Allison Adams

Lena’s Place

Backing up Beth DeSombre (first set) and Cyndi Craven (second set)

Saturday, October 9, 8:00 p.m
Central Congregational Church, 2676 Clairmont Road, between LaVista and Briarcliff Roads
More information and directions at lenasplacecoffeehouse.com/

Five out of the past six years, I have spent one week every August in New Hampshire at the Summer Acoustic Music Week, a workshop for acoustic musicians of all stripes. It’s a great learning experience, and I have become a better songwriter, mandolinist, guitarist, singer, and performer because of the powerful instruction offered. Even more important to me, however, are the deep friendships with other musicians that have grown out of this experience.

This coming weekend my SAMW friend Beth DeSombre is coming all the way to Atlanta from Massachusetts to play Lena’s Place. Beth is an incredibly gifted songwriter and performer, and she has been an inspiration to me for years. A professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College, Beth built herself a stellar academic career, wrote a bunch of books, won a bunch of awards, made full professor, and then decided to make herself into a performing songwriter, too.

A lifelong lover of folk music, Beth started playing more, writing more. She attended SAMW and got inspired. She received some important encouragement — the most important of which was probably from Pete and Maura Kennedy, who teach at SAMW. Pete and Maura heard the splendid, original voice in Beth’s songs and helped her start her career.

Beth and me with our big hairy friend (another amazing singer-songwriter) Kevin Desabrais in a delirium after a song swap at SAMW

With help from Pete and Maura and some other friends, Beth came out with a CD in 2007 — she was recording hers at the same time I was recording mine. We provided each other encouragement and advice as each of us was in different stages of the process (Beth to Allison: “Enter the South Florida Folk Festival Singer-Songwriter Competition!” Allison to Beth: “Don’t forget a Sharpie for signing CDs!” — okay, so maybe her advice was a little better than mine).

We loosed our songs upon the world within a few months of each other. Beth got some excellent radio airplay and good, positive attention from the critical world. I got a little radio play, too, and I did enter that contest, got selected as a finalist, and traveled to South Florida in early 2008 to play the festival. Beth and her husband, Sammy, graciously found me lodging with Sammy’s family, who have a home nearby. Now, we are both working on our second CDs, once again sharing stories and advice.

Playing with Cyndi

Come hear Beth this Saturday night. She is an amazing writer — poignant, complex, poetic, vivid, luminous. I’m proud to know her, and I’ll be proud to back her up on her set.

And I also get to back up my friend and musical soulmate, Cyndi Craven, who is sharing the bill with Beth that same evening. I have been a fan of Cyndi’s longer than I have been her friend, and my admiration of her gifts as a writer, a performer, and an interpreter of songs only deepen with the years. What a privilege it is to play her songs with her.

Songwriter, singer, guitarist, mandolinist, and concertinist Allison Adams has been making music on Atlanta’s acoustic scene for a decade. Her debut solo release, Redbud Winter, won her a slot as a finalist in the South Florida Folk Festival Singer-Songwriter Competition in January 2008. One of the songs from that recording, “Famous Blue Apron,” also gained her a spot as a featured artist on the Halifax, Nova Scotia-based WOT90 internet radio station featuring the voices of women. She was also selected as a “Fresh Pic” on WOT90 webpage. “Famous Blue Apron” spent nine weeks in the top 15 on the WOT90 charts, including two weeks at number 1.

Raised in Rabun County, in the farthest corner of the Northeast Georgia mountains, Allison writes songs that draw on a reservoir of experiences from her upbringing—comfort offered by a tiny A.M. gospel radio station, the fragile economy of a rural community, the traditional art and science of canning food.

These days Allison is hard at work recording her second CD, The Strawberry Girls, and contributing to the group The Beans with longtime Atlanta acoustic music scene favorites Cyndi Craven, Tom Wolf, and Billy Gewin.

Harmony singing brings Allison great joy, and she loves finding a place for her voice in duets and ensembles. In past years she has sung and played concertina around the Atlanta area and the North Georgia mountains in the folk duo Bittersweet and the original roots-rock band Letters to Mary. With Paige Parvin and the late Paul Jean, Allison was for six years one-third of Local Honey, a trio that featured female duet harmony on jazz standards, pop covers, and Allison’s originals. For five years she sang alto and played guitar, concertina, and mandolin with the vocal quartet Old Enough to Know Better. Allison has also provided instrumental and vocal support on stage for a number of artists, including Caroline Herring, Kate Campbell, Ashley Filip, Bruce Gilbert, and others.

The Avondale Art-B-Que

Saturday, June 12

Franklin Street, Avondale Estates, Georgia

1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Because they asked so nicely, and because they promised to pay us in art, we said Yes! when the Art-B-Que folks asked us to take a three hour slot on Saturday afternoon of this year’s event. You’ll get Beaned, with Cyndi, Tom, Billy, et moi, but you’ll also get a good forkful of a few of our favorite honorary Beans—including Ashley Filip, Bruce Liebowitz, Heidi Pollyea, and Paul Pendrey.

Check out the Art-B-Que website for more details, but trust me on this: the event itself will be a blast—lots of great work by the artists whose studios populate that area, yummy ‘que, us’ns for music, and this year . . . a CAR SHOW! Yeehaw!