After spending lots of winters going to Dallas where I lived with my best friend Chris Williams, one year my car veered off the highway and I found myself driving along the gulf and seeing the beautiful towns of Pass Christian and Biloxi for the first time. The year was 1995, folks were gentle and the weather was superb. Hurricane Camille in 1969 had leveled this area and the scars still remained, but further down the road, an environmental nightmare: Casino Cruiseships. Work was scarce unless you wanted to deal cards, but when I met "Crazy Mary", we just hit it off and before I knew it, I was locked in for the winter.

Mary Johnson was a professional caterer and while working a job together at an old mansion at the beach, a photographer handed me a biz card and asked if I had modeled and how about lunch to check out his work. Ok. During that lunch, we made a deal to trade photos for some CD covers I needed, and so it went.
Billy Dugger owned "Shades of Gray" photography studio in Biloxi and also donated time to the local theater there.

We eventually spent a couple of hours scouring old buildings downtown Gulfport, and secured permission to shoot at the JC Pennys store. The vacant second story had lots of possibilities for black and white photography with it's 6000+ sq. ft. wood floors, rounded brick arches leading to more empty storage lofts. A wooden freight elevator bore ghostly hand prints from years of use. It was perfect.

Billy had brought his Hasselblad, I played music as he set up. This is one of the photos. In between working jobs, Billy called and said the photos turned out great, "OH and by the way.... friends at Center Stage in Biloxi were in a pinch for a performer, due to a cancellation and would I be interested in playing..."

Playing live isn't real high on my list, in fact, I'm a bit of recluse when it comes to audience type playing, but he convinced me it would be ok. He rushed some of the photos he'd taken, down to the local paper...and on it went. This would be my first performance in 5 years and later, the photos would become the cover and back of Deo Volente.
The response of that packed house performance at The Biloxi Theatre was overwhelming, and I returned to Michigan with a re-newed energy, a little more nerve and began creating Deo Volente with Glenn Wolff of Traverse City.

More Travel History

Fast forward to '06, deep in the swamps of northern Florida while jamming it up a huge band of soulful musicians, I was ready for a collaboration project. I had met my husband Jeff in Key Largo FL in 1998, and we bought a summer farm house to restore near Marquette, Michigan. We started scanning the area for songsmithers and came up with "Stonehouse Music Cooperative", a CD with only upper peninsula musicians featured, and what a fun project that was. I followed that up with playing a few gigs, one of my favorite was a songwriter's circle joined with Jonathan Edwards and friend, Pat Niemisto at the Hiawatha Music Festival.

2010: Just wrote a song for Calumet's dog mushing race the "Copper Dog 150" titled, " Midnight on the Rails" with a bluegrass romp about mushing.
Standing at the sidelines during races, listening to the dogs rush by reminded me of a train....

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