Working with children and families has been a big part of Will Branch's work for the past 3 decades.
Concerts
With his playing partner Dave Fox, Branch has performed hundreds of concerts at libraries and schools and on Children's Stages at prestigious festivals. To learn more about Fox & Branch, see the section below.
Branch continues to perform concerts for children as a solo act. His show is built from the same fun, interactive material that made Fox & Branch connect with audiences. The repertoire is drawn from American Roots music and from many other sources.
Music Together
Branch is also the director of a long-standing Music Together center. Music Together is a much-loved program for young children and their families. The goal of the program is to give children a grounding in basic musical abilities by age 5. Branch's center, Mr. Will's Music Together, offers classes at 3 locations in the Milwaukee area. For more information, visit:
http://www.mrwillsmusictogether.com
Fox & Branch
For 28 years, Branch partnered with Dave Fox in the duo Fox & Branch. The duo performed nearly 2,000 concerts over the course of their career, much of the time presenting programs for children and families.
Fox & Branch’s last performance was at the Matheson Memorial Library in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, on Friday, June 27, 2025.
Dave Fox and Will Branch started playing music together in 1997. They would visit each other’s homes and at first Will was learning guitar arrangements from Dave. That grew into Will accompanying Dave on the many fiddle tunes that Dave knew. This musical relationship developed into a duo that had a wide repertoire of fiddle tunes, blues songs and other American roots material, performed on guitars, fiddle, washboard and banjo.
Around the year 2000, Fox & Branch began performing for children and families, mainly at public libraries in the region. Over the years they recorded a number of albums for families and expanded their touring region to include most of the Midwest as well as Boston, New York City, and southern Louisiana. They performed at major festivals like The Winnipeg Folk Festival and crowd-sourced a tour of Ireland and the UK.
Fox & Branch won many awards over the years, including 5 Parent’s Choice Recommended Awards for their recordings for families. They were proud to be named one of the “50 Reasons to Love Milwaukee” in 2015 by Milwaukee magazine.
In 2007, Fox & Branch began a tradition of playing free concerts once a month at Anodyne Coffee in Milwaukee. The first monthly concerts were at the Bay View location, but eventually moved to the larger Walker’s Point location. These concerts became a favorite gig for Dave and Will, as they watched generations of children grow up attending multiple concerts.