Bluegrass and beyond

I got started into bluegrass/country via two wonderful women - Andrea Hansen and Marnie Niemi.

Andrea is head of an organization called "Strings Across the Sky" stringsacrossthesky.ca which is devoted to teaching fiddling in the far north. In 2003 Andrea asked me to join their faculty and I was honoured to accept. Soon I was off to my first fiddle camp and a whole new world of music. Instead of teaching using classical music, we use the popular fiddle tunes, and I found myself really enjoying the new genre.

Not a month after my return, my friend and the second wonderful woman, Marnie Niemi, phoned to say she was putting together an all girl bluegrass band and had heard I might be interested in some fiddling. We got together with two other gals on a sunny October morning and I was hooked. This band was called Roses in the Snow and we enjoyed a great ride until all parting ways in the winter of 2006. Along the way I was helped and supported by many wonderful and generous hearted folks - Marnie and my other bandmates as well as Chris Quinn, Andrew Collins and John Showman of the Foggy Hogtown Boys - were particularly welcoming and supplied me with much needed direction and information to help me with the steep leaning curve and I am forever grateful to them.

When the Roses dissolved I was sad at the prospect of no bluegrass in my life but as they say, "when one door shuts another opens" and this new door opening for me was being approached by the well established Ontario band, Hometown Bluegrass. I happily joined them in May of 2006 and we have a full calendar of concerts and festivals. We play every year at the Tottenham Bluegrass Festival, and this year we are also at several others all around Ontario. We did receive an invite to play at a festival in PEI this past summer as well, but had to decline due to my daughter's wedding. Hopefully next summer we will make that one. Our first CD, Population 5, was released just over a year ago and is getting good airplay. We are back in the studio now for the next one and are very excited about that. The gents in this band are a pleasure to play and hang out with and I love being a member. I am now doing some singing with them which is really lots of fun too. View a short video of us from a warmup before a set at the 2006 Tottenham Bluegrass festival here - http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1305784061

I also play with some wonderful fellows in Toronto - we call ourselves the Grassheads. This group meets weekly to jam and include Wayne Douglas, Al Gata, and Chris Low. We played our first public concert this past June and it was well received - had a tough audience too, kids aged 5-12. Chris is a teacher and we played at his school in Toronto. What a thrill it was to see all of these kids from virtually every background collectively enjoy the music so much. It really was very special and my hope is that we continue to get out and play in the community.

One really nice aspect of the Bluegrass world is the down to earth and wholesome atmosphere which comes with it. Not that we don't party (know about jello shooters???) but it is a very safe and family friendly world, just plain good hearted folks. The festivals are generally held out in the country, often on farm properties, and this makes for a very nice time for all. I have been able to take my kids to every festival I've been to without worries - in the Gospel warmup pic up to the right you see my son Felix with his fishing pole ready to go.....

        Fun with leopard - definitely not the 

              formal TSO dress code here.........

 Making our 2nd

CD -

Home Again

Many thanks to Jason LaPrade  at Crystal Clear Sound who is just wonderful in every way - including being very patient!  It was very difficult to choose what to put on this CD with all the great tunes in the band's rep, but we have come up with a good variety which really represents the band well. My featured contributions are "Amazing Grace"  plus "Doc Harris the Fisherman" (that's the one everybody calls a gypsy tune the way I do it :-) and a super sassy one I sing called "You Tried to Ruin My Name" I'm also singing harmony on some others. We are proud at Hometown to have developed into a very versatile band where everyone sings and plays also. It is definitely a plus to have the ability to choose from a lot of possible approaches for tunes and it's a very rewarding process finding out what feels right to us and working things out - 

see Hometownbluegrass.ca for more 

The 25th annual Tottenham Bluegrass Festival  was just amazing. It's always a great festival but it was especially exciting to be there for this important milestone. Hometown did some sets and I was also up for a "fiddle" set with Michael Cleveland and Joe White. I've had the pleasure of meeting Michael several times and also doing a bit of an impromptu duet which can be seen here. Michael has two wonderful 5 string fiddles and we are playing on those in that video. I really enjoyed meeting and playing with Joe too

~~~~~The Bluegrass Bus ~~~~~

 Hometown warming up for a Sunday Gospel set

I finally made good on my running joke about "goin' to Nashville" and showcased at the International Bluegrass Music Awards Convention. I believe just about every bluegrass musician around had to have have been there! If there is some sort of world record for most banjos per square foot surely this event wins hands down. There is music absolutely everywhere and you find yourself standing in a circle playing with people from all over the place. For me, being relatively new to bluegrass, being exposed to a variety of great players is the best way to develop myself so I was in heaven down there. The showcase opportunity great and I thank Tony DeBoer for sending me down. I did meet and jam with some amazing players. Nice friendly people too - I was having a drink after one of my showcase sets when approached by Mr. Ernie Bradley and his Grassy Ridge Band looking for a fiddler to pick with them and boy did they turn out to be some amazing and inspiring musicians! Very nice fellows too.  Ernie sang a wonderful song he has written about miners which particularly got me choked up. We had a fine old time doing some hard driving traditional tunes plus some more great originals until 4AM and I hope to see more of them down the road.

Go see......

stringsacrossthesky.ca

hometownbluegrass.ca