Muddy Bottom Blues
Program #246 (June 4 at 8:00 p.m. and June 5 at 3:00 p.m.)
Grace Pettis epitomizes the term singer/songwriter. As a singer, her voice is both powerful and beautiful, and she uses it like a fine arts painter to color and craft her songs.
From an early age, Grace was encouraged to speak her mind and to express herself musically. Words and music were the family heirlooms she inherited from her parents, a traveling songwriter (Pierce Pettis) and poetry scholar (Dr. Margaret Mills Harper), who were divorced by the time she was a small child. As a result of that separation, she was raised in two very different parts of the "Deep South": the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, and the backwoods of Mentone, Alabama.
Grace's musical influences run the gamut of Southern sounds: from mountain music and gospel to country and folk to R&B and hip hop. Pierce was on the road a lot, and the albums he left for her to listen to while he was touring the country and sending paychecks home were both a way to be closer to him and a driving influence in her writing from an early age. She was writing songs as soon as she could talk and enlisting help from her mom to get them down on paper by the time she was five.
An award-winning singer-songwriter from Austin via Alabama, Grace, who has been characterized as “a little bit folk, a little bit country/Americana, and a whole lot of soul.”
Grace is the winner of many of the nation’s most prestigious songwriting contests, including NPR’s Mountain Stage New Song Contest, and has received grants from the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation.
Her highly acclaimed independently released records, Grace Pettis (2009) and Two Birds (2012) (both produced by Billy Crockett and recorded at Blue Rock Studio) and the acoustic EP, Blue Star in a Red Sky (2018) (written and recorded with her longtime guitar player Calloway Ritch), have garnered praise from top-notch magazines, newspapers, and radio.
She also holds down duties as a member (along with Rebecca Loebe and BettySoo) of the Americana/folk-pop trio Nobody’s Girl.
(provided by Grace Pettis)
