Eliza Gilkyson & Mary Gauthier Concert March 25, 2007

Patience is a virtue, an old saw that my mother loved to quote. I've been around for 57 years but I still don't really believe it. We've been trying to get Eliza here at Heartland for years, but the schedule never quite worked out. Then, suddenly not only is she available, but Mary Gauthier is coming along with her. Two of the most exciting performers in the folk world

Maybe Mom was right after all.

Reading their biographies, you have to wonder how two such different women ended up on stage together. A third generation musician, Eliza Gilkyson's father, Terry, wrote such folk standards as Greenfields, Marianne, and Memories Are Made of This. From the early demos with her father she went on to tour Europe, be inducted into the Austin Music Hall of fame and score a Grammy nomination for Land of Milk and Honey in 2004. Granted in the sixties she "took a lot of acid and lived in a boxcar, thinking, yeah, someone's gonna come along and discover me here." but these days her son is part of her band and she's a grandmother of two.

On the other hand, Mary Gauthier didn't write her first song until she turned 35. She was too busy battling booze, drugs and depression. She turned 18 in jail, drifted through a series lousy jobs until she made it through the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and opened a successful Cajun restaurant in Boston's Back Bay.

But even a successful business didn't exorcise the demons, the addiction still had her in their grip. Then a little miracle happened: Without warning, Mary found herself, for the first time, writing songs. "It was like, bam, two neurons touched, fused, connected, and the next thing you know I'm obsessed with getting words down in a song to make sense of all this, to try and understand my own life." Like her life, Mary's music can be rough, but it has an undeniable power.

$20 adv. $25 at the door all ages event

Official Website: http://www.heartlandconcerts.org