K.C. Compton
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June is on leave.
Music is one of the earliest memories I have, given that my mother had a lovely voice and singing was as automatic to her as breathing. I grew up singing harmonies over dishwashing duties with my two sisters, and every family outing became a Concert-in-the-Chrysler. I never gave it a second thought: What you do on long trips in the car or while working in the kitchen is work out harmonies. I thought that's what everyone did.
I sometimes imagine how it must have been for Daddy, who didn't consider himself a singer, to listen to all this chirping in his nest. I think he loved it.
I performed on the radio for the first time when I was in the second grade. I recall sitting around the radio at the appointed time with my family, ready to hear my debut. When the program aired, I was profoundly disappointed. "I sound like a little kid," I told my mother dejectedly. "You ARE a little kid," she replied. I didn't want to perform again in public for a very long time. The sound on the radio was nowhere near a match for the Me I heard in my head.
Throughout junior high and high school I sang in church as a soloist or with my sister Donna and my mom. I also sang in every possible configuration of singers at my high school – girls' chorus, mixed chorus, chamber ensemble, octet, quartet, duo. However, what I really wanted to do was sing in a band. My boyfriend was the cool lead guitarist for the cool local band, but he informed me that "No one wants to hear a chick sing." I took this as the absolute truth and satisfied myself to stand on the sidelines with my girlfriend Kristin, whose boyfriend was also in the band, and smoke and look attractively bored during all his gigs.
When I went to college, I discovered folk music and instantly learned every song Joan Baez ever recorded, followed soon by Judy Collins and Buffy St. Marie. About the time I was beginning to work up my nerve to perform in public, I realized that it was all over. Janis Joplin was the standard now and if you couldn't growl and drink a lot of whiskey, you might as well hang up your vocal chords. (As history tells us, she did all three, although she created a bright light before she crashed and burned.) All that previous training in how to produce a clear, beautiful tone and make yourself heard out in the cheap seats had absolutely nothing to do with the music people wanted to hear now. I went into hibernation.
When my son was a toddler, I began to sing again with a band called Sunburst & Company. We toured the Southwest for nine months, singing on college campuses and making some really wonderful music. But trying to travel with a child was lousy on him and lousy on me, so I came back to Oklahoma City and quit singing.
Throughout these years I was busy as a mother of my two amazing children, Austin and Ariel. In keeping with the times, I wanted the world to be better for my children and for all humanity. The difficulty of accomplishing political and social activism smack dab in the buckle of the Bible Belt is another story altogether. But I'm proud to say I didn't sit out the social activism of the day. (The only time I've ever been arrested was "going over the wall" to occupy the site of a proposed nuclear power facility, which subsequently didn't get built.)
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I was busy being a single mom and building my career as a reporter, editor and newspaper columnist. In the late 1990s, in what now feels like an ignition, I began to sing again. A friend in Santa Fe invited me to a "sing-around" and I felt like I'd fallen into Heaven. What an incredible treat, sitting around someone's living room with a dozen or so other singers, taking turns around the circle, singing any ol' song we wanted to, accompanied or un-accompanied, folk or traditional or blues or whatever we wanted it to be.
I had just started building a repertoire of songs when my career took me from New Mexico to Wyoming. I soon discovered that, in Wyoming, if it ain't bluegrass, it ain't sh*t. I discovered a true affinity for the high and lonesome and let myself get talked into entering the High Plains Old Time Country Music show in Douglas, Wyoming. When I told my mother-the-music-teacher that I'd won first place in this show, she said with some disgust, "All those years of lessons and she's yodeling …" To which I replied, "Yes, Mom, but it's a really pretty yodel …"
In 2001, I was hired as managing editor of Mother Earth News magazine and moved to eastern Kansas – a move I wouldn't have predicted for myself in a million years. For several years, I had been a member of Mudcat.org, an amazing online forum populated by musicians the world over. I wrote a thread called "Moving to the Kansas City area. Any Mudcatters?" and got a reply from GaryT, who not only lived in K.C., but jammed regularly with a group to which he invited me immediately. At that jam were these two wonderful musicians, Martha Haehl and Lynn Snyder, with whom I got better and better acquainted through several musical gatherings.
I don't even remember how we decided to form a group, only that we enjoyed singing with each other so much, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. June Holte was a part of the original mix and we called ourselves Carry On. Eventually we moved on to become Checkered Past and invited another one of our jam buddies whose music we admired, Kerry Stanley, to join us. And now Bill, too.
What I love about what we do is that we're all serious about our music and committed equally both to fun and growth. We work really hard to expand our horizons, to get our songs just right, and to work out any barriers along the way. Being in a band is one of the most intimate relationships one can have. We spend hours and hours together, and sometimes when you've just written a song or are working out a harmony that sucks so far, or are just flat-out too tired to think, emotions can feel pretty raw and exposed. I love that we give each other room to be human, yet hold ourselves to a high standard.
I also love that we're committed to using our music to make a difference. Having lived through turbulent times, we're all deeply aware of the profound value music provides in galvanizing opinion, jumpstarting consciousness that's been numbed by too much bad news, providing energy for the disempowered and focus for those suffering outrage exhaustion, and also just making it easier to be human. Each of us is mature in ways that matter now and I feel incredibly honored that we get to share our wisdom and wit through the incredibly rewarding avenue of our voices and instruments.
I think my band mates would agree that it isn't just a hobby for us, it's a calling. What's ahead sometimes seems daunting – we know we need to get a CD recorded and also to write some new songs and then get our World Domination Tour under way. The joy is, we get to! With each other! Wowie Zowie!