Kathy Kallick
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine
August 1995, Volume 30, Number 2
There were a couple of directions we could have gone with this album,” says singer/songwriter Kathy Kallick of her current release, “Matters Of The Heart,” on Sugar Hill Records. “We could have done cover tunes, or we could have done a mixture [of covers and original songs]. As I started to think about putting together this album—my first solo project—and talking with Todd Phillips, who produced it, [we] felt really strongly that it should be all originals, that we should make that one of the prominent features, that I’d written all the songs. So we chose songs that are all in similar vein, even though stylistically they’re not the same. [They are] all songs that I felt were really about feelings. Not all love songs, necessarily, but feeling-based, emotive songs, mostly about relationships.”
As founding member and lead singer of the San Francisco Bay area bluegrass band the Good Of Persons, Kallick is no stranger to songwriting or to dealing with work in several musical styles. Her earliest experiences, growing up in Chicago, were with folk music. After several years of piano lessons, Kallick’s parents gave her a guitar for her tenth birthday, and she still says “Yeah, that’s my instrument. My mother played very traditional old-time folk music, and my dad played classical music, so they each taught me things about playing guitar. One Christmas my dad gave me two records, a Charlie Byrd record and a Doc Watson record. I listened to them both a lot, but I guess you can tell which direction I went in!”
Kallick continued to listen to folk-based music through her high school years, and she began writing her own songs. “I listened a lot to Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, John Prine, and people like that. People who wrote really personal songs and storytelling songs. I really liked that a lot. And when I went to writing bluegrass songs, I tried to put aspects [of that] into my bluegrass songs.”
Kallick’s move to bluegrass was precipitated by a physical move, from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay area, where she still lives. “Chicago was quite a flourishing folk music town, but when I moved to the Bay area in the early ’70s, I found the bluegrass scene to be much more compelling than the folk scene. A lot of the stalwarts of the bluegrass scene were very welcoming, taught me things on the guitar, taught me songs, and sort of gave me what I think of as my bluegrass art history.”
“I’d have to say that Pat Enright was the first bluegrass singer I was really knocked out by,” she continues. “Pat was in a group called Phantoms Of The Opry when I first moved here. I started sneaking into a local saloon when I was 20 to listen and kept getting booted out. I was really glad when I turned 21 and could just go in and listen to Pat Enright for a whole night whenever I wanted to!” She began to listen to recorded bluegrass music, too. “I listened to a lot of Bill Monroe—always have since then, and always will, because he’s just my favorite singer and songwriter. I love his phrasing and the cadence of his singing. The first bluegrass album I got was his “A Voice From On High,” and I tried to memorize every single bit of it. My next one was a Jimmy Martin record; I think it’s called “Moonshine Holler.” It just had great stuff on it and I tried to play that record and learn his style.” She also listened to the Stanley Brothers, Larry Sparks, and Del McCoury.
“I didn’t only listen to men,” Kallick says, “but when I started listening to bluegrass, that’s a lot of what there was to listen to.” Finding the local bluegrass community receptive to women performers, Kallick set out to capitalize on that—if only for one show. With Sue Shelasky, Barbara Mendelson, Dorothy Baxter, and Laurie Lewis, Kallick put together what was meant to be a one gig show at Paul’s Saloon in San Francisco. As she told BU in March of ’91, “we thought it would be fun to put together an ‘all girl’ bluegrass band.” Their name was a play on the name of Frank Wakefield’s group, the Good Ol’ Boys.
The group was so well received that they became regular performers at Paul’s and began playing other venues and festivals. “We forged a mixture of styles that we all liked into an eclectic sound that stayed a major feature of the Good Ol’ Persons for the next 20 years.” Lewis left to front her own band, and several other players came and went in the early years of the GOP, which Kallick says, “was infiltrated by men at an early stage.
“In the greater scheme of things of bluegrass bands, though, we really haven’t had that many personnel changes over the years,” she remarks, pointing out that current Good Ol’ Persons members John Reischman and Sally Van Meter joined the group on 1975 and 1978 respectively. “The growth of the group comes from the members of that group listening to a lot of different music, getting inspired to write new songs and bring in new elements.” When the group began, there was some comment about the prominent role of women in the ensemble as well as the mixture of styles the group played—and the fact that no one played banjo. “There were some people who said we shouldn’t call ourselves a bluegrass band because we didn’t have a banjo. Sally Van Meter is actually a fine banjo player, but she got to where the dobro was the instrument she really wanted to concentrate on, and we felt dial it was providing a bluegrass sound to the rhythm.”
They did find acceptance in more traditional quarters. When they went to the Bean Blossom Festival in Indiana Bill Monroe was very fond of the Good Ol’ Persons, in particular a song that I wrote, the first bluegrass song I wrote, called ‘Broken Ties.’ He really liked that song and he asked us to sing it in every set, which wasn’t what we were used to doing. We were accustomed to doing all the songs we knew over the course of an engagement. This one song we’d just do every set, because he’d say, ‘Now I want you to sing my favorite song.’ I wouldn’t argue with him!
“I always think of bluegrass as a very classical form of music, and I’ve described it that way to people who don’t know anything about bluegrass, says Kallick. Bluegrass players study the classical renditions of songs note by note as they’re learning the songs, play along with recordings and try to achieve that same sound. A lot of bluegrass musicians approach their form the same way that classical musicians do, and typically it’s not until they’ve been studying that way for some time that they begin to improvise. Arranging a song is really fun. You’ve got different people with different ideas—all of us are pretty opinionated and strong willed—but we get arrangements invented that please all of us.” She cites her long musical history with mandolinist John Reischman, with whom she’s played since the early ’70s. “Our musical relationship has continued to grow and flourish because not only do we have some common interests in music but we have some different tastes that we listen to and we listen and we influence each other with our different tastes. I never would have listened to Latin music that much if it hadn’t been for John—or to Nat King Cole for that matter. All the stuff you listen to seeps into your consciousness and starts to leak out when you write songs. That’s sure what’s happened lo me.”
Kallick’s recorded songs have ranged from the bluegrass-tinged eclecticism of her Good Ol’ Persons projects through her award winning children’s release “What Do You Dream About?” to the traditional bluegrass feel of the songs recorded on her duet project with Laurie Lewis, “Together.” On “Matters Of The Heart,” she explores other musical pathways, from the classic country style of her duet with Tim O’Brien on “Bakery Window Wedding” to the boogie-woogie piano rocker (piano by John R. Burr) of “Midwestern Boy.” Several tracks have a Latin edge, and one of the most popular cuts from the album, “See You In Seattle” comes with a jazz-flavored arrangement by John Reischman.
“We had all the same rhythm section on the whole record, even though there were guest players and singers that colored the songs in different ways. Throughout, producer Todd Phillips plays bass, John Reischman is on mandolin, Scott Nygaard plays guitar and I play guitar on some of the songs. It’s not a traditional bluegrass record—it’s very hard to categorize. It’s the kind of record I enjoy listening to, but when you go in to different record stores you might find it under country, folk—or bluegrass! It has the elements of all—if there were a category called ‘eclectic acoustic music,’ I guess that would fit.”
She wrote the first cut on the CD, “Radio,” on her way to an IBMA meeting several years ago. “I was real excited. I hadn’t been to an IBMA event in about five years. I just went by myself, landed in Louisville about ten o’clock at night and got my rental car and set off to drive to Owensboro, very excited. Here I was in Kentucky and going to hear a lot of great bluegrass music. I got in the car and looked all over the radio for some good bluegrass music because I was so psyched up and there was nothing! So I started writing my own song to listen to.”
“I write a lot of songs in the car,” Kallick continues. I think it’s because it’s when I have free time—it’s quiet and I have time to think. That’s when my imagination can get loose and make up a song. I always think the song must have been there on the periphery of my consciousness, just waiting for a quiet moment.
“The other time I write songs a lot,” she says “is I either dream the song, or wake up with the song in my head. I think it’s the same thing—it’s the time when there’s enough quiet for the song to work its way out to my consciousness.”
“Quake Of ’89,” another cut from “Matters Of The Heart,” was also written during a drive. “That kind of popped out in a very explosive manner, just like the subject matter. It was from all my feelings and responses and what went on during that earthquake and the few days after. I really did get calls from all over, all these far-flung places the Good Ol’ Persons had played, wanting to know if we were OK—and then some people who are close to me never called. I was struck by that—and by all the general damage and pandemonium. I started gathering up by the door all the things that I wanted to take with me if I had to run out of the house in a hurry. I realized that there was absolutely no way I could get out my door—I couldn’t climb over the pile of stuff!”
She continues, “The point of that event for me was in thinking about what was important, what do I value in life, and it always comes back to relationships.”
When asked about the people who listen to her music, Kallick responds: “As I look out over the audiences generally, it’s grownups—people who want music to make them feel something, stir them up, challenge them, maybe make them think about something they haven’t thought about in a while. Sometimes you have to listen to them kind of deeply or more than once to get something out of them. I think that takes an experienced listener.”
On “Matters Of The Heart,” the song “See You In Seattle” has appealed to listeners from a wide range of backgrounds. It has been played in country, jazz, bluegrass, and folk radio formats, and was used nationally across Canada in a radio news program.
Kallick wrote the song while on tour with the Good Ol’ Persons. “Every year for many years we did a tour in the northwest in the fall, in October, just a beautiful time to be in the northwest. One of my oldest friends, from high school, lives in Seattle. That song was inspired by that person, conversations I’ve had with that person, and just by the general feeling of that area. I have a deep, strong feeling when I go to that Seattle-Puget Sound area.
“The song seems very intimate and personal to me,” she adds, “with specific references to events in my life and my friendship with this person. But it has a very universal appeal. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and say, ‘You know, that song could be about me, and my old friend, or my old lover. It strikes a chord in people,’” Kallick reflects, “and that’s thrilling to me. That’s my favorite thing in music, if you can make something that’s personal that’s also available to other people.”
PREPARATION FOR PERFORMANCE
“These days, I really do try to rehearse a bit before performing,” Kathy Kallick says. “It’s not like when we were performing three or four times a week, my guitar strings were constantly getting changed and I fell really loose. There were a lot of clubs to play in. Now it’s more bookings—a touring style of performing instead of playing locally on a regular basis. I’ll go from a week or a month of inactivity to playing every night. So as I’m getting ready for one of those tours now I’ll actually sit and play with a metronome, play guitar and run a variety of tempos, play and sing a variety of songs just to get everything warmed. Before I come to a group rehearsal I like to be somewhat well rehearsed on my own—get my guitar in shape, change the strings and play it a bunch, get my hands in shape.” And for vocal warm ups? “I’ve always loved to warm up by singing ‘Walkin’ The Dog.’ I’ll sing that in the car on the way to a performance of any style of music, just to warm up the pipes.”
GUITARS AND GEAR
Kathy Kallick played the same guitar from 1970 to 1992, a 1965 Martin D-28. “A beautiful guitar with Brazilian rosewood, and, I thought, the only guitar I would ever play—until I dropped it backstage between the first set and the second set, and it fell on a concrete floor and got broken pretty badly. We kind of butterfly stitched it together with duct tape and made it through that night. Then it had to go to the guitar hospital and be repaired for a few months.
“I bought a new [old] guitar. I thought I’d never do it! I got a really beautiful 1955 Martin D-18. It’s just a sweet guitar and I love it madly. So now I’ve got these two guitars…” Kallick uses GHS phosphor bronze strings, medium gauge. “I often beef up the D and G strings. Those are the ones I tend to break when I play hard. I use a Fender extra heavy tortoise shell teardrop-shaped pick, and I’m pretty picky about that. If I don’t have one of those picks and have to use another kind, I get grumpy.”
As for microphones, Kallick has used several she likes, including Shure SM57s and 58s and a Beyer vocal mic, but she’s decided against carrying mics with her. “I believe in the best of all possible worlds the sound person knows more than I do, knows the system, knows the room—it seems to me that taking my own mics around will only work as well as the system I’m going to plug it into.” She doesn’t use a pickup on her guitar. “I’ve never used one and I hope I never will. I know a lot of people who have pickups on their guitars and they can get a pretty good sound, but I really like the sound of an acoustic guitar. With a pickup it just doesn’t sound the same to me.”
RECORDINGS
KATHY KALLICK
“Matters Of The Heart” (1993) – Sugar Hill SH3820
“What Do You Dream About?,” a children’s album originally released on Kaleidoscope (and winner of a 1992 PARENTS’ CHOICE Gold Award), is scheduled for a fall, 1993 reissue on Sugar Hill.
Sugar Hill released the newest Kathy Kallick recording (SH 3833) in March 1995. It’s a collection of songs for children called “Use A Napkin (Not Your Mom),” which is the title song. It features many notable Bay Area musicians (Jody Stecher & Kale Brislin, Sandy Rothman, the current Good Ol’ Persons and others) playing a variety of originals and covers.
LAURIE LEWIS & KATHY KALLICK
“Together” – Rounder 0318, a reissue of the 1991 Kaleidoscope release.
GOOD OL’ PERSONS
Kallick’s Kaleidoscope recordings with the Good Ol’ Persons are now out of print, hut negotiations are underway for reissues, titles include “I Can’t Stand To Ramble” (1983), “Part Of A Story” (1980) and “Anywhere The Wind Blows” (1989).
The GOP are part of a number of compilations which are currently available, including those released by Strictly Country Records, Planet Bluegrass and Wolf Mountain Music.
KATHY KALLICK & THE LITTLE BIG BAND (with Keith Kittle, John Reischman and Todd Phillips) will have their recording debut on two Sugar Hill compilations, scheduled to be released this fall This group is performing nationally throughout the next year, and plans an album release in 1990.
