Music Journey, So Far....

Make Me A Poster of An Old Rodeo (after John Prine's passing April 7, 2020)

Inspired at Ruth's, Muncy PA 2006

Hank's guitar

Inspired at Home with Willie, 2007

Mockingbird, sing your song.. carry me along... pretty bird, so many tunes, sing your sweet song to the Moon

Hannah & Michael's visionary and legendary Skyheart Studio, circa 2010

This is Just One Woman's Story....of My Musical Journey, So Far

I grew up in a musical household - my dad, Hank, played guitar at the neighborhood gatherings; my mother, Jane, sang along to Frank Sinatra and Pearl Bailey records, and my sister Gail's Elvis Presley & Platters records were the soundtrack in the '50's.

I fell in love with music - most likely an old language - and the guitar in particular when I was 11. It was clearly the Beatles' fault. I wasn't screaming with the other girls at the screening of "Hard Day's Night",
I was knowing that someday, I was gonna play guitar, too. The two voices that
melted me as a teenager were Diana Ross singing "Where Did
Our Love Go”, and John Lennon singing just about anything in those early days.
But, wait! As hooked as I was on Motown artists and every Beatle album that came out,
there was Stax in Memphis and Muscle Shoals in Alabama - the tight knit musicians recorded live, as they played with studio gobo's (which nicely isolated the musicians' mics from each other, yet achieved a "live" sound) between them.....
add Jackie DeShannon, Dusty Springfield, Aretha, psychedelia, Janis Joplin, CSNY... the '60's- oh, the '60's music...

In 1969, I was awakened to and by Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Ellen McIlwaine, and then,
Big Mama Thornton, Bessie Smith...
uncovering the Blues...
Bonnie Raitt!...whose first album, recorded in a cabin on a Minnesota lake, later inspired me to record at home,
in a cabin on abundant acres of forest and creeks...and when a friend turned me on to Nina Simone in the late 70's,
it all was a sumptuous musical feast to be had - these women rocked my world,
and I found a voice inside me that was itching to get out.
Women singing, women writing, women playing....few women were producing or engineering back then. But when I read the liner notes of Janis' "Cheap Thrills" album that included her name under "Engineered by...", I thought maybe, just maybe, someday....
I could do that, too...and in time, I learned never to let gender dictate my soul's desire or ability, or let the
old school of gender judgment keep me from expressing myself and playing music from my true soul.
That said, I never approached the Music Industry Machine; for me, it was all organic and regional. I know that there is a less pleasant truth for most women who have entered that Machine. I am indebted to them for forging the path.

Music became my sanctuary. I was given my first guitar, a nylon string, and from there,
I played a cheap, old Fender strat style-copy electric and learned "barre chords" (NOT so-named because of the venues, but because of the use of one or more of the fingers acting as a capo to create moveable chords up the neck of the guitar),
followed by a Greco 12 string, and then
my main songwriting instrument for years, my Guild D25-M acoustic dreadnaught..
As a teenager, I started to write tons of songs, and recorded them
"sound with sound" on a reel to reel tape recorder my dad had brought home from someone's trash alongside the road, shyly
playing them only for close friends and family. A lot of those
songs evaporated into thin air, fortunately! - but many actually
became part of my recordings and performances over the years..."Soul Baby", "My Injury", "Evil",
"All Right Daddy"(for Janis), and "Be Like a Train" were a few of them.

In the 70's, I slowly emerged publicly, as I began to write songs on my new Guild D-25 -- "Talk it Out", "Green Pastures", "Pennsylvania" (one of the first songs I wrote in a tuning other than standard), "Sittin High", "Girl With the Beautiful Eyes",
to name a few. I then moved from NYC to help form my  first band, Rubyfruit Begonia, with friends from Pennsylvania innerlands. We performed for senior citizens, college community coffeehouses, a women's prison, even on a Morning TV show in rural Pa., and at a local rural bar where we were harassed by drunken bikers, while our 8 women collective carried on up on stage,
with acoustic guitar, mandolin, bass, and women's voices singing
"Silver Threads & Golden Needles", and other folk-bluegrass-country tunes along with a few of mine thrown in.
I became a part of a college community as a townie, helping to provide program ideas and
producing local women's music festivals in that Appalachian college town with other women who were students.

I was off and running, pawning a diamond ring for my favorite electric guitar to this very day - a stripped down 1960 Gretsch Anniversary I found at Silver Horland in NYC, and which I named after Tina Turner's birth name of Annie Mae (Bullock).
I later added a multitude of other electric and acoustic guitars. Couldn't get enough! - the sounds, the textures, from the depth or kind of wood, the type and combination of pickups, the types and gauges of strings, the use of fingers or picks and what gauges of them could give the desired sound...and then, the use of delays, compression, harmonic enhancers - all the colors, and palettes!

Begonia, a trio of three women friends from Rubyfruit Begonia, was formed in 1980 and for years was a canvas on which I felt I could paint my music freely with two gifted and talented women musicians and friends - Brenda Fisher and Jude Klucitas. We played for a couple decades, connecting with folks at festivals, colleges, clubs, coffeehouses, lesbian bars, theaters and more, mostly from Pennsylvania to Vermont and New York.
Brenda and I recorded the first two Begonia cassettes (Begonia, and Blueswoman) in a cabin, taking them to studios to mix and mixdown before duplication. Everything was done by hand and with little knowledge - just sheer love and joy of the art of recording, and bringing it all together into something that could be shared with others.
Dozens of my songs, and some of Brenda's, ended up on those recordings.
When time to record the third release, Like It Is, came around in 1990, after first starting the recordings in the cabin once again,
we decided to let a studio do the work - we laid down the "rhythm beds" as they are called,
before adding vocals, percussion, and guitar tracks, giving the songs a live synergy.

In 1992, after the passing of my mother, Jane, and in tribute to her,
I leaned into my acoustic songwriting from the earlier years and recorded Voices on the Wind,
adding a bunch of newly written songs as well. It was grassroots-organic, recorded with little overdubbing.
On many of the 17 songs, Brenda sang harmony, adding bass & some harmonica,
and Jude played percussion. That opened up the door for gigs at Caffe Lena in Saratoga, NY,
as well as expanded the venues Begonia could take our music to.
A dear and cherished friend and soulful fine artist, Jean M. Adams, whom I met in the early '80's, literally hand-pasteled each and every front cover of Voices on the Wind...at the intitial release of 500 copies, that was no small feat. It was an act of pure love. Jean's piece of art, "The Breaching Heart" also was part of the cover for Begonia's Blueswoman in 1988.

Begonia returned to the studio in 1994, but those recordings unfortunately never got released...songs I wrote,
such as "Willie", "Goddess of Angels", "Freedomsong", "Believe I Care", "Heal Me",
and some of those earlier songs I had written ("All Right Daddy", and "Evil").
I wish I had kept more notes of all
the gigs over the years. It’s no small blessing to have
enjoyed the musicality and friendship of three women like we
did. The number Three is very powerful. I hope the spirit of
Begonia can somehow live on in a beautiful way.

Along the way and during the 90’s, I had the good fortune to
make music with Ernie Williams for a few months in upstate New York, a man who used to say
“you don’t get old playing music, you get old not
playing music”. True. Music keeps our spirit and heart young.

Also during the 90’s, some sweet and amazing women friends
and I would get together and cook meals, play songs for each
other, and even do an occasional gig together. We called
ourselves the hagangels, to each other only, and joke very
intended. I was the only official hag in the band, I think.
Here’s to the memory of laughing, making music, and being moved
with and by Amy, Sara, Amy and Rosanne.

I've also been honored to work with my brother, Glenn. Glenn is
a prolific songwriter who has worked with dozens of musicians on
the North Fork of Long Island, NY. He and I sang together as teens. He
would bring home "fakebooks" of hit songs of the '60's that he borrowed from
a classmate in school; I was teaching myself electric guitar and he would mostly belt
tunes out while I played guitar. We even "wrote" some tunes together.
I went my way musically, and he his, and we have always maintained our love and respect
for each other's songwriting and musical lives. Matter of fact, his songs are in my DNA, and vice versa.
I'm sure all that time listening to WABC-AM radio as teens, with dj's Cousin Brucie and Dan Ingram, created a synergy and familarity, a kind of intuitiveness for each other's music over the years.
I was honored to play guitars, sing background, and co-produce Glenn's Shelter Me cd in 2009 (with Brenda Fisher and Jude Klucitas, pianist Gabe Shuford, and recorded by Dan Keely) and a few tracks on Glenn's Not Long Ago cd in 2012.
Over the decades that Begonia performed together, we covered songs of his, like "Long Time", "Rags to Riches", "Out of Love";
and "Nicole's Song", "Free as the Wind", and "Lady", with Rubyfruit Begonia.

Among the most powerful and surreal experiences I've had in my musical life
occurred in the 1990's, when I met and spent time with a Mississippi Delta legend,
Jessie Mae Hemphill.
Her music making was something so deeply
core and out of this world, there is no comparison to the gut and soul,
the purity, and everything that is human and everything that is not,
to delta blues and Jessie's was a powerful example of that. It is a language
I am humbled by, moved by, but ever mindful of from whence it came.
There is little glory in living the life of a blueswoman.
As a tribute to the unknown, unsung blueswomen, I wrote the song
"Blueswoman" in the late '80's. It is the title of the cassette-only release
by Begonia in 1988.

During the 90's and up to the present, I've performed publicly - solo, and with some fine musicians along the way - Betsy Soares on percussion, Michael McAllister on bass, percussionist Holly Huzar, songwriter Mary Crinnin,
and one of my most cherished ensembles, The Lazy Burro Band - a metaphor of sorts for my later years'
low key approach to "performance" -
and which included the beyond-worldly brilliant artistry and beauty of my dear and cherished friend Rosanne Raneri,
bassist Chris Neuhaus, and my beloved Betsy Soares on percussion.
The Center for Natural Wellness School of Massage Therapy, from which I graduated and became a licensed massage therapist in 2002, graced me the space and artistic freedom to release 1311 in 2007.
In 2015 and 2016, I had the honor to work with Synchronicity Drummers (Cindy M., Cyndi C., Teri, Kaaren) and the incredibly soulful violinist Lisa Nelson at two benefits
(for 13 Grandmothers/Concert for Nepal, and Equine Advocates in Chatham, NY) at YogaBliss in Schenectady, NY.

The journey of 1311 (my solo album and what I refer to as
my music studio and which took place from 2005-2007) was
purely magickal. I set my mind and heart to making music
solely with TheBandInMyHead ~ playing all instruments as well as recording myself -
sometimes frustrating, daunting, exhilarating ~ always challenging. What I knew
was, I couldn't continue to allow my music to sit and collect
dust and remain inert. I have slow, turtle energy, and I needed
the time and space to capture songs on...tape? no...been
there, did that. I convinced myself that I could teach myself
the basics of digital recording via ProTools,
and set out to do just that.
I recorded the album organically, with the natural sounds of
wind and rain on a metal roof, and even the birth of baby
sparrows in the eaves. Years later, I wonder how I did it all myself!
It was truly an act of love and it blows my mind how blessed I am to have been able to pull it off.

Since that release, I wrote and recorded more songs that only
a few close friends & loved ones have copies of. Songs like "Well of Loneliness", "Strong and Beautiful", "Serengeti",
"Love Is You", "Girl By the River", "Surrender", and a remake of "Hole in the Sky",
written in the early '80's and originally performed with Begonia. Once again, I was "joined by" the BandInMyHead.
I never got around to "finishing" the process of mixing and mastering and duplicating those songs.
They are, however, some of my most treasured. Organic, raw, uninhibited recordings.
I guess I could say I create music for the sake of making music, whether
I perform publicly or not...Expressing creatively is what it's all about for me.
As many musicians age, our abilities to play, or sing, are challenged. Aging works on the Inside as well as on the Outside, and the lessons and work we do in our lives manifests in a myriad of ways. I am inspired to my core by artists like Lucinda Williams, Patty Larkin, Joni Mitchell, Rosanne Cash, Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Coburn - artists who have faced physical challenges,
and now, I too face them.
BUT. NEVER GIVE UP.
A major shift in my life occurred when I took Energy classes with Healer Joy Adler. I am grateful beyond words, for words can only convey so much afterall, to Joy - whose voice sits in the Higher Realms - and the Energy tribe
I have come to know and love in the past decade or so.
I carry them with me every moment. With Joy's classes and her gracious invitation to join on some of her meditations with my guitar, I opened more to ways I could use sound to reach others.

Whether or not I can play the way I used to, I have come to realize the journey I'm on is not linear at all. Music heals, and music is healing. Playing for people (and animals) for years has proven to me how healing music can be. Music by Loreena McKennitt, Karine Polwart, Todd Boston, Ashana, Deuter, Parijat, Snatam Kaur - some of the music that I began to uncover in more recent years - expanded my palette of listening to music. When I recently was no longer technologically able to make the (endless!) playlists and cd's for friends of inspiring music from my perspective, guess what happened? I walked outside and heard the birds' songs.
There is always music to hear and be healed by.
Wherever my journey goes from here, I know I can find sound to heal and be healed.

If you've stuck with me so far on this page, I thank you for reading my story. I will be updating songs to listen to on this website
as I navigate technology a little further. Ah, the journey so far has been rich, delicious--take a look below at some of the cast of characters I've been blessed to work with over the years...
If 1311 can inspire anyone to reach inside and pull out their
inner musings, I will feel richly blessed.
Tell your stories, paint your visions...maybe even create a website of your story, your journey - thanks to newer platforms, one doesn't need to know "coding" to create a personal website...it just takes patience (ok, a lot!) and inspiration.
Peace.

Betsy Soares, Rosanne Raneri, Beth, Lisa Nelson - October 2015 at Mary Clare's phenomenal YogaBliss, Schenectady NY

Betsy joining Beth @ Skyheart Studio, Gloversville, NY 2010

Betsy, Michael McAllister - Skyheart October 2010

Rosanne Raneri, Beth - YogaBliss, Schenectady NY October 2015

Beth with Jessie Mae Hemphill, Page Hall SUNY Albany NY, November 1993

Youthful, Back-in-Time: Beth - Main Theater, New Paltz College, NY, March 1992

BEGONIA: Brenda Fisher, Jude Klucitas, Beth - Main Theater, New Paltz College, March 1992

BEGONIA: Jude Klucitas, Beth - Main Theater, New Paltz College, NY, March 1992

Betsy, Rosanne Raneri Flying!, Beth - YogaBliss 2015

Finding the Laughing Place: Glenn Jochum and Beth, Greenport NY 2011

Holly, Mary, Zoe Concert for Love/GLSEN Benefit, Yoga Loft Delmar, NY February 13, 2011 (photo by Gail J. Blacklock)

Beth, Bets Concert for Love/GLSEN Benefit, Yoga Loft Delmar, NY February 13, 2011 (photo by Gail J. Blacklock)

Synchronicity Drummers and Drummers Holly Huzar and Betsy Soares performing with Beth - Concert for Nepal/13 Grandmothers, YogaBliss, 2015

My amazing, soulfully intuitive musical cohorts, who helped bring my entire 1311 cd into a live concert setting - Betsy Soares, Chris Neuhaus, Rosanne Raneri. CNW, Albany NY November 24, 2007

Original Blueswoman lyrics, 1987.

Beth, solo @ Valentine's Albany, NY 1994

playin' Annabelle, Skyheart Studio, 2010

Yep, that's Cowgirl Bethi age 7, circa 1960

Summer 1970

...and that would be Cowgirl Beth too, 1991

Way back in Time but no less a true Experience!: Rubyfruit Begonia - Lock Haven State College (University), 1977 or so. Mardi Geist, Clare Traynor, Beth Jochum, Brenda Fisher, Carroll Rhodes, Jude Klucitas, Diana Powell "DP" Andrus; Mae Glidewell, not in this photo, was pianist.

Clare, Mardi and Beth, RFB - somewhere in PA, 1978

Mae, Carroll, and Beth, RFB - State College, PA. 1978

Rubyfruit Begonia, drawing by Jude Klucitas 1977

And this would be, "Unknown Woman Guitarist", for all the unknown women. Goddess Bless. Photo found in a pawn shop.

The Musical Journey, so far.....