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England is Americana
But Amy England is not at all unhappy to be lumped into the Americana crowd in music, a rela-tively new moniker for all the sound that derives its roots from traditional country music, but rejects the Rodeo Drive-bought cowboy boots of the Country Music Channel. Insiders of the “alt country” style, like Mark Brine and The Handsome Family, share something in common with Emmy Lou Harris and Johnny Cash, for example. England, who lives on the island with her husband Peter England and baby Ella, produced her first album “Heart Like Mine” in January of 2003, and her twangy, tart voice — her dad played Patsy Cline and Hank Williams in the house — has been heard on over 200 college and public radio stations. Her album was listed as one of the top in the Americana industry and her song “Twenty-Twenty Vision” is on a 2005 compilation disc, “The United States of Americana.” “It’s a good fit. I’m not really country and I’m not just folksy. It’s bluesy,” said England, who picked up the guitar a couple of years ago and is currently working on her grandmother’s violin, when no one else is around. “One bad thing about being in a niche is that it’s not a lot of money.” But England is not in a huge rush. She would be happy if a song she wrote made enough profit to buy a house, as she said fellow folk musician Pierce Pettis did when he sold a song to Garth Brooks. From a musical family, England often accompanies her brother Andrew Hunt at gigs in Brooklyn, N.Y. where he lives. She will play at festivals in Texas and Rhode Island, and at the arts festival on Nantucket in the fall. She is a frequent performer at the Talking Stick Ceilidh coffeehouse at the Unitarian Church and will be there again on Saturday, Aug. 27. Sipping iced coffee outside The Bean on a lunch break from her job as a graphic designer for the Maria Mitchell Association, England said she was comfortable in the role of self-promoter and net-worker. “It’s sometimes discouraging, but I kind of knew it would be like that. Anything in the music business is like playing the lottery,” she said. After moving to the island where she visited as a child, England moved in with her sister and subse-quently met her future husband, who has lived here since he was 14. Like in Rome, Italy, where England was for five years before Nantucket, she enjoys the “big fish in a little pond” atmosphere and writes about what she knows. The love stories on “Heart Like Mine” are island-tinged and if they are not England’s, they are deconstructed from a small-town “Did you hear about so-and-so?” mentality. “You hear a lot about other people’s business and people don’t always like it, but you change a couple of names and you’ve got a good country song,” she said. England likes to play for people who are listen-ing and has not been dogged about getting gigs in restaurants and competing with food. She has writ-ten several new songs this summer and plans to put out another album in 2007. “For the first one, I wasn’t sure where I belonged,” she said. The next album will be more acoustic, with mandolins and the lap slide. “I love that sound and it works well with my voice,” she said of the slide. Heavier drums on her first album took the sound to a more commercial country place that England hopes to avoid. She may even include a lullaby this time for her daughter who will be two in September. England has hope for her genre and believes it is experienc-ing a rebirth – she points to the ambling Volkswagon commercials as evidence. This past weekend she was looking forward to taking a road trip with her husband and daughter to the Newport Music Festival to hear Old Crow Medicine, the Pixies and Patty Griffin, her songwriting hero. Len Germinara, one of the co-founders of the Talking Stick coffeehouse, said he was honored to have England perform there. He and Phil Austin began the coffeehouse in April and plan to continue the open microphone setting, on the last Saturday of every month, into the winter. Based on the Celtic and Nova Scotia tradition of a “ceilidh,” where communities gather in a living room or kitchen around a fire to pass food, stories and babies, the Talking Stick also borrows from a Native American tradition of allowing only one per-son in a group to talk at a time. “A lot of people are working full time and don’t have the time to seek gigs and self-promote,” said Germinara, who had hosted a similar event in Bridgewater, Mass., before moving here with his wife, an oceanographer who works for the UMassBoston field station. “We have an awful lot of very talented people on the island, we’re very fortunate,” said Germinara, a poet and an actor who recognized that a gap left by a defunct island coffeehouse, Cross Rip, needed to be filled. Recordings have been made of the last two of four coffeehouses for those who want to use them as demo tapes, he said, or for a future “best of” com-pilation. The coffeehouse charges $3 for performances, two-thirds of which goes back to the Unitarian Church and the rest of which is used to purchase coffee and cookies. “We’re looking for people to hang out with and make a little art,” he said. The next Talking Stick Ceilidh is Sat., Aug. 27, 7 to 10 p.m., at the Unitarian Church, 11 Orange St. Germinara also hosts the Nantucket Poetry Slam, which will begin again after a summer hiatus on Sept. 11 with 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright. Germinara will host the Teen Poetry Slam at the Nantucket Atheneum Weezie Library on Thurs., Aug. 18, from 6 to 8 p.m. The event is open to any school-age child. Three prizes will be award-ed as youth vie for titled of top slam poet. I |
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