johnfoyle
07-06-2005, 04:25 PM
http://www.sfbg.com/39/40/x_sonic_reducer.html
THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY , Guardian,
July 6 - July 12, 2005• Vol. 39, No. 40
Sonic Reducer
Luck of the draw
NYC singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell is way steeped in the city's country history – so it seemed like an insane coincidink when she discovered she was related to Ethel Park Richardson, a Chattanooga, Tenn., songcatcher, historian, and radio drama producer. The Nashville-raised Cantrell had read Richardson's 1927 tome, American Mountain Songs, but didn't realize the author was her great-great-aunt. "To find out I was related to her was really kind of a trip, a funny confirmation that what I had been doing all along was an avocation and interest and meant to be," she says now, calling from Raleigh, NC, on a tour that will find her playing in SF for the first time.
The musical history jones seems to go deep down in Cantrell's DNA because she's shown herself to be quite the ethnomusicologist on her 12-year-old Saturday program on WFMU, Radio Thrift Shop. "It was a way to encapsulate that I was playing a lot of older music, a lot of older records I found at thrift shops, but also music that was discarded or no longer thought cool by other folks," she says. "It's old-time country and pop when there were fewer genre stratifications." She's been playing vocal groups like Cats and the Fiddle and Golden Gate Quartet lately, and material from old radio shows is also a must. Now Cantrell will have to get used to being on the other side of the console (she'd been to the city many times in the past as part of her job in equity research for Montgomery Securities in NYC), doing radio appearances across the country. Radio also seems to be in her genes – as it is in those of Jeremy Tepper, her husband, who programs Outlaw Country for Sirius Radio. So would she call her music country? "Maybe because I grew up Nashville, I feel like it's my right to claim the title. If someone's expecting country music to sound like Faith Hill, they might be disappointed," she says. "But I'd rather risk a little confusion on the margin."
kimberly
THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY , Guardian,
July 6 - July 12, 2005• Vol. 39, No. 40
Sonic Reducer
Luck of the draw
NYC singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell is way steeped in the city's country history – so it seemed like an insane coincidink when she discovered she was related to Ethel Park Richardson, a Chattanooga, Tenn., songcatcher, historian, and radio drama producer. The Nashville-raised Cantrell had read Richardson's 1927 tome, American Mountain Songs, but didn't realize the author was her great-great-aunt. "To find out I was related to her was really kind of a trip, a funny confirmation that what I had been doing all along was an avocation and interest and meant to be," she says now, calling from Raleigh, NC, on a tour that will find her playing in SF for the first time.
The musical history jones seems to go deep down in Cantrell's DNA because she's shown herself to be quite the ethnomusicologist on her 12-year-old Saturday program on WFMU, Radio Thrift Shop. "It was a way to encapsulate that I was playing a lot of older music, a lot of older records I found at thrift shops, but also music that was discarded or no longer thought cool by other folks," she says. "It's old-time country and pop when there were fewer genre stratifications." She's been playing vocal groups like Cats and the Fiddle and Golden Gate Quartet lately, and material from old radio shows is also a must. Now Cantrell will have to get used to being on the other side of the console (she'd been to the city many times in the past as part of her job in equity research for Montgomery Securities in NYC), doing radio appearances across the country. Radio also seems to be in her genes – as it is in those of Jeremy Tepper, her husband, who programs Outlaw Country for Sirius Radio. So would she call her music country? "Maybe because I grew up Nashville, I feel like it's my right to claim the title. If someone's expecting country music to sound like Faith Hill, they might be disappointed," she says. "But I'd rather risk a little confusion on the margin."
kimberly