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| INTERVIEWS ARCHIVES RESCHEDULED |
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Name: Laurie Lewis
Date: Friday June 1st, 2007
Time: 1:00pm EDT
Website: www.laurielewis.com
Interviewer: Gracie Muldoon
Description:
Laurie Lewis (born September 28, 1950 in Long Beach, California), is an American bluegrass musician. Laurie fell in love with American folk music as a teenager, at the sunset of the '60s folk revival. "Oh, it was so exciting," she says of the Berkeley Folk Festivals where she first caught the folk bug. Every day I'd hear something new, Doc Watson or the Greenbrier Boys. Something about it just invited me to start playing it." After high school, she drifted away from the music, but always kept her fiddle under her bed, though she didn't know why. In her early 20s, she discovered the Bay Area bluegrass scene. To her, it was "like opening that door all over again. It woke up all that excitement I felt as a teenager, and I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life."
In the mid-70s, she helped found the Good Ol' Persons, an all-female ensemble that was soon headlining major folk and bluegrass festivals around the country. In 1979 she founded the Grant Street String Band, also including Beth Weil, Tom Bekeny, Greg Townsend, and Steve Krouse, in which her own songwriting came to the forefront. Her songs helped shape the template for the modern bluegrass-pop style. She spreads her talent over several genres - bluegrass, folk, country - and with the recognition she has within all those fields. Since then, she has recorded solo and duo albums, usually accompanied by mandolin artist and singer, Tom Rozum. Lewis, accompanied by Tom Rozum, has appeared at the Grand Ole Opry and several times with Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion. She is also the program director for a Music Camp on the Oregon Coast called Bluegrass at the Beach (www.BluegrassattheBeach.com) which she has done with Tom Rozum since 1992. Nowadays, she often plays under different names with a fairly regular roster of musicians, calling themselves "Laurie Lewis and her Bluegrass Pals," "the Guest House Band;" in 2006, she renamed her group "Laurie Lewis and the Right Hands." Many years ago, Lewis twice won California's Women's Fiddling championships. She is a versatile musician, having for many years played bass and sung with the late Dick Oxtot's Golden Age Jazz Band, as well as with the Bay Area band the Arkansas Sheiks. Lewis plays guitar and other string intruments. Laurie Lewis's 30-year career with the usual commercial yardsticks. She has won a Grammy ("True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe," 1997), and twice been named Female Vocalist of the Year by the IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association). Lewis has toured widely in many parts of the world, including most European countries, China, and Japan. When not on tour, she makes her home in Berkeley, California. |
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