BACKSTORY

Music moved me before I took my first breath.  The sweet simple tunes hummed by my mother while she worked lulled me to sleep as a baby.  My mother says that I hummed “Amazing Grace” while I nursed.  Though still an infant not yet able to speak, music was a gift that was already mine.  A few years later, I sat by my grandma in church, hearing her strong alto lift and blend with every old hymn that rang out from the lines of wooden benches.  The church was my first audience.

My earliest memories of home always revolve around music: mostly gospel songs shared by our family in church, but also old country radio, which was a constant around our place.  And the old record player in our living room scratched out a wide range of influences… Claudine Longet… Marty Robbins… Roger Miller… Loretta Lynn.  Most of the musicians I listened to as a child had already long passed.  The music I loved best was old music.

My piano teachers through the years helped me find the order, structure, and reason in music…where I would have preferred to wander in my own repetitive melodies, they urged me to stretch and experience a more classical style of playing.  Around age twelve, I could play anything by ear.   But I was nearing the end of high school when a church pianist was needed, and the responsibility to play written notes well weighed heavily on me, and so I gained the ability by the sheer force of performing under pressure.  I have always been grateful for that discomfort.

I wrote poetry, endlessly.  Sometimes two or three poems a day; often hidden underneath the math assignment I was supposed to be working on.  I read a lot of old-fashioned books, namely the Bible, which influenced my writing greatly.  The power of a single word is spellbinding.

Music has taken me places, geographically speaking.  In college, I traveled with a singing group to perform in churches all over the country.  Since that time, I have sung in homeless shelters, in health care centers, in homes for the elderly, and at a few music festivals.  I would never consider myself a performer, but simply a musician.  My favorite place to sing is right next to my husband and children, all lined up on a wooden bench on Sunday morning.  It always takes me right back to where it all began for me.