July 9, 2005
It seems like a good day to start this journal page.
We've had this website up for about a year now, an eventful year at the end of a string of eventful years. In a nutshell, my mother, Eleanor Ponder, and my husband, Robert Kiefer, both survived cancer. There have been other wonderful opportunities for everyone in our families, but somehow their survival has dominated the landscape, and has created in me a renewed sense of vocation in my art and teaching - fresh ideas, and the potential for new adventures. In January of this year, Robert and I finally incorporated Cove Struck Music (LLC) and he has taken over the business side of the Business as well as directing me on stage, producing the CDs, and being the best roadie-stage-manager-chauffeur around. We're traveling a lot together, loving every minute.
I'm sure you noticed that our newest recording project, GOING ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN: Songs of War and Separation is featured on the home page. We are very proud of this collaboration with award-winning fingerstyle guitarist, John Knowles. To prepare for recording the project we rehearsed, with Robert directing, as if we were going to perform it live. We performed several songs at Murphy's Loft here in Nashville during the recording process, again at the local release party at The Basement (Nashville) last November and finally performed the whole CD (plus a few Carol and John numbers) at Bongo After Hours in June. Paul Carrol Binkley and Eddie Bedford created the perfect setup for us at their recording studio, Heartdance (also in Nashville and only blocks from our house in Lockland Springs). We recorded each song live, me in one room on headphones and John in another, also on headphones - with a window through which we could see each other. We made a very few minor corrections here and there after recording, but what you hear is what we really sound like on stage.
The Acoustic Rainbow Sampler folks chose the song "In Our Hearts and On Our Knees" for inclusion on their March 2005 sampler, which went to 1,300 DJs internationally. We are already starting to get inquiries for the rest of the CD from DJs in this country, as well as in Australia, Belgium, Italy, England, and the Netherlands, and are shipping it to them as fast as they request it. We've gotten feedback from several veterans of American wars as well as other friends and fans - GOING ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN seems to evoke emotions in a good way, a productive way, as well as satisfying people's aesthetic sense. I am grateful that this is so.
Robert and I are currently on the road in Syracuse and Utica, NY doing concerts for the Aesthetic Education Institutes and one great public gig, Utica Monday Night in Hannah Park on the 11th (8:00-9:30). We did our last Institute concert yesterday - what a joy it is to sing for these teachers and Teaching Artists (TAs), and to know that they will be taking the arts into the schools with integrity and purpose. The warmth and focus they bring to a concert is unparalleled anywhere. They investigate each work of art they see during Summer Session, sometimes for days before they see it - and the result is a remarkably intimate concert experience for all of us. It's impossible not to sing well for such audiences.
I've been an Aesthetic Ed TA myself since 1989. Without the insights and artistic growth I've experienced as a TA, I don't know if I would have had the courage and the tools to make the life-change of adding singing and recording as primary professional foci in 1998.
After the 11th, we go up past Chicago for the Woodstock (Illinois) 20th Annual Folk Festival - I sang there a couple of years ago, and am delighted to be going back. The Festival people are fabulous, the audiences are terrific, and the children's area is a "good-natured riot" to quote my friend Charles K. Wolfe.
We get home on the 18th, and I'm having my right knee replaced on the 21st of July. It is a most joyous event!!! I'm looking forward to a speedy recovery, and the insights that come with every such major physical event.
Go in Grace.
Carol
Future journal topics
- turning GAM into a stage production
- performances at HG Hill and Charles and Myrtles
- the relationship between middle age and art
- the relationship between art and TAing
- knee surgery
- family and art
- theatre and music relationship
