| Claire Lynch |
Claire Lynch possesses one of the most unforgettable voices in bluegrass.
And you don’t have to take the critics’ words for it. How are these for references?
Dolly Parton: "Claire … has one of the sweetest, purest and best lead voices in
the music business today."
Linda Ronstadt: "Claire Lynch is a rare talent indeed. She has a beautiful,
effervescent voice which can handle both contemporary and traditional musics
with complete authenticity."
Local music fans can make up their own minds. The bluegrass diva will perform
Thursday at 8 p.m. at Grounds for Thought, 174 S. Main St., Bowling Green, with
the Claire Lynch Band. She’s been working with the band since 2004, after she
emerged from a few years off the road. Backing Lynch’s vocals and guitar are:
Mark Schatz, bass, clawhammer banjo, percussive dance; Matthew Wingate, guitar,
mandolin and vocal; and Bryan McDowell, a 21-year-old phenom, on mandolin,
fiddle and vocals.
She grew up in Kingston, NY, before moving south to Alabama when her father who
worked for IBM in the space program was transferred. Her family loved music. She
and her two sisters sang three-part harmony in church.
"I took up guitar pretty early age 12," Lynch said in a recent telephone
interview. " and through high school I’d write songs for my girlfriends.
I’d sit in the garage with a tape recorder and write."
Her music then was inspired by the singer songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s.
She discovered bluegrass at 19. The McLain Family Band was playing a show in
Huntsville, Ala, and was playing on the street to scare up business.
Lynch was taken with the sound. "My jaw dropped.," she said. "This is
amazing energy."
So she went in. A local band, Hickory Wind, including a couple guys she knew from
high school was the opening act.
It wasn’t long after that when sitting around a campfire at a fiddlers convention
that she started to sing.
The guys were taken with her voice, and hire her as a lead singer. In 1974, she
married Larry Lynch one of her bandmates.
The band later changed its name to the Front Porch String Band.
Both as a singer and a songwriter she scored her share of accolades. She penned tunes
covered by the Seldom Scene, Patty Loveless and others.
But in 1999 with her marriage to Larry Lynch on the rocks, she decided to take a
hiatus from the road, raising her daughter and trying to save her marriage.
She ended up getting divorced. During that hiatus she also took a shot at running a
booking agency – "the hardest thing I ever did" and worked as a backup
singer for Parton.
She continued to write. "I became an independent songwriter. For a number of
years leading up to that time I worked as a staff writer for Universal
Publishing and Polygram Publishing. So I was doing the Nashville thing, a lot of
co-writing and when I stopped doing that I formed my own publishing company so I
was writing more for myself more artistically."
Lynch said songs she’s spurred to write by "something happening in your life
that causes an emotional stir. Once you’re a songwriter and you come up to that
emotional experience there’s usually words that can put together, and there’s
usually some sort of music that marries to those words."
The band doesn’t only play her tunes though. "There’s a songwriting community, a
lot of beautiful songwriters out there who don’t have a gig but they’re cranking
out beautiful stuff if it’s touching me, I want it touching my fans."
Her measure of a good song is simple: "There has to be some heartstrings
attached."
In 2003 she started playing locally, and then Rounder Records re-released some of her
older material. Lynch rounded up some old bandmates and headed back out on the
road.
"There’s something about being out on the road that’s freeing," she said.
"It’s sort of like you go into a time warp."
Not that touring is easy. Meals and sleep can be irregular. "It taxing on the
body," she said. But "just having the feedback with your fans"
makes it worth it.
