BETHLEHEM, Pa. – On any given night inside Godfrey Daniels, strangers become friends and tickets are reservations.<\/p>\n
“I love this place. The day I walked in here, I knew I wanted to volunteer,” Stan Baker said.<\/p>\n
On this night, the legendary music listening room attracted Belvidere, New Jersey’s Sam and Jeff Rush, regulars for 25 years.<\/p>\n
“The history of people who have come through these doors, it’s the who’s who of folk Americana,” they said.<\/p>\n
A place where the distance between artist and audience disappears.<\/p>\n
Local Musician Alex Radus is a Godfrey regular.<\/p>\n
“It’s a listening room where there is a connection with the artist and audience you can’t really get otherwise,” he said on why it’s so special.<\/p>\n
The feeling musician and owner Dave Fry first felt.<\/p>\n
“I needed a place where I could play and be listened to,” Fry said.<\/p>\n
To fill that gap, Fry rented an old donut shop.<\/p>\n
Friends helped turn it into a club, with the name an ode to how vaudeville comedian W.C Fields used it to skirt censorship at the time. Fry gathered a bunch of friends for that first show, March 19th, 1976.<\/p>\n
“It’s like a nice blanket. I know of the magic that exists in this room. It’s really interesting to watch the new performers come in and look at the walls and recognize people they know and respect,” Fry added.<\/p>\n
No more so than world-renowned singer-songwriter John Gorka.<\/p>\n
“I remember looking up at the walls and thinking, oh, this is, this is what Greenwich Village must have been like in the 60s,” he recalled.<\/p>\n
His 1983 song “That’s How Legends are Made” is about Godfrey’s. Gorka lived in the basement for a time as a student at Moravian College.<\/p>\n
“This is what the place that made it possible for me to for a dream to come true, because it was here I saw the kind of performer, the kind of artist I wanted to be,” he said.<\/p>\n
The small room in South Bethlehem may not have changed music, but it has changed how people hear it.<\/p>\n
“If Godfrey Daniels was a song, how would that go?” 69 News reporter Bo Koltnow asked Fry.<\/p>\n
“We are the world, wee are the people,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BETHLEHEM, Pa. – On any given night inside Godfrey Daniels, strangers become friends and tickets are reservations. “I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,153,155,154,1391],"class_list":["post-143181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-bethlehem-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}