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Christine Albert’s story posts in The Alternate Root Oct. 25, 2014

14 Oct

Christine AlbertChristine Albert’s serene expression masks a life torn by personal violence and loss. Her spiritual calm on stage seems to transcend memories of surviving rape and also being struck down by a drunk driver along a dark stretch of Texas highway.

The original songs on her first solo album in 20 years, Everything’s Beautiful Now, express messages of hope and renewal.

As a result, her Austin audience attending the CD release party at the Strange Brew Sept. 25 felt lifted up and transported to an ethereal space created without walls or religious dogma.

Albert wrote or co-wrote six of the songs on the new album. Like her “Flower of the Moon” song co-written with her husband, Chris Gage, Albert illuminates the darkest moments in life as a time for growth and for transformation.

     “I believe in the holiness of whatever comes my way/and I’ve learned not to resist the urge to pray…”

“Moon flowers blossom at night. I was going through a period where I was not sleeping well. I had a lot of insomnia and I finally connected it with my own delayed post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said in a recent interview.

Though she prefers that listeners find whatever message speaks to them inside her song lyrics, her personal story enhances them.

Albert band and friends

Albert survived a rape by an intruder in her Santa Fe, New Mexico home in the middle of the night in 1981. She moved to Austin less than a year later.

In 1986, she survived being hit by a car along a highway outside San Antonio while the person standing immediately beside her died instantly.

“My truck had broken down along the highway in San Antonio and a couple of really nice 17-year-old kids stopped to help me. They were best friends, two boys. While we were standing there, a drunk driver going 75 miles an hour and swerving from one lane to another swerved right into us,” she said.

“I was thrown across the highway and the person I was talking to was killed instantly. The other young man was injured, but survived.”

Today Albert forms the other half of a personal and professional musical partnership known as Albert & Gage that in 2009 released the album, Dakota Lullaby, with songs written 35 years ago by South Dakota singer/songwriter Tom Peterson. The 61-year-old Peterson is writing again and Albert included two new songs, “On That Beautiful Day,” and “My Heart’s Prayer,” for her current album.

Her new CD release represents a musical communion with Albert’s, Gage’s and Peterson’s creative muses along with a couple of famous friends and her son, Troupe Gammage.

Gammage joins his mom to sing on the Shake Russell and Dana Cooper song, “Lean My Way,” in a harmonious mother and son duet best explained by common DNA.

Troupe, a keyboardist and singer/songwriter in his own right as a member of the band, SPEAK, will open shows on tour for the popular Indie band, RAC, over the next several weeks and he will also be part of the RAC show as their featured vocalist. He is the son of Ernie Gammage, Albert’s first husband and also a local singer and musician who formerly fronted the band Ernie Sky and the K-Tels.

Her son also sings background vocals on Albert’s version of the Jackson Browne song, “For A Dancer,” along with other SPEAK band members, Nick Hurt and Joey Delahoussaye.

Both songs imbibe a spirit of wisdom shared from one person to another. However, all the songs on the album feel purposefully chosen by Albert.

Local legendary singers and songwriters Jerry Jeff Walker and Eliza Gilkyson joined Albert on “Old New Mexico,” a song she co-wrote with Walker that tells the story of her move from Santa Fe to Austin in 1982. Gilkyson adds her voice to the track appropriately as the two became close friends more than 40 years ago in New Mexico and moved to Austin about the same time.

At 59 years old, Albert has found her spiritual voice. The album’s theme also remarkably exemplifies a mission statement for the nonprofit organization she founded, Swan Songs. The group fulfills musical last wishes for individuals at the end of life.

Albert also chairs the Board of Trustees for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) that recognizes musicians for excellence at the famous GRAMMY awards annually. The Recording Academy, headquartered in Santa Monica, California since 1957, has 12 chapters located all over the country including Texas.

The Recording Academy pays Albert’s expenses for traveling back and forth to L.A. but the job is a volunteer position and demands sacrifice from her since it takes away time spent performing and shared with her husband and son. Her two-year term of office ends next May.

The year 2005 represents a hallmark year for Albert. That’s the year she reinvented herself both by founding Swan Song and by running for a position on the Recording Academy’s Texas Chapter board, which ultimately led to her national leadership position.

Those two decisions followed a traumatic year in 2004 when Gage underwent back surgery and could not work for a while. She and Gage together also own MoonHouse Studio in South Austin and much of their work is interrelated. While her husband recovered from surgery, Albert carried the financial burden as neither of them owned disability insurance.

The Austin community rallied to create a benefit; MusiCares also helped the couple during the first month of Gage’s recovery from back surgery.

“That experience changed me. I was so moved by what our community and MusiCares did for us and I wanted to give back and make sure that support continued for other musicians,” she said.

Albert and close friend Gaea Logan had informally begun organizing concerts for terminally ill patients in the early 1990s. By 2005 Albert was inspired to formalize the program. She chose the name, filed the paperwork, and it became an official 501c3. Today Swan Songs offers each musician an honorarium to perform private concerts to fulfill the wishes of a recipient. In this way, the organization supports the music community as well as the patients and their families.

Either one of her non-paying roles could suffice as a full-time job.

“I never get up in the morning and say ‘I wonder what I should do today.’ I always have long lists of things that I can’t put off,” she said.

“When they’ve been put on the back burner long enough and finally make it to the front, I say ‘Today’s the day for this.’”

Albert wrote the lyrics for the title track off the album, “Everything’s Beautiful Now,” after caring for Gage’s mom, Darleen Gage, during her final stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The couple moved Darleen from her home in South Dakota to a facility in Buda in 2010. Then at age 87 she died in June of 2012.

Albert first heard the lyrics for her song, “Everything’s Beautiful Now,” in some of the last words Darleen spoke before she slowly slipped away.

“She said ‘I’m ready but I don’t think I can say anymore goodbyes.’ I think that was the thing that was holding her back. Then she said ‘I’ve had to say goodbye to so many people in my life, I just don’t know if I can face saying the goodbye part,’” Albert said. “I was really struck by that.”

The song’s lyrics represent a combination of both Albert’s and her mother-in-law’s perceptions and life and death and grieving.

Albert has said goodbye to several people in her life over the past five years including her dear friend and fellow musician, the late Sarah Elizabeth Campbell. The two performed together every Monday known as “Mystery Mondays” at El Mercado South in Austin for a year before Campbell’s death in December of 2013.

The song’s lyrics represent a combination of both Albert’s and her mother-in-law’s perceptions about life and death and grieving.

“When we started “Mystery Mondays” we didn’t know Sarah was going to be so sick and that we were going to lose her. Then we didn’t know about Steven Fromholz, Larry Monroe, and countless other friends we lost. Every time we went to that gig, we were mourning someone else from the Austin music community,” she said.

“It became a lot more than just a gig; it became a gathering place for our community to be together and to express musically what we were going through. It still is. In the last few weeks we’ve lost even more good friends.”

At weekly shows at El Mercado South, fans seem deeply connected to the musicians on stage, as the room remains uncommonly silent throughout the performances.

Before 2013 Campbell also sang Monday nights at Artz Rib House and before that at La Zona Rosa. Some of Austin’s finest musical citizens including Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Marcia Ball and Toni Price have graced the El Mercado South stage in recent years, reminiscent of the days they performed Wednesdays at Threadgill’s North from the 1970s through the 1990s.

When musicians gather for “Mystery Monday” at El Mercado South, their kinship extends beyond each singular performance. Unscripted and unpretentious, band members baptize listeners in a wash of emotions.

Another tune on her album, Warren Zevon’s song, “Keep Me in Your Heart,” provides a sad goodbye. She never had the chance to meet Zevon before the rock singer/songwriter died in 2003, but she fell in love with his lyrics.

Albert discovered Zevon’s song through their mutual friend and a vocalist with the Greezy Wheels band, Lissa Hattersley, who posted the lyrics on her Facebook page in a gesture of condolence following the death of Albert’s father.

Hattersley also recorded her 2009 solo album How I Spent My Summer Vacation in Albert and Gage’s recording studio and Chris co-produced it.

Another song, “Little One,” Albert wrote about a female friend before the lyrics slowly evolved into a dialogue with her son, Troupe, and later a mantra she had often spoken to herself.

“’Little One’ refers to anyone who is in an embryonic stage of waking up to the world, especially a spiritual world; anyone who needs to find their direction, their strength, and their clarity again,” Albert said.

   “Wake up Little One/feel the warmth of the rising sun/wake up Little One to the one who you can become…”

Albert said she practices Buddhist mindfulness and meditation techniques, but she does not ascribe to any specific religion.

Meditative practices led her to the song, “At Times Like These,” which Albert initially wrote in 2009 for her sister Linda who lost both her husband and a grandson within a few months.

Another song, “Someday Isle,” Albert wrote with Kira Small, a former Austin singer and songwriter, who now lives in Nashville and performs studio session work and sings harmony on Martina McBride’s newest album, Everlasting.

“When Kira and I started writing it, we were inspired by the common phrase, ‘Someday I’ll do this,’ and ‘Someday I’ll do that.’ When we realized by saying that, you’re always keeping yourself at a distance from what you want to do or from what your dreams are and there’s an isolation to it,” she said.

“So we used the play on words, ‘Someday Isle.’ It’s that place ‘over there’ when we say ‘I’ll do it — later.’”

Albert experienced some of the darkest times of her life all within a span of five years from 1981 until 1986. In 1995, she met the love of her life, Chris Gage, after seeing him perform with Gilmore on stage at Bass Concert Hall as part of “The Broken Spoke Concert Series,” offered by the University of Texas at Austin’ Performing Arts Center. The couple later married on May 10, 2003.

She recorded her last solo singer/songwriter album Underneath the Lone Texas Sky in 1995 although she continued releasing the bilingual French/English TexaFrance series as well as six Albert and Gage collaborations. Everything’s Beautiful is her 12th release.

“This album had more of a theme for me. When choosing the songs, there was something about it that was almost spiritual – what I was trying to say, why I was recording it, and the process was so personal,” she said.

“I wanted to hold these songs in a little sacred space for myself and to help others find that through the music.”

Albert hopes the album “makes a statement” as a whole and is interested in performing the songs live in churches and other places of worship.

“I think these songs fit in a more contemplative thoughtful environment and they could be helpful to people in that regard,” she said.

“It’s also a way to spread the word about Swan Songs’ mission. I didn’t consciously set out to do that, but this album really does express what Swan Songs’ mission is all about.”

Please see this story posted on The Alternate Root magazine at: http://thealternateroot.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2756:christinea-ebn&catid=208:what-s-trending&Itemid=268

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The Broken Spoke hosts The Blazing Bows ‘Fiddle Fest 2013’

19 Jul

by Donna Marie Miller

About 30 elementary age boys and girls and a half dozen adults – all fiddlers – tucked their instruments under their chins to perform some good old time string classics of folk and country music July 15 at The Broken Spoke.

Little girls, some as young as 5 years old, with braids pulled up on top of their heads and dressed in their best embroidered dresses or ruffle skirts and lacy tops, stood beside little boys wearing plaid shirts and Wrangler jeans. Most all wore cowboy boots.

They donned Texas Resistol straw hats in white and red and a few wore western scarves tied around their necks Lonesome Dove style. Meanwhile, parents shot video from the side porches along either side of the bandstand or upon the dance floor, with their digital camcorders, cameras, and smart phones.

Beneath the glow of neon signs advertising well-known beer labels, dozens of families came together inside one of Texas’ oldest — if not Austin’s most well known honky tonk. Without drinking a drop of alcohol, adults clapped and raised some revelry for their children. Mothers with infants in their laps and fathers with babies on top of their shoulders turned The Broken Spoke into a romper room of “G”-rated fun.

Mary Hattersley and her Blazing Bows Suzuki-style music students performed within just a week from the day that she underwent cancer surgery. “Sweet Mary,” as folks call her, smiled, sang, danced and played fiddle like nobody’s business from a set list that read an awful like a music history lesson.  “Fiddle Fest” provided the finale to a Blazing Bows two-week summer camp that has culminated at The Broken Spoke annually for nearly 20 years.

However, for the first time in as long as some fans can remember, one of The Broken Spoke’s original owners, James White, did not attend the performance.  Instead, White rested at home following surgery July 3. Doctors have placed a Defibrillator inside the left side of White’s chest to regulate irregular heart rhythms. He also broke his foot recently walking on the Town Lake trail.  White has worn an orthopedic “boot” or removable cast since mid-June and he has a few weeks to go before his bones heal.

Mary Hattersley’s husband, Cleve Hattersley, accompanied the group on guitar, and fiddler Kay Mueller helped lead the fiddle performance along with another fiddler, Catherine Van Zanten.  Together the four Suzuki teachers have represented “Fiddle Fest” since around 1994.

“It is important that we do the show at The Spoke because it is a show about the history of fiddle in Texas and all the songs we play have been played and danced to right there for years,” Mary Hattersley said. “And it’s where the famous Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys often performed.”

The Hattersleys along with Mueller and Van Zanten also bring their students together at the Austin Suzuki Academy on Saturday mornings for group and theory lessons.

Blazing Bows’ former campers have returned every year to perform their finale at The Broken Spoke as part of the Hattersley family tradition.

“It gives me so much joy to play music. You can get all bollixed up in music with the practicing and the playing, but it’s all about the joy,” Mary Hattersley said.

The Blazing Bows perform at the Old Settler’s Bluegrass Festival in Dripping Springs each April and at the Austin Art Festival in July and previously performed at the Pioneer Farm May Pole celebration. They cancelled all other summer shows when doctors diagnosed Mary Hattersley with vulvar cancer last June.  In December every year they perform at the Austin Armadillo Bazaar. They plan to also take their Blazing Bows shows to local celebrations, nursing homes, and schools as well in 2014.

“It’s so important to me and the Blazing Bows to play at The Broken Spoke because of the music history. People remember going to The Broken Spoke when they were kids. A lot of times, it was a family place,” Mary Hattersley said.

Ironically, while their Blazing Bows have played The Broken Spoke regularly for nearly two decades, while the band, Greezy Wheels, never performed there.

The Greezy Wheels – 2013 Texas Music Hall of Fame

The Hattersleys reunited the band, Greezy Wheels in 2001 and it became the first in town to sign to a major label. The band has since formed its own label, Mahatma Records, and made The Austin Chronicle’s top ten list in 2011 for their album, Gone Greezy. 

Some might label the past few years as Greezy Wheels “heydays,” but the band’s fan base knew the group’s sound as one ahead of its time – once referred to as “progressive country” 40 years ago. The Greezy Wheels created the sound as an amalgamation of country and western, blues and jazz music.

Cleve Hattersley played mostly solo one-night gigs around Austin before forming the Greezy Wheels band in the 1970s.  Its members convinced Mary Egan to leave Kenneth Threadgill’s band, the Hootenanny Hoots, and to join the Greezy Wheels. Not long afterwards, Threadgill’s restaurant proprietor Eddie Wilson and co-founders of the old live music venue, Austin Armadillo World Headquarters, caught their show.  Wilson jumped at the chance to book the Greezy Wheels as a back up band for the Flying Burritto Brothers and the band’s reputation just took off after that.

The Greezy Wheels played the Armadillo World Headquarters more often than any other band and backed up the most national music stars regularly.

“We backed up ‘the Boss,’ Bruce Springsteen at Armadillo World  Headquarters when he was doing his first tour of the United States. He had just played Houston and a bunch of people followed him down here to Austin. He was young and nobody really knew who he was,” Mary Hattersley said.

The Greezy Wheels backed up other regular acts at the Armadillo World Headquarters at the time, including Willie Nelson, Marcia Ball, Alvin Crow, Asleep at the Wheel, and Doug Sahm before the group disbanded in 1978.

Twenty-five years later, Mary and Cleve, and his sister, Lissa Hattersley, reunited the Greezy Wheels in 2001.

Currently, their newest album, Kitty Cat Jesus, which released in May features two songs: “I Cry Myself to Sleep,” and “I’ll Get Away With It,” that have received lots of local radio station air play.

Other Greezy Wheels members include: lead vocalist Lissa Hattersley and other band members: vocalist Penny Jo Pullus, drummer Johnny Bush, bassist Brad Houser, and trombone and harp player, Matt Hubbard. Both Bush and Houser previously played with Edie Brickell and The New Bohemians in the 1980s. Hubbard also performs with Willie Nelson.

The Greezy Wheels will perform again Oct. 11 at the Starlight Theater Restaurant and Saloon in Terlingua and Oct. 12 at Padres Bar and Grill in Marfa as part of the Chinati Foundation Open House there. The event includes two days of art, music and lectures and brings in visitors from all around the world.

The Hattersley hippie years

Mary’s dad, Oscar Butler, represents somewhat of a legend in West Texas music circles as he worked as a choir professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, N.M. Butler put a violin under his daughter’s chin when she turned ten. Years later, she attended NMSU, but only from 1961 through 1962, before running off to San Francisco with two hippies, artist friend Chet Helms and her first husband, Leonard Soforo.

“Chet, Lenny and I all decided to go to San Francisco. We had this old Chevy, but it broke down right outside Las Cruces. So Chet hitchhiked to Dallas and was picked up by the police. In those days, it was difficult to stay out of jail looking like a hippie,” Mary said.

Mary and Leo Soforo made it as far as San Francisco where her husband took a job as a disc jockey that didn’t last long.

“I was a hippie for a long time,” Mary Hattersley said. “I had a wild spirit.”

Helms ended up in Dallas City Jail the same day that police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald for shooting President John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963.

“We were all worried about Chet. Here he was sitting in the same jail as Oswald,” Mary said.

Coincidentally, Dallas police eventually released Helms from jail sometime after Jack Ruby shot Oswald. Helms later met up with the couple in San Francisco, but Mary Soforo’s problems grew bigger.

Leo Soforo, had mental problems that stemmed from years of heavy drug use, she said.

“He was one of those people who took acid and had a bad trip – he just never recovered,” she said. “He ended up committing suicide.”

Mary moved to Santa Fe, NM and married and divorced two more times after Soforo’s death and before she met Cleve Hattersley in Austin.

This past June marked the couple’s 39th anniversary, as common law husband and wife, legally registered in Travis County. Cleve is  66 and Mary just celebrated her 70th birthday June 8. Doctors diagnosed her with vulvar cancer and removed all the affected tissue July 2.

“They found out I had it right when we were in the middle of (Blazing Bows) summer camp. I decided we would do camp anyway. The doctors went in and found the cancer all in one place and got it out. The surgery went well. There’s nothing else required,” she said.

A Little Fiddle Song History

Fiddle history resounds within the Blazing Bows as much as their music. Mary Hattersley introduces each song to their audiences with a brief history.

Interestingly, “Bile em Cabbage Down” often translated to “Boil them Cabbage Down,” for Mary Hattersley’s students has been renamed “Violin Cabbage Down.” The fiddle breakdown features seven variations.

“One year we were playing this song and the electricity went out (at The Broken Spoke,) and we just kept playing it in the dark.  We were still playing when the lights came back on.  It was so cool,” Mary said.

“The other reason for playing at The Broken Spoke is that the great Texas fiddler Bob Wills played there.”

The first song the group performed, “Lil’ Liza Jane,” enjoys a long history that dates back to the early 1900s with roots in standard, jazz and bluegrass music. First recorded by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in 1947, Nina Simone performed it at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960, then David Bowie and his King Bees performed it in 1964, and The Band recorded a version of it in 1968. Finally, it appeared on an album recorded by Alison Krauss and Union Station, which earned a 1998 Grammy Award.

The Blazing Bow’s third song, “Rubber Dolly” made famous by Appalachian string bands in the 1920s and 1930s became a favorite performed by 1960s folk singer Woody Guthrie and then 1970s country singer Ray Price.

Next the group performed an Irish jig written in the early nineteenth century called “Swallowtail.”

“That’s one of the most beautiful songs ever to become a fiddle song,” Mary Hattersley said. “ Every fiddle tune should contain a jig.”

For their fourth piece, local fiddle player Billie Curtis performed the American classic entitled “Soldier’s Joy,” a 200-year-old song recognized as the oldest and most widely distributed tune in the English speaking language. Curtis, who plays with Lone Star Swing, formerly played with Houston’s popular Wild River Band, as well as Western Swing legends such as Johnny Gimble and Herb Remington. He has a daughter who plays with the Blazing Bows. His band performs at El Mercado in Austin most Thursday nights.

The Blazing Bows also performed “Drowsy Maggie,” featuring Anna Wicker on the fiddle, followed by a medley of “Turkey in the Straw”/”Arkansas Traveler”/”Devil’s Dream,” – a fiddler’s all-time greatest hits list.

Performing “The Orange Blossom Special” with the Blazing Bows holds particular significance to Mary Hattersley.  She remembers once teaching fiddler Jean Luc Ponty to play the song backstage at the Armadillo World Headquarters while they waited to perform back up to Frank Zappa and his band, The Mother’s of Invention.

“It was just a few chords, but Ponty picked it right up,” she said. “Then he performed it on stage.”

She and the children also performed “La Culebra,” translated “The Rattlesnake,” a mariachi standard. Its origins reach back as far as 1944 when Ruben Fuentes Gasson played it with Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan as the group’s violinist and composer. Later his reputation grew when he performed on Linda Ronstadt’s multi-Platinum album, Canciones De Mi Padre.  

The Blazing Bows performed Cotton Collins’ version of “Westphalia Waltz,” about Polish immigrants during the Great Depression who worked in the coalmines of the Alleghenies and in the mills of Massachusetts. Collins and his Lone Star Playboys renamed the folk song after the Texas town by the same name and performed it often as part of their lunchtime broadcast on radio station, WACO in Waco.

And the Blazing Bows rendered Glen Miller’s big band song, “In the Mood” a fiddle version at The Broken Spoke. The song once considered “racy” and originally written about Tin Pan Alley later became part of The Beatles’ recording of “All You Need is Love,” thanks to producer George Martin.

The Blazing Bows performed one of 129 versions of the often misspelled Irish folk song about a bar maid, “Drowsy Maggie,” as well. The song became internationally known after the band Jethro Tull first performed the song in concert in 1989 at the Apollo Theater in Manchester, England.

The favorite of the night, “The Cotton-Eye Joe” had family members dancing on the dance floor in front of The Broken Spoke bandstand. The Moody Brothers’ version of the song won a Grammy Award nomination for best country instrumental in 1985. Then The Chieftains received a Grammy Award nomination for their album, Another Country, with Ricky Skaggs in 1992.

The group closed the night with “Ashokan Farewell,’’ named after a camp in the Catskill Mountains not far from Woodstock, New York, once run by Jay Unger and Molly Mason. Written originally as an instrumental Scottish lament, called “Fiddle Fever” Ashokan campers later wrote lyrics. Two 16-year old girl members of the Blazing Bows, offered their own words to the song July 15.  The song once served as the opening track to a PBS special about the Civil War, created by filmmaker Ken Burns. Twenty-five other versions of the song played in the 11-hour series produced and broadcast on television in 1984.

The song’s poignant lyrics focus on the emotions young musicians feel about leaving fiddle camp. It served as an appropriate closing performance for the Blazing Bows’ program finale at The Broken Spoke.

http://oakhillgazette.com

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