A Bit of History, Part I: The Atlanta Years

I remember the exact day I wrote my first song. It was 2001 and I was living in Atlanta and riding the wave of the old-time/bluegrass music renaissance inspired by the Coen Brothers’ movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? I had just gone to my first Gillian Welch and David Rawlings concert at the Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points and came home in a trance: I needed to write a song. I wrote my first song that very night.

Around that same time, I shook a decade of dust off the violin I’d played from age 4-13 and learned to fiddle on it. I had good friends who introduced me to porch jamming and fiddle tunes and the songs of Doc Watson, Tim O’Brien and Tony Rice. Soon I wanted to play more often than they were inclined to, so I started showing up to bluegrass and old-time jams, which you could find most days of the week in Atlanta back then. Folks seemed very happy to welcome a newbie, and it didn’t hurt that a lifetime of singing alto in a cappella church music gave me a good ear for harmonies.

I started sitting in with some local bands at bar gigs and local festivals and opries. Yes, opries. I know you’ve heard of the Grand Ole Opry. Well, it’s just the “grandest” (biggest) of the hundreds of little opry houses all over the rural south. An opry is where local and regional gospel and bluegrass bands play on Saturday nights to a supportive local crowd that hollers enthusiastically at good breaks while enjoying $1 home-made cellophane-wrapped brownies and soda cans from an ice-filled cooler.

Songwriting during those years in Atlanta made perfect sense, because I was already playing other peoples’ songs with people and in front of people all the time. I was playing almost entirely with men and we were singing a repertoire written almost entirely by and about men. I wanted to sing some songs from a different point of view, so I tried writing them for myself. I will be forever grateful to Leonard, Paul, Joe and John of Whoa Nelly!, because they were the first human beings with whom I dared to share an original song, and they received it with such enthusiasm. They immediately worked that song up with me, and added it to their setlist for the gigs I joined them on fiddle. (It’s called Three Roads, and it’s on the new album, although it sounds more country and less bluegrass than it did when I sang it with Whoa Nelly!).

In 2006 I joined a trio whose goal was work with each other on each of our original songs just for fun… until someone we knew who owned a local venue suddenly needed an opening act for none other than Tony Rice & Peter Rowan. Could we play a set? We said YES!, and quickly chose a band name (Lonesome Redwing). Thankfully, the gig went well and we played to an appreciative crowd (phew!) and we were off. Playing with Kathy Reed and Russell Weeks in that trio and getting to work up originals was an ideal setup for me. We mostly played local venues and festivals, but we had some special gigs, too, like opening for Patty Loveless, The Steep Canyon Rangers and Claire Lynch, and getting to debut an original song by Louisa Branscomb.

We recorded an album called, “Fly, Fly, Fly,” during which time I was both working full-time as a hospital chaplain and very pregnant with my first child. I still remember looking out in the crowd at the release party and seeing my husband standing beside the Pack ’n Play at the back of the bar where our 3 month old baby was sleeping. That was Atlanta!

And then I moved to Pennsylvania …