Claire Lynch

By Larry Nager

Bluegrass’ original singersongwriter was always proud of what he called his “true songs.”  Bill Monroe packed a lot of his life into his music, whether it was the Blue Grass Boys’ inside joke, “Heavy Traffic Ahead,” inspired by a road sign near Lester Flatt’s home in sleepy Sparta, Tenn.; his pain at returning to his parents’ house deserted “I’m On My Way Back To The Old Home”; or, more happily and most famously, childhood memories of his musical mentor, “Uncle Pen.”

Claire Lynch and her new album, “Whatcha Gonna Do,” are firmly in that bluegrass tradition, even if the 12 songs’ musical settings include folk, swing and mountain ballads alongside a highlonesome Monroe cover. The singerguitarist’s eclectic streak goes back to her first band, Hickory Wind, started in 1973 with her mandolinplaying boyfriend, Larry Lynch (they married in 1976). But “Whatcha Gonna Do” is in the introspective singersongwriter mode of her early idols Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. In fact, there’s no bluegrass banjo until guitarist/banjo picker Jim Hurst picks up his fivestring on the ninth track, Monroe’s “My Florida Sunshine,” which Lynch first heard on an eighttrack tape in the 1970s. She gives it the Full Mon, right down to Jason Thomas’ twin fiddles.

Hurst is back on banjo for the folky “Barbed Wire Boys,” but the album’s only other fivestring is bassist Mark Schatz’s haunting clawhammer accompaniment to “Widow’s Weeds,” one of four songs cowritten by Lynch, and “A Canary’s Song,” by some unknown songwriter named Garth Brooks.

She’s not sure how the purists will respond, but she’s past fretting about it. “I’ve been in bluegrass a long time, so I’ve had plenty of stages of worrying about bluegrass purity,” she says with a laugh that can only be described as silvery. “My initial stages were total ignorance to the fact that people cared whether or not I played pure bluegrass. And then when I found out, I tried to walk the line and have pretty much walked the line for a long time. I just think that at this point in my career, it’s OK to do whatever feels good and I feel that I’m a singersongwriter who comes from bluegrass music, who’s a bluegrass player originally. But I also look at myself as a singersongwriter surrounded by these wonderful musicians.”

Along with guitarist Hurst and bassist Schatz, both twotime IBMA winners on their respective instruments, the Claire Lynch Band is rounded out by fiddlermandolinist Jason Thomas, who has won contests on both instruments all the way from his native Canada down to Florida.

Having that heavy artillery behind her gave Lynch the confidence to make a different kind of CD. “I did this album intentionally, having decided to do just the kind of music I wanted to with the kind of approach I wanted to and no holds barred.” Her attitude is definitely in the bluegrass tradition. After all, if Bill Monroe wasn’t an outlier, he’d have kept Stringbean on banjo and never hired Earl Scruggs. “That’s right,” she says. “People forget that Bill and them guys were bigtime innovators. They were responsible for a huge evolution of music.”

New York To Front Porch

That innovation called bluegrass was less than twnety years old when Claire Lutke started playing it in the early 1970s. She’d started on guitar as a kid in her native upstate New York. The Lutke family lived in Kingston, not far south of the town of Woodstock. Claire’s dad Evan worked for IBM and her mom Betty instilled a love of music in her three daughters, although, instead of bluegrass, the family stereo played Broadway show tunes and classic pop standards.

The first music that really caught young Claire’s ear was the 1960s folk revival. “I had two older sisters and the older one was into folk music and she had a guitar. It was a Harmony Fhole, and when she left it on the bed, I’d go and pick it up. We all had a whack at it.” She harmonized informally with sisters Karlyne and Susan and when Claire was 12, her dad took a job in the aerospace industry, relocating the family to Huntsville, Ala. There, she would meet her future husband and change her life, her name and how she played guitar. “I played with my fingers like a folkie, until I started hanging out with Larry Lynch after high school and he handed me a flatpick one day and said, ‘You have to learn how to use this’.” She did, and before long the couple was starting a marriage and a band, Hickory Wind, named for a song Gram Parsons had written when he was in the Byrds.

It was the era of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” album, the “Dueling Banjos” craze, the mainstream success of country rock and backtoroots “wooden music.” Bluegrass was in the midst of a national youth movement the scope of which it would not see again for almost thirty years, when Alison Krauss, Nickel Creek, Yonder Mountain, and O Brother Where Art Thou created another Children’s Crusade.

“It was a really fun time,” Lynch recalls. “It was the time of the ecology movement, as they used to call it. So the fact that we were acoustic and, as John Hartford used to say, ‘Don’t need an amp and don’t plug in,’ we just thought that we were cool doing that, and we were portable and could go anywhere. And it was the music of people our age.” As the band got more serious, they planned their debut LP. That’s when they heard of a more established Hickory Wind band from West Virginia on Chicagobased Flying Fish, a leading roots label of the time. “And we thought, now’s the time to change our name before we do our first record,” Lynch recalls. The Front Porch String Band was born. They made a couple of regionally successful independent LPs, some of which were rereleased on their stillavailable, selftitled Rebel debut, mixing fine originals by Claire (“Hills of Alabam’,” later recorded by Kathy Mattea) with reworked classics (a jamgrass “Wabash Cannonball”) and thoughtful covers (Neal Allen’s “The Singer”). Their name reinforced a group identity, but the sound that leaped out at you was that unmistakable voice. Pure yet powerful, crystalline yet gutsy, Claire’s voice set Front Porch apart from the eclectic newgrass pack. As hot as the picking was, it was her singing that drew the crowds. “That’s just the facts,” Lynch admits. “It’s hard to get around that.”

It soon caused problems within the group, which had started as Larry Lynch’s band. What began as a sort of extended musical honeymoon for the couple soon turned into a business, and then into a source of conflict.  “It was not an easy thing,” Lynch says of trying to balance the roles of bandmembers and life partners. “It was fun and cool at first. And then it turned into more of….oh, how shall I say? All of sudden, there was this competitive feeling. And I just never looked at it that way.”

Raising Kids And GRAMMY® Nominations

In 1982, shortly after that promising Rebel debut, Lynch gave birth to their son Kegan and the Front Porch String Band and their amazing lead singer pretty much disappeared for the rest of the decade. Seven years later, the Lynches had a girl, Christy. “I’ve taken two or three hiatuses from my career, and the first two were really forced, because of children. It was just way too much to do to try to do both. With both parents playing in the band and little ones at home, it was really difficult for us. If we hadn’t had family around us, we would never have been able to do what we did.”

North Alabama is less than two hours’ drive to Nashville and, with some help from John Starling, the former lead singer/guitarist for the Seldom Scene, Claire was able to start making a name for herself as a Nashville songwriter and a backup singer. Claire’s soaring voice can be heard on Linda Ronstadt’s overlooked classic, “Feels Like Home,” as well as Dolly Parton’s GRAMMYwinning “My Grass Is Blue” and “Little Sparrow.” She’s also recorded with her early hero Emmylou Harris, as well as Ralph Stanley. Most recently, she appears on singersongwriter Jesse Winchester’s new CD, “Love Filling Station,” part of a quid pro quo that includes their “Whatcha Gonna Do” duet of Winchester’s soulful “That’s What Makes You Strong.”

As Lynch was raising her family, the mid1980s saw mainstream Nashville undergo a hip roots revival with Ricky Skaggs, Dwight Yoakam, Foster & Lloyd, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Steve Earle, Sweethearts Of The Rodeo and the Desert Rose Band. Lynch had been on the fast track to join them, until she left the race.  “I missed some good opportunities, as far as moving out of bluegrass and into the country music realm. I had children right around the time that I was getting attention from  Nashville.” Lynch sees a positive side effect of those occasional breaks. “As far as the longevity of my bluegrass career, in a way it’s been helpful. I think it’s helped me to continue to generate some interest out there because I haven’t overexposed myself.”

In 1990, the Front Porch String Band returned, and in 1991 released “Lines & Traces” on Rebel. In 1993, Claire released her first inspirational album, “Friends For A Lifetime.” “ But a major turning point came in 1995, when her third solo album, “Moonlighter,” was nominated for a bluegrass GRAMMY. Still backed by the Larry Lynchled Front Porch, there was no denying who was the star. From then on, all albums were released under Claire’s name, which put more pressure on an alreadystrained relationship. Whatever went on behind the scenes, Lynch’s music was moving to another level,  including her 1997 classic, “Silver And Gold,” her second GRAMMYnominated CD. In 1996, “The Front Porch String Band featuring Claire Lynch” was the only contemporary band and sole female voice on Sony’s “Bluegrass” compilation, alongside founding fathers Bill Monroe, Carl Story, Flatt & Scruggs, Reno & Smiley, the Stanley Brothers, the Osborne Brothers, and the Country Gentlemen. It was no surprise when she received the IBMA’s 1997 Female Vocalist Of The Year award.

Starting Over

In 2000, Lynch released “Lovelight,” moving closer to mainstream country. That same year, the Lynches broke up Front Porch for good. Larry would focus on Celtic music and today leads northern Alabama’s Kinvara. Claire began another hiatus, helping teenaged Christy get through high school and trying to save her marriage. In early 2007, after 28 years, the couple split and Claire made a new commitment to music with an album reflecting those changes, the aptly titled “New Day.” And she finally packed her stuff and moved north to Nashville. Of course, as any divorce survivor can tell you, after that first burst of freedom comes the hard question, “What next?”  Or as Lynch poses it on her new album’s title cut, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”

“With the exception of ‘My Florida Sunshine,’ each of the songs on there has something to do with making a choice and living with the consequences. It just fell that way, and then ‘Whatcha Gonna Do’ is just literally about that.” That was also the question she and the band asked before making the album. “We sat down one evening at dinner, the whole band, and we talked about it. Jason and Jim had already been with me for a couple years, since 2005. But Mark had just come off of four years with Nickel Creek, so he had more of an acoustic worldview than I did. And he started talking about that there’s a lot more of an audience out there besides bluegrass, although you’d never want to alienate those people. And Jim and Jason were already thinking that way, so we were all on the same page. “It was like, ‘Well I could do the same thing again, or I could move a little bit into just whatever song I think sounds cool, because look at the versatility here with the musicianship.’ So we decided that we wanted to maybe open our audience up to the singersongwriter world.”That world includes their new agent. “We work with the Roots Agency and they have historically represented folk people like Arlo Guthrie and Richie Havens and a lot of world music. Up until they signed NewFound Road, which they signed in July, we were their only bluegrass act. And what we’ve found is that there are a lot of folk festivals out there that bluegrassers hadn’t really tapped into, but they’re open to having a bluegrass band. Especially because of the variety that we do.”

That variety extends to leading workshops at bluegrass festivals and music camps, where Lynch has been teaching singing, performance and songwriting, helping shape the next generation. But she’s concerned that pop and country’s obsession with the young and pretty seems to be spilling over into bluegrass. “One of the wonderful things that the music industry has lost is allowing players to be good without having to be cover material for People Magazine. We didn’t have the visual media that we do now. I mean, even back in the ‘70s, a lot of those bands whose music we dug, we didn’t get to see ‘em. Maybe a picture here and there, on their album cover, or if they were lucky to make a TV appearance. I’m talking about mainstream rock ‘n’ roll, even. But we were crazy about the music. And all that’s changed. Now everybody is visually in your face.” Sometimes the visual and the musical come together in surprising ways, she adds. “I went out to

California, we played for the CBA (California Bluegrass Association) out there. We taught the camps and then played for the festival. They had a whole community nurturing the young there. It’s amazing the crop they’re raising of kids that can play their fannies off. There was one little gal that could really play the fiddle and do the hulahoop at the same time and she didn’t miss a lick, either. Oh my God! She brought the house down.”      While she’s not adding hulahoop to her show, Lynch remains unafraid to try new things, especially new beginnings. In a career—and a life—that has seen more than its share of starts and stops, she’s become an expert at starting over, of reinventing herself. For an audience going through many of those same sorts of career and personal changes, singersongwriter Lynch is a reassuring voice of experience.

“Starting over, like after a marriage has broken up, or starting a business over, you have to have your goal, your vision. You have to decidedly move on it. I know that sounds really clich1d, but it’s the awesome truth. It’s just deciding what you need to do and then putting your nose to the grindstone and then doing it. It’s just a lot of work. Whether it’s work on your emotions, or work in your office, or work on your instrument, or whatever. It’s just, ‘One day at a time. Push, push, push. Make some progress.’

“If you were to put it in some sort of biblical terms, you know, God didn’t part the waters until his people put their foot in the water. In other words, they had to get wet before he made dry land for them. That’s just sort of an analogy of making big changes in your life. I think you just got to go for it. You got to get wet, baby!”

Larry Nager is a musician, writer and filmmaker based in Nashville. His documentary Bill Monroe: Father of Bluegrass Music is now on DVD.

Dale Ann Bradley

Her “Scars and Scuffmarks” Make Beautiful Bluegrass

By Larry Nager

There are as many different reasons for playing bluegrass as there are bluegrass musicians. For Dale Ann Bradley, two-time IBMA Female Vocalist Of The Year, bluegrass is affirmation, celebration, a soft place to fall, part of her eastern Kentucky birthright and, finally, a gift. It’s been her companion through a hardscrabble life, brought her out of a bad marriage, helped with the struggles of raising a son on her own and, for the past decade, eased her fight with diabetes. She picked the right ally, apparently.

Bradley came to our lunch meeting in downtown Nashville after a sleepless night of flying back from a week of performing, teaching music, and battling mosquitoes in northwestern Canada. Despite being covered in welts and profoundly jet-lagged, her eyes sparkled and her face lit with that wide-open smile as soon as she started talking about her new album, “Don’t Turn Your Back,” her second for Compass Records.

Raised in Bell County in eastern Kentucky, Bradley’s strict religious upbringing kept her away from secular music of any kind until her teens. As with so many things, growing up without it taught her its real value. “Just getting started into music at all was quite a feat, because my religious background was Primitive Baptist. We had no musical instruments. I was about 14 before I got a guitar. But, it was hard to get a hold of recorded music, even up until I got into high school.”

Today, a seasoned professional for more than 25 years, Bradley still doesn’t take music for granted. Nashville is an industry town, but she never uses the word “product” when referring to her music. To her, it’s a statement of who she is. “‘Don’t Turn Your Back’ kind of sets the theme for the album,” Bradley explains. While the title sounds like something said in a lover’s spat, it’s a reminder of how to face life’s challenges—head on. “Like the song says, ‘Don’t turn your back.’ Just don’t give up. There’s a way to be made, even if sometimes the path is long and it’s not easy.”

Pineville to Renfro Valley

Bradley’s path started in the town of Pineville where she was born to Pearlie Ann and Elder Roger Price. When she finally got that guitar, there was no stopping her, and informal jam sessions soon turned into Back Porch Grass, a band that played throughout eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. By 1984, she was competing in the regional finals of the Marlboro Country Music Talent Roundup held in Lexington, which, for the small-town teen “might as well have been New York City.” Her band didn’t win, but Bradley met another bluegrass group in the contest, the all-female New Coon Creek Girls, who apparently liked Back Porch Grass’s singer. A few years later, Bradley got a call.
In 1989, New Coon Creek Girls Pam Gadd and Pam Perry were leaving to form another all-female band, Wild Rose, which would enjoy some chart success with its blend of bluegrass and commercial country. The New Coon Creek Girls contacted Bradley to fill Perry’s mandolin spot. She plays mandolin, but not as well as guitar, and didn’t get the job.

A lot happened in the five years since meeting the New Coon Creek Girls and getting that job offer. Bradley had married, given birth to a son, and gotten a divorce. “I married when I was twenty and my ex-husband was in the Navy, and he went overseas for eight months,” she recalls. Returning stateside, he was stationed in Jacksonville, Fla., and the dutiful wife moved with her newborn son from her childhood home. She quickly realized it wasn’t the life she wanted. “I was pretty homesick for Kentucky, and I wanted to pick, and I was in a place where that just wasn’t gonna happen,” she says. “I call it a hiatus now, or a sabbatical or whatever. But, there couldn’t be a marriage and a music career. It couldn’t happen. But, I probably needed that to see just exactly what I wanted, you know?”

She took her infant son, John Fitzgerald Bradley, Jr., and moved to Somerset, Ky., where her old friend and Back Porch Grass bandmate, Harold McGeorge, helped her get back into music and produced her first demo. She took that recording with her when she auditioned for the New Coon Creek Girls in Renfro Valley, Ky., where they had a regular spot on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance. Bradley also dropped a demo at the Renfro Valley office before going on to Nashville to meet with music publishers and generally test the waters. By the time she got back to Pineville, where her grandmother was caring for her son, Renfro Valley had already called with a job. For Bradley, it was a true musical homecoming, confirmation she’d made the right choice by moving back to Kentucky.

Though overshadowed by more famous, more commercial radio barn dances like the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride, Renfro Valley is one of the longest-running. Founder John Lair (who ran things until his death in 1985 at age 91) had helped start the WLS Barn Dance in Chicago before returning to his beloved Renfro Valley to start a show there. He even wrote, “Take Me Back To Renfro Valley,” the program’s theme song, and built a special entertainment complex to house the show. In 1937, during construction, Lair staged his barn dance 140 miles to the north, in Cincinnati on WLW. After Lair left, WLW continued as The Boone County Jamboree, important in the development of bluegrass and country music in the Midwest.

Unlike its flashier brothers, the Renfro Valley Barn Dance avoided any whiff of commercialism, presenting old-time string bands and ballad singers. One of its defining acts was an all-girl string band that Lair formed and named the Coon Creek Girls. They had flower names—sisters Rosie and Lily May Ledford, Violet Koehler, and Daisy Lange—and, in 1939, they were so well known, they played for Franklin Roosevelt at the White House. Lily May became a revered figure in the ’60s folk revival and the self-styled “Banjo Pickin’ Girl” frequently appeared at folk, bluegrass, and old-time music festivals.

Given its history of traditionalism, as well as its reputation for featuring female musicians in more than the typical “girl singer” roles, Renfro Valley was the perfect place for Bradley to seriously begin her career. After two seasons, the talented young woman had become a seasoned performer. “What I learned from Renfro Valley was invaluable. We might have 12 shows a week. Tour groups were going through, and there were shows about every day, but Monday. What I learned there I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. I learned exactly what to do and what not to do.”

Coon Creek and Beyond

The New Coon Creek Girls were also part of the broadcast and when the guitar spot opened, Bradley was first choice. “When I joined in January of 1991, we had Pam Perry on mandolin, Vicki Simmons on bass (one of the strongest female musicians I ever worked with), and a wonderful singer, Ramona Church. And Deanie Richardson was there a big percentage of the time.”

This is when the bluegrass world really started taking note of Dale Ann Bradley. The group’s album “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore,” released in 1994 on Pinecastle, reveals all the elements that would win Bradley her IBMA awards. The title song by Kentucky old-time music icon Jean Ritchie, showcases Bradley’s strong, warmly-expressive lead voice. She sings every word like she means it, part of her eastern Kentucky upbringing. She believes that’s a big difference between her generation—for whom bluegrass comes from experience and a connection to tradition—and today’s freshman class. “The kids today in bluegrass, it’s a wonderful energy, but it’s a different energy. And I think people my age might be the last of that generation that really lived those songs hardcore. There’s so much technology now, so much more available just effortlessly. It wasn’t like that when we were growing up. It was still much like what it was with our parents.”

With Bradley fronting the group, the New Coon Creek Girls were moving up in the bluegrass ranks, garnering more airplay, festival bookings, and a steady stream of recordings. It was a busy time for Bradley, and the band’s sound was evolving. “The material started changing as me and Ramona came to the band and Pam Perry came back from Nashville. We started writing a whole lot, and the melodies were different, and that was good with that combination.”

Bradley had come of age in the ’70s, perhaps the last era when great melodies reigned in pop, rock, R&B, and country music. She brought some of those melodic influences to the band, both in terms of covers, as well as with her own writing.

Meanwhile, bandmembers were moving on, getting married, and having children. Deanie Richardson (who is now Bradley’s manager) had become one of Nashville’s first-call session players. Maintaining the “all-girl” concept was getting harder, says Bradley. “I don’t think it would be that way now, but, at that time, it would have been impossible to replace those women. It would not have been that strong. And I didn’t want to have an all-girl band just for the sake of having an all girl-band. So we just hired some guys and tried to keep the Coon Creek name—Dale Ann Bradley and Coon Creek.” Coon Creek featured such notable “guys” as fiddler Michael Cleveland. Cleveland did two stints with Bradley, who finally dropped the Coon Creek name when she recorded her first Compass CD, “Catch Tomorrow” (2006).

Solo Flight

Both Compass albums were produced by label CEO Alison Brown, who also contributed masterful banjo. It continues the Bradley tradition of banjo-picking producers. (Sonny Osborne worked with her at Pinecastle).

Her love of banjo is the reason she’s so excited about the newest addition to the Dale Ann Bradley Band, Terry Baucom, whose banjo has driven some of the best bluegrass bands of the past thirty years, starting with Boone Creek. “Terry Baucom is phenomenal,” says Bradley. “He is an energy force on stage. When we’ll present his part of the show, you got to come up to par with him. He demands that you bring out the best in yourself. Not by being critical, but he’s gonna do it and you gotta do it. And when he kicks the song off, you’ve gotta be with him. No way to not be with him. I’m very thankful to have him in the band. He’s brought everything up several levels. He’ll make you be better.”

On bass, her son Gerald has been filling in while he finishes school at Berea College. “He’s gonna be playing with me a few shows coming up. He played the Opry a few years back. The bass player couldn’t make it, and I thought he was ready. He dressed up real sharp. He wasn’t sweating at all, until we were standing there right at the edge of the stage, and he was green. He said, ‘Mom, I’m gonna be sick.’ I said, ‘Now’s not the time.’ And he went out there and busted it! He did so good.”

Bradley relocated to Nashville in 2007. It was a tough move. “In the back of your mind, you always wonder, ‘What if? What if I went down to Nashville?’ At the time I moved here, writing was really the thing on my mind. And, I had met a lot of people. I thought I could get into that circle, but I knew I had to be here to do it. My son was a sophomore in college, pretty self-sufficient. And my dad was doing well, and I just felt so compelled. I never felt more compelled to do anything. So, I loaded up the big Ryder® truck and came down here. It took a little adjusting, but I toughed it out.” She says she stayed because of her father’s reaction to a particularly homesick phone call. “He was like, ‘Unh-uh, you’ve ran all your life. You just stay right there.’ If he had said, ‘Aww, come on home,’ I’d have been right back there in Kentucky. But, there was nothing for me to do back there, to advance or even make a living with what I was doing.”

She sings about the struggle of making it in Nashville on her new CD’s closing track, “Music City Queen,” co-written with longtime collaborator, and one of Bradley’s favorite songwriters, Louisa Branscomb. That song’s theme of broken dreams at the corner of Broadway and tomorrow, notwithstanding, Nashville has been a very good move for Bradley. Along with back-to-back IBMA wins, she’s even cracking mainstream Nashville’s bluegrass ceiling. Her video for “Don’t Turn Your Back” recently debuted on CMT at number two, beating country superstars Carrie Underwood and Reba McEntire. “It’s a cool thing at this time in my life and this time in my career,” she says of the video’s success. “I think it’s saying a lot about our society, how it’s relating to music. I think people are wanting to see and hear something that’s real, not just polished up. I really do love the video. I think it’s about as real and human as it can get. It’s just me, it’s just the band, it’s where I’m from. There’s nothing doctored up. I put a little hairspray and a little lipstick on, and that’s it. Other than that, it’s what you see is what you get.”

The new CD also dips back to some of her favorite ’70s and ’80s pop and rock music, with bluegrass arrangements of Christine McVie’s Fleetwood Mac hit, “Over My Head,” and, keeping with Bradley’s resolute character, Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

Apart from all the other challenges facing a woman leading a bluegrass band in 2009, Bradley has had to deal with diabetes, diagnosed about six years ago. “I’d probably had it for about ten years, since I was 35. I’m doing better. I’m regulated on medicine. I’ve lost weight. I try to eat like I’m supposed to. But, the energy level’s been where it’s really got me. Sinus infections, if you’re a diabetic, it takes ’em longer to heal. Being diabetic, you have to realize that if you have it, you’ve got to deal with it. It’s not something that’s just going to disappear. You have to deal with it.” Even as she complains about fatigue, there she sits, just off that Canadian trip with no sleep, talking with more enthusiasm and energy than most teens.
It’s taken Dale Ann Bradley a long time to get to this place, from that first guitar in Pineville to her painful exile from bluegrass as a Navy wife to juggling music and single motherhood and, finally, to building her award-winning solo career. All that living, the good times and bad, comes through in her music. And she feels that’s what people relate to when they hear her sing. “It is living and hard experiences. There’s a lot of scars and a lot of scuffmarks there, as there is with a lot of people. ‘Hey, that’s one of us.’ When I see something like that, something that’s real and not doctored up, I can relate to that. It makes me feel good, it really does.” Which brings her full circle to her song, “Don’t Turn Your Back.”

“We don’t need to forget hard times. They’re hard going through, but we sure do grow from them, if you’ll allow yourself to learn from ’em, and not deny it. Those hard times helped build this music.”

Larry Nager is a Nashville-based journalist, musician, and filmmaker. His 1993 documentary Bill Monroe: Father Of Bluegrass Music is now available on DVD.