PORT TOWNSEND — Dana Lyons, the singer-songwriter who manages to stir humor into his environmental activism, will give a family concert at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship sanctuary this Saturday.
Admission to the 4 p.m. event is a suggested $10 donation at the door of the fellowship hall, 2333 San Juan Ave.
“I’ll be doing a mixture of ballads and love songs and comedy,” Lyons said in an interview from his home in Bellingham.
He added that he’ll dip into his latest album, “The Great Salish Sea” from 2014, and from older records such as “Circle the World,” “Cows with Guns” and “Ride the Lawn.”
Lyons has a long history of injecting his music into environmental causes and significant places. During the 1980s, he donned a hazardous materials suit for a concert at the Hanford site in protest of the proposal to turn it into a nuclear waste repository.
Lyons and compatriots won the battle: Radioactive waste doesn’t go to Hanford. Where to put it, though, remains an open question.
In September 2011, Lyons came to Port Angeles for an environmental victory. Joining tribal, state and federal officials at a ceremony overlooking the Elwha River, Lyons sang his song “One Drop of Water,” to herald the start of Elwha River dam demolitions.
These days, Lyons seeks to raise awareness of the trains carrying crude oil through Washington state. He wants them banned, in the wake of disastrous derailments in several other parts of the United States and Canada, including one in Mount Carbon, W.Va., last month.
On Saturday, he’ll speak briefly about the issue, encouraging people to learn more about fossil-fuel transport through Washington’s communities.
“Towns and counties throughout the region and the United States are passing resolutions to stop the exploding oil trains. People are holding educational forums [and] writing their legislators,” Lyons said.
Let us keep on as activists, he added — “and have a good time doing it.”
To hear some of Lyons’ music and read more about him, see CowswithGuns.com.
