The band recorded a CD, began rehearsing seriously in the spring of 2001 and played their first gig that October. "We only had to do one set, so we had a couple of months to work up nine or 10 songs," Huffman said.
The group performs for free, with the sound system the only expense to those putting on a benefit.
In early October, the group performed at Gimme Shelter, the annual Interfaith Hospitality Network benefit that raised $40,000. The band members perform Dec. 7 in Ann Arbor at a benefit for a patient who needs a liver transplant.
Everyone in the band is in a social services profession: Huffman's husband, Bob, is a music therapist; Dave Buehrer is a former social worker and now a youth director at West Side; his wife, Jennifer Hill Buehrer, is a social worker; and Kyle Rasmussen is a psychologist.
"We wanted to do something in the sense of tithing our talents, giving something of our time to serve organizations that are doing good in the community," said Dave Buehrer, who sings and plays guitar.
"I like the fact we're doing benefits, that we have kind of a social-work purpose," said Rasumussen, the band's drummer.
The six-piece band, featuring vocalists, guitar, bass and drums, plays everything from the Beatles to Fleetwood Mac to Indigo Girls to Cracker, as well as bluegrass and some Christian music, in both electric and acoustic forms.
Rasmussen says the band isn't a "Christian" rock band.
"I think of it more as a humanitarian purpose. The fact we play some Christian songs reaches some folks, but that's not everybody we want to reach," Rasmussen said.
The main goal is to play music that is positive in nature, Buehrer said. "We wanted to appeal o organizations that aren't Christian or that are maybe interfaith, to nonprofit organizations," he said.
While the music came together readily for the and members, most of whom have been professional musicians, finding time to practice was not so easy.
"It is really difficult to get six people together," Buehrer said. "For the most part, we do rehearsals on Thursday evenings" in the basement of the church's Pittsfield Township parsonage.
Naming the band also proved a bit challenging.
"We tried to do something with a religious tone, but nothing that beat someone over the head," Huffman said. "We were playing around with word plays. It took us a long time. It was the biggest thing we dealt with."
Ultimately, Huffman said, the group liked the idea of manna, what God provides in the desert, and fest, for celebrating, and the entire word, then, sounds like manifest: To be made known, to reveal.
"We thought it was kind of cool," Huffman said.
And that's just the way band members describe the experience of playing in the group.
"Just being associated with these guys is great," Rasmussen said. And, he admits, it is a bit unusual to have a minister in a rock band. "It's also very cool. She's the rockingest minister around!"