Legendary singer and multi-instrumentalist Alice Gerrard is a Grammy nominee, North Carolina Folklore Society Award-winner and a 2017 inductee into the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame. This weekend, she’ll perform with Kay Justice, Laurelyn Dossett, and Kari Sickenberger at the Arts Place of Stokes in Danbury.
She recently spoke with WFDD’s David Ford about what she’s learned along the road during a career spanning more than 50 years.
Interview Highlights
On the importance of deep listening:
"I really believe this. I feel like there's no substitute if you're trying to learn how to do something in the style of blah, blah, blah, whoever or whatever, you need to listen to that stuff. And you need to really absorb the sounds of it. And you can also start playing it too, but you can't just expect to grab that sound without really internalizing it."
On 'inhabiting a song':
"What I'm hearing when I hear that is the many different sorts of sounds of primitive Baptist singing, you know, where they decorate the notes and, you know, blues and stuff and all those sorts of notes between notes and space between notes, and the way you turn a note. I remember I was touring once with a group that included Lydia Mendoza. She was a very well-known Tex-Mex singer ... a wonderful singer ... and I would ask her, 'Lydia, how do you get up there every night and sing the same song and have so much feeling in it?' Every time she said she puts herself in the song, she's up there, and she's in that song, in that story. And I feel like that's sort of the way I feel when I'm doing it. I mean, I'm not consciously putting myself there, but I think that I try to inhabit the song."
On preserving her voice at 91:
"I'm thinking about that a lot because I don't sing — especially since I moved — I'm not around the people who used to stop by every day and come in and we'd sing and play and stuff like this. So, I have to sit by myself and do it, which doesn't inspire me as much as I'm a very collaborative sort of person. I like to do things with other people too, and so it's hard just to sit around and sing ... But I think, because definitely, as you get older, you know you have to keep doing it, or you're going to lose it.