Laurie lewis biography

Singer, songwriter, fiddler

The San Francisco Bay Area bluegrass veteran Laurie Lewis is often described as a triple threat: she is a powerful vocalist in the high-lonesome mold, a song-writer who has bridged the gap between contemporary ideas and traditional song styles, and a championship-level fiddler. Forging a solo career with a series of album releases under her own name beginning in the mid-1980s, Lewis has also been noted for her ongoing collaborations with other musicians. She has been especially influential among women in bluegrass, an underrepresented group on bluegrass stages before she came along.

Lewis was born on September 28, 1950, in Long Beach, California. As a youngster she moved around several times while her father finished medical training—to Dallas, where her father played piccolo in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and to Ann Arbor, Michigan—but the family settled in Berkeley, California, when she was eight. Lewis took classical violin lesso

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Laurie Lewis

American musician (born 1950)

For other uses, see Laurie Lewis (disambiguation).

Musical artist

Laurie Alexis Lewis^[1] (born September 28, 1950) is an American bluegrass singer, musician, and songwriter.

History

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Laurie Lewis was born in Long Beach, California on September 28, 1950. Her family moved regularly from place to place until she was eight years old, when they settled back in Berkeley.^[2] Her family strongly encouraged Laurie and all her siblings to play music. She started on piano and violin until a friend took her to the Berkeley Folk Festival where she first caught the folk bug:

Oh, it was so exciting. Every night there were concerts, and during the day you'd be in a eucalyptus grove listening to someone making music with nothing between you and them. Every day I'd hear something new, Doc Watson or the Greenbriar Boys. Something about it just invited me to start playing it.^[3]

She began picking simple song

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Laurie Lewis (born September 28, 1950 in Long Beach, California), is an American singer and bluegrass musician.

In the early 1970s she played with The Phantoms of the Opry, a bluegrass band from the San Francisco Bay Area. When the Phantoms broke up she co-founded the Good Ol' Persons, an all-female bluegrass band with Kathy Kallick. In 1979 she founded the Grant Street String Band, also including Beth Weil, Tom Bekeny, Greg Townsend, and Steve Krouse. In the late 1980s, she formed "Laurie Lewis and Grant Street". Since then, she has recorded solo and duo albums, usually accompanied by mandolin artist and singer, Tom Rozum. Nowadays, she often plays under different names with a fairly regular roster of musicians, calling themselves "Laurie Lewis and her Bluegrass Pals," "the Guest House Band"; in 2006, she renamed her group Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands.

She has won a Grammy ("True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe," 1997), and