Sara Grey & Kieron Means "Sing Out" - Winter 2008 Like Mother Like Son by Matt Watroba

After over 40 years of singing, collecting, teaching and spreading traditional music around the world, Sara Grey seems more enthusiastic about her chosen work than ever. "We don't work at it, we just do it. We just open up our mouths and do it." The smile in her voice reveals the love of continuing the singing tradition with her son Kieron, now 28 years old. "When a child grows up with a parent who sings and plays music, it's just part of their lives - it's bound to happen," Sara continued. "Kieron always knows where I'm going. He knows when I'm going to pause, and I know when he's going to pause even when it's out of context. We just feel it." I caught up with Sara Grey on one of her trips back to the States a trip she makes a couple of times a year these days - at the 2007 Old Songs Festival in New York. She and her son, Kieron Means, played the main stage as well as several workshops. To experience the vo cal blend and performance chem istry of this mother-son duo was an absolute delight. "There are very few mother-son combinations." Sara began. "In Britain there's a phenomena at the moment. The Sidmouth Festival (in Sidmouth, England) celebrated its 50th year three years ago and they paid tribute to the offspring of musicians and singers. There was Eliza Carthy with Martin and Norma, there was Kieron and myself, there was John Kirkpatrick and his son Benjy, Chris Coe and her daughter Lucy - it just goes on and on - all the offspring that grew up with this music. It's just thriving. I will never forget standing at Sidmouth Festival three years ago, and all the younger generation had their arms around each other - they adore each other - and they were all standing there with a beer in their hand in the marquee. I was standing next to Chris Coe and we looked at each other and we were in tears. We both knew that this is the next generation, there they are. It is healthy, it's strong, and we are so proud." Although born in New Hampshire, Sara moved to Scotland in 1970 and has considered it home ever since. Her love of singing, collecting and tracing the paths of traditional songs, however, started in the States. As a young girl in New England, she was surrounded by a cornucopia of musical styles - from French Canada down to the Carolinas. Even her father contributed to her eclectic influences. "He was probably the only Jewish old time fiddler in New Hampshire. My grandparents came from Russia and they settled in New Hampshire - first through Leeds in England, and then through Canada. My dad grew up in a predominately French Canadian community and there was a very small enclave of Jewish people who grew up there. I was very much influenced by his playing. He was also a very good storyteller. I've given a lot of my dad's stories to Kendall Morse over the years because he was very fond of them." In addition to her riveting voice, Sara Grey is also known for her unique banjo style - an instrument rarely heard in New England when she was growing up there. "My dad had been stationed in North Carolina before he went over as a medic in the war. He was stationed in Greensboro and he made a lot of friends there. When he came from the war he would visit these friends, and he took mom and me down. I remember I was very young – about 8 or 9 at the time - and I heard, what I'm sure was, a fretless banjo. It was a tobacco auction and there was this old sitting on a great big stack of tobacco leaves and he playing. I just remember being absolutely knocked out this. I just thought it was the greatest sound I ever heard. I drove my dad crazy and he got me a little Fairbanks banjo and away I went." Away she went, banjo in tow, to play at dances and -at parties that included some of the most important old ballad singers in the Northeast. In addition to diverse musical styles, Sara was surrounded by many of the source singers found in the Frank and Anne Warner's collection of traditional music. "I was very, very lucky to be surrounded by old singers a lot of people who Frank and Anne Warner collected from living all around. John Galusha to the North and Lena Bourne Fish in East Jaffrey, New Hampshire, to the South and lots and lots of great French Canadian Quebecois musicians around me. I had a little bit of everything. It was something I suppose I took for granted." She may have taken it for granted, but all of those influences seem to have taken root in Sara as she continues carry on the traditions with an emotionally intense presentation that always serves the song. Sara left New Hampshire at 18, bound for college. "I went away to Boston University and then Oberlin where I was a couple of years behind Joe Hickerson. I was there for just a year and a half and they basically didn't know what to do with me." She remembers with a laugh. "I was in conservatory. I majored in music as a singer, but because my traditional background they just didn't know where put me. They wanted to kind of pigeonhole me." Sara moved to Montana in the 1960s where she got her degree in Theatre Studies. It was there she met the founders of the famed Fox Hollow festival, Bob and Evelyn Beers. As a result, Sara sang in the first gathering at Fox Hollow where she met Sandy and Carline Paton and many others who would eventually form the loose circle of singers known as the Golden Ring. This led to Sara lending her voice to the early Golden Ring recordings on Folk Legacy and to her own release on that label in 1970. It is not uncommon to hear songs from that recording on folk radio today - especially the haunting duets with a young Ed Trickett. 1970 became a pivotal year in Sara's life and music career. She got her song collecting feet wet with Shelly Posen, gathering songs in the logging camps in Northern Ontario in the sixties. Because they were both singers, they were able to establish relationships in a way some folklorists could not - sometimes trading a song for a song. "I did a degree in folklore and got so disillusioned with the whole academic side of it. To me it seemed every way not to collect and not do all these things. I took myself over to the British Isles in 1970. The folk clubs were just rampaging at that time through Scotland and throughout England. I had come across to do some collecting for the Mariposa Foundation. I liked it so much that I took residency. I decided that's where I wanted to remain and I've been devoted to music on both sides of the Atlantic with a foot on both sides ever since," Sara recalls. Her impact as a performer in Europe has been widespread. There couldn't have been too many young women slinging the banjo and reflecting the changing tradition of songs travelling back and forth across the ocean - with the important exception of Peggy Seeger. "We were both starting to spread this music out. For the very first time people were hearing authentic traditional American material. I think what preceded that was the Skiffle movement. Nobody has ever clearly defined it here. It was almost, to me, like parodies of Lead Belly and people like that. They just kind of did them their own way and this movement just caught on fire over here. They were singing American songs. They heard Joan Baez and some of the things that made it big on Vanguard and Elektra records and things like that, and they thought this was the extent of American music." Sara has spent decades performing in the British Isles disproving the American music stereotype established in that era. She found this area of the world much more conducive to making a living from club to club, festival to festival singing traditional material. She recorded and performed in a successful duo with Ellie Ellis for about eight years, only to return to the solo shows with the emphasis on traditional songs. The duo became so popular in fact, people wondered if Sara could pull it off solo. But captivating an audience with an unaccompanied ballad or with her uniquely frailed banjo is what Sara Grey does, and continues to do, the best. Sara's unique relationship with both sides of the pond has led to an intense interest in what happens to a song when it travels. This has led to recordings, workshops and even a book on the subject. "That's been my passion for years and it's developed and rippled and spread out to interest other musicians and singers as well. I just recently finished a book with Tom Spiers - he's a wonderful fiddle player - Tom and I live near each other. He lives in Fife and 1 live in Perth in Scotland, and we collaborated on this book of migration of ballads across the Atlantic. Wide variations - some that have come back on themselves, some that have travelled and not changed, some where the text has changed and the tune hasn't and vice-versa." Sara gleefully tells various stories of hearing songs sung in an informal circle or in performance that demonstrate these variations. There are no sweeter words to a collector like Sara than, 'I know that song, but we sing it a little different.' "You have to be tuned into it," Sara muses. "You have to be constantly aware, and just have your ears and eyes open all the time because it happens a lot." Sara Grey continues to perform on both sides of the Atlantic. She sings in clubs, festivals and in a variety of educational settings where she conducts workshops on a variety of subjects including song migration, supernatural ballads, banjo style, logging songs from Canada and the United States, ballad interpretation, and many more. Her son lives in upstate New York, so coming back to the States is a great way to connect with family and with friends through, what can be, a pretty frantic touring schedule. "I don't think I'd have it any other way. I adore coming back here and singing. I usually come back a couple of times a year. Kieron and I have embarked on some pretty hefty tours. In the end, I just can't wait to get back to Scotland. It's my home and I just love it. 1 have a really deep love for both countries, but I am very comfortable living in Scotland." There is an intoxicating comfort in everything Sara Grey does these days. She still, in her own words, "lights up like a sign" whenever she sings or talks about the old songs - where they've been and how they got there and the pleasure of keeping the tradition alive with her son, Kieron Means, can be easily witnessed in .every note and every glance in their live performances.