Musicians need faithin their talent and their ability to deliver it to an audience. And the faith of the Luke-Ham-Sandwich Family Band is as deep as its name is odd.
For the past four years, Del and Debbie Lukasiewicz have hauled their eight children around the country playing folk and fiddle music. The kids are home-schooled. Three are adoptees from a Haitian orphanage.
They all live in a not-so-little house on the prairie north of Longmont. Think of them as a multi-ethnic Partridge Family, minus the annoying red-headed kid.
“Well, maybe on occasion an annoying kid,” Deb said with a laugh.
This family is a study in faith. Not just the leap of faith it takes to adopt three kids when you already have five, but the Christian faith that permeates their lives as surely as the music.
“It’s how we make the family the center of everything we do,” Deb said. “Some families camp out; we make music.”
This is a fiddle band that can swing from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” into “Orange Blossom Special.” Their rehearsal hall? A rambling house they built 11 years ago on a 13-acre spread.
It’s the kind of place you’d expect in Ken Caryl Ranch, not on a dirt road. There’s a lake out back that hosts bald eagles in summer and freezes in the winter. Travis, 8, must be one of the few kids from Haiti who plays hockey.
“It’s been gratifying how this community embraced us as a black-and-white family,” said Del, whose construction company builds restaurants throughout the region.
“The question we’re asked a lot is how to raise black kids as a white parent,” Deb said. “But you raise them the same way, and if you raise them right the kid will flourish in any culture.”
Their faith literally led them to their children. In 2001, the family went on a church mission to Haiti. They worked at an orphanage. On the first day, they met Travis, then 18 months old.
The family was smitten.
Struck by Haiti’s poverty, they decided to adopt him and set the paperwork in motion. They soon decided they wanted to adopt a second child.
“We didn’t want Travis to be the only child of color in an all-white family,” Deb said. Then the orphanage called. Two young sisters, Ronise and Tori, were available.
Some large families joke that they have enough kids to form a ball team. Deb and Del looked around and decided they had enough for a band.
Thus was born the Luke-Ham- Sandwich Family Band, a play on Lukasiewicz.
The lineup: Del plays guitar; Deb runs the sound board. Danika, 17, plays fiddle, mandolin and guitar and serves as music director. Her fiddling siblings: sister Taylor, a day shy of 15, and brothers Ty, 12, and Chase, 8. Rounding out the band are Travis; Ronise, 11; and Tori, 7.
Tim, 18, is the oldest and off at college in Ohio.
Danika is a prodigy, and listening to her spin out long sinuous fiddle lines, you feel like you’re watching Texas music legend Bob Wills’ granddaughter.
The kids are their own roadies, setting up mic stands and tuning instruments like pros. The band puts 40,000 miles a year on a fifth-wheel trailer. Gigs range from church services to county fairs.
All this togetherness, and the kids still curl up with each other on the living room sofa.
“We may not be of the same color, but we’re of the same heart,” Deb said.
William Porter’s column appears twice a week. Reach him at 303-954-1977 or wporter@denverpost.com.
