An Evening with John Gorka

John Gorka plays The Cedar Cultural Center on Saturday, November 21, 2026. He's a New Jersey-born singer-songwriter who got his start at a neighborhood coffee house in eastern Pennsylvania, where he worked as a resident MC and sound man at the Godfrey Daniels club. From there, he drew on the folk-inspired acoustic music of troubadours like Stan Rogers, Eric Andersen, Tom Paxton, and Claudia Schmidt, and later landed in New York's Fast Folk circle.

His rich baritone voice and original songwriting caught the attention of peers like Suzanne Vega, Nanci Griffith, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Red House Records released his first album, I Know, in 1987, and five more followed on Windham Hill's High Street Records, including Between Five and Seven in 1994, before he returned to Red House in 1998 with After Yesterday. In 2010, he recorded Red Horse with label-mates Lucy Kaplansky and Eliza Gilkyson. His song "Where No Monuments Stand" also features in the documentary Every War Has Two Losers, which is about the poet William Stafford.

It's a solo bill, so the night is built around Gorka's voice and his songwriting. If you've never heard him, that baritone is the thing to listen for. The Cedar Cultural Center is at 416 Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis, MN 55454. Doors open at 7 PM and the show starts at 8 PM.