THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409160746
SECTION: HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 209 lines
Tangent: making contact at a single point or along a line; touching but not intersecting.
DREDA McCREARY has superglued part of a pingpong ball onto the nail of her index finger. Maybe, she thinks, it will solve her lifelong problem of nails that are too soft for the instruments she plays.
She sits down, picks up the clawhammer banjo and plucks at a string experimentally.
Boiiinnngg.
Then she strums a few bars.
``Hey,'' she says to the other two women in the room, ``it works.''
And so does Tangent, the 2-month-old folk music band McCreary, Connie Smith and Marsha Gilmore formed.
These three women are in their late 30s, with children, husbands and outside jobs that have nothing to do with music. Yet they are carving time from their packed schedules to play music; following the melodies and harmonies of their songs into the magic the sound creates; and doing it not for their children, not for their husbands, not even for their families' savings accounts, but for themselves.
Their timing couldn't be better. For the first time since the '60s, folk music is experiencing a mainstream revival - especially female folk lyricists. Singers like The Roches, Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman are recasting folk music with a pop bent while retaining its traditional storytelling genre.
``There's a folk music revival,'' agrees McCreary, ``but don't call it folk. It doesn't work to use the `F' word. Call it `alternative music' and it works.''
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McCreary and Smith have played together before, as have Smith and Gilmore. Gilmore once sang backup on an album McCreary and her husband cut as the band Everkleer. And all three are well-known in Hampton Roads' folk music community for their voices, their aptitude with instruments and their creativity.
But with children, husbands, jobs and life in general interfering, it had been five years since they'd seen each other, longer still since they'd played professionally.
Then, late last spring, Smith asked McCreary to sing with her at an immunization fair at the Chesapeake Health Department, where she works.
And the music and their personalities clicked.
``I wish Marsha were here,'' said McCreary, who knew that Gilmore's husband had been transferred to Guam.
``She's back,'' Smith said, smiling.
The three got together for a party Memorial Day weekend, ``and the next thing I knew,'' McCreary said, ``we had business cards.''
``We start singing together and we blend together so well,'' said Gilmore, snapping her fingers. ``It just happens for us. It's just meant to be.''
So far, they've only had a handful of gigs - the Virginia Beach Folk Music Festival in August, Sea Horse Days at the Virginia Marine Science Museum this month, an anti-drug rally at Indian River High School, and they're booked Oct. 1 for the Neptune Festival.
But the bookings don't matter. What matters is the playing.
``It's a creative outlet all three of us need,'' McCreary says. ``If we don't have it, we're not a full person.''
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Oh the married men, Oh the married men
I never would have had a good time again if it wasn't for the married men.
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Smith, Gilmore and McCreary sing the words with gusto, their faces breaking into grins with each hard chorus of this song of infidelity.
This is their weekly practice session, held this Sunday afternoon in the den of Gilmore's Virginia Beach ranch house. She's kicked her two teenage daughters out for the afternoon and her husband is at sea, so the three have the house to themselves and their music.
They usually practice at McCreary's, where her husband, Track, cares for the three McCreary kids (ages 4, 6, and 8) and the two Smith kids (ages 5 and 10). Without Track, say the three women, there wouldn't be a Tangent.
It was Track who first introduced Dreda to folk music when they met 16 years ago. Throughout their marriage, including Everkleer, he's always sung lead and she's always sung harmony. When Tangent began, she asked Track how he felt about her performing professionally again.
Go for it, he told her. He was burned out on performing; it was her turn.
With Tangent, McCreary's branching out and singing lead occasionally - no small feat, she says, given the crystal clarity of Smith and Gilmore's strong voices.
``But they're pushing me.''
In her ``real'' life, McCreary is a biologist for the Virginia Beach mosquito control commission. Local folk music guru Bob Zentz calls her ``the singing mosquito catcher.''
She spends her days driving around the city, counting the insects her traps have snared, baring
her own arm to their bites.
Why biology?
``It's easier to make a living,'' laughs McCreary, a stocky woman with thick, wavy hair who wears long, flowing dresses when she performs.
But she takes the performing side of her life into her job; when she visits third-grade classrooms to explain the importance of mosquito control, for instance. Or when she sings lustfully while driving down the city's back roads.
``I like this work. I can be outside all day; I work with people, which I love. It's a perfect job for me because I do a little bit of everything.''
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On a Wednesday night in late August, the three women are unpacking their instruments in the nearly-empty center room of the White Horse Pub in Pembroke Mall.
They're here not to perform, not even to negotiate a gig. Just to play.
They, along with 15 other folk music aficionados, gather here every week for an old-fashioned jam session. No sheets of music, no organization. Someone starts picking on the guitar, another catches the melody with her banjo, still another pipes it along with his flute. And, like magic, the music flows.
It's as if the musicians speak a secret language; one the Tangent members speak best. At one point in the free-for-all jamming, the others stop playing and just listen to the harmony McCreary, Gilmore and Smith create.
Gilmore is overdressed for the occasion, wearing a forest-green suit that sets off her curly red hair. She's come straight from her job as a sales clerk at This End Up Furniture Co., an unusual choice of employment for a musician, she admits.
But it's part time, and it allows her the flexibility she needs for her music. In fact, she just turned down a better paying management job because it would conflict too much with her playing.
Eventually, she hopes to turn her volunteer work as a musician in the Virginia Beach school system into a paying job. But until then, she'll keep pushing the indestructible pine furniture and brightly colored accessories the retail store stocks.
Gilmore received her first guitar at 16, while living with her grandparents. Her grandfather played the banjo every night and instilled in her a love of traditional music that's never left.
In college, she majored in voice, until an encounter with a ``voice nazi'' teacher who insisted she give up the folk songs she loved. Disillusioned, Gilmore dropped out and has spent much of her life since then raising her daughters and playing music, mostly in pickup bands or with friends.
``She's been able to combine motherhood and music in a real nice way,'' says Zentz, one of her admirers and an early mentor.
``It's more than a hobby,'' Gilmore says. ``We have no choice; we have to do it.''
And it's fun - a word all three women use when talking about the music. ``I feel like I shouldn't be allowed to have that much fun and get paid for it once in a while,'' Gilmore says.
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By 9 p.m., as the early movie across the way lets out, the White Horse begins filling up. Cigarette smoke drifts lazily over to the musicians, who have pushed back the tables to create an impromptu studio.
Smith, who calls herself the group's ``introvert,'' sits on the outside of the music circle, there, but not there. She plays with an intense, serious expression on her face, as if she's forgotten that this is supposed to be fun.
``I'm just trying to remember the music and the words,'' she says later, explaining why she looks so solemn while playing. ``Later, when I can remember it well enough to plan dinner while I'm playing, then I'll be relaxed.''
Music has been a part of Smith's life since she can remember. One of her earliest memories is of waking up early, climbing out of her crib and sitting in a chair, banging her head against the wall to some inner rhythm only she could hear.
Her father played classical music in the house, and she learned to play piano and guitar by ear, a method she still uses. ``I have to hear it, then I can play it,'' she says.
She always planned that after college - during which she majored in nutrition - she would save her money, quit work and just play. And for five years, that's what she did: playing guitar, working at Zentz's Ramblin Conrad's Guitar Shop, meeting her husband through the music.
Eventually, she says, ``I had to grow up.'' She got a job with the Chesapeake Health Department, where she still works as a nutrition supervisor. She got married. Although her husband is also a musician, her own music went into hibernation.
``It became. . . how to work it all; how to do it all. It felt like I had all these things to do and the music wasn't fitting.''
And then when her kids were born, it became even more difficult. Every time she took her guitar out of its case, her youngest son, Russell, started fussing and banging on the instrument. He saw it as competition for her attention.
But she never stopped playing. She spent those years practicing at her kitchen table in Chesapeake, getting better.
And now that Russell is 5, starting kindgertarten and playing outside with his friends, it's time to invite the music back in.
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Julius Caesar, Gilmore's ancient dog, wanders into the den where the women are practicing and flops down at their feet.
They ignore him, concentrating on the music.
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``If I was a blackbird, I'd whistle and sing
And follow the vessel my true love sails in
And in the top rigging I'd there build my nest
And flutter my wings o'er his lily-white breast
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It's a traditional Celtic sailing song Gilmore sings in her tinkling voice, but it's one that has personal meaning to her, given her sailor husband.
That's the beauty of folk music, she says. It tells a story, has a message, speaks to people.
``And besides,'' she says with a laugh, ``at our age, it's the most acceptable type of music to play.''
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My parents, they chide me, they will not agree
Saying me and my false love married should ne'er be
Oh let them despise me, let them do what they will
If there's a breath in my body he's the one I'll love still. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/Staff
Folk singers Marsha Gilmore, from left, Dreda McCreary and Connie
Smith formed the group Tangent two months ago. ``There's a real folk
music revival,'' McCreary says.
D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/Staff
Marsha Gilmore and her band mates play at the White Horse Pub in
Pembroke Mall. Dave McNew, left, of Virginia Beach plays an
instrument called a Bodhran.
by CNB