Her Story

The Early Years

This woman is no rookie wannabe. She was drilled as a singer from an early age, trained in the classics. A singer/songwriter for 33 years, she honed her craft on the Midwest club circuit in her late teens and early 20s, with studio gigs on the side. An Air Force brat most of her childhood, she was exposed to a variety of lifestyles and cultures. The music she encountered in her travels was absorbed into her psyche, forging her into an eclectic and gifted musician of incredible range and sensitivity.

Her empathy for those less fortunate led to an interest in medicine during her late 20s, when she became a medical assistant and finally a medical editor, all while continuing to pursue songwriting in private, something she cherishes to this day.

She married and settled down on the gulf coast of Mississippi. She felt comfortable there. Her greatest love was being a mother, however. She knew only too well the demands of the music industry and her fiery but shy and loving nature kept her close to home, to spend as much time with her children as possible.

She would occasionally venture out into the coffeehouse circuit to the joy of her fans at home, though. Developing debilitating stage fright in her early 30s, she rarely sang in traditional public venues, although she would venture into churches in Mississippi and Atlanta to sing gospel or rock if she was up to it, frequently doing her own arrangements and bending traditional approaches to hymns.

She comments with a nervous laugh that performing was the equivalent of “pulling teeth. Without anesthetic. The only time I felt comfortable was when I wasn’t singing alone on stage.” Eventually, in 1999, she formed a small trio called Something Else that included Tina Pierre and Ceci Smith, who became close friends. She settled comfortably into performing, arranging, producing and co-writing their first CD, Outta the Box.

She laughs about it now with a charming throatiness and southern accent. “Man, those days were crazy…….work, the studio, the kids, the rehearsals, plus helping to start this one coffeehouse at a Lutheran church near here, with those rehearsals too. It was like ‘I coulda been a contender’….but I’m too tired!’” She laughs out loud for a moment, and then sobers. “I’m not particularly enchanted with organized religion but I believe in the human spirit. We are a part of something bigger. It was just my way of saying that, I guess.”

Caught up in her desire to finish the album “and get some sleep,” she says she ignored a continuous fever and increasing fatigue for a year until December 2000. One of her dogs began to nose around her right arm, poking at it, nudging, lying on it at night. After a particularly insistent prod, she felt a sharp pain. She tentatively investigated the area and froze when she found a lump in her breast. Lying next to it was a very large lymph node. As a medical editor, she already knew.

She had breast cancer.

The hardest thing she’d ever had to do was to tell her husband and her kids after the tests came back positive. She shakes her head again and again when pressed for details, refusing to talk more about it, lips pressed firmly together. A lovely, petite blonde, she seems larger than her physical presence. If she chooses not to speak, no one seems interested in attempting to coax her. There’s something formidable about her, despite her 5’4” slender frame.