A local folk trio is hosting a house party-style event on June 16 at Newport’s Falcon Theatre, part of a series bringing together poets and songwriters. The series is the brainchild of members of Raison D’etre, three women folk artists who have been performing in the region for 31 years.
The event is dubbed “Girl Singer Night,” and features Kentucky poet Marianne Worthington and Oxford, Ohio-based singer songwriter Lisa Bailes. It runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at Falcon, located at 636 Monmouth St. in Newport.
The Poet and Song series has four events per year, and each features one poet and one songwriter. The series started in 2018, but took a hiatus during the Covid pandemic, returning in October 2021.
A history homework assignment
Raison D’etre includes Vickie Ellis and sisters Roberta Schultz and Violet Rae Webster. The sisters grew up singing together. Ellis and Webster met in college. They formed their group in 1990 and have been singing together ever since.
“Primarily we it started as a ‘homework’ assignment,” Schultz said. She said she was not sure whether it was Ellis or Webster who was working at the Cincinnati Museum Center at the time, but they were asked if they could learn and perform some period music for a flatboat-era exhibit.
The group had found their niche and began performing “historical” material around the region.
“We went down to Maysville’s Washington Visitors Center and did their Simon Kenton Festival,” Schultz said. “Some of our early gigs were basically those homework assignments where we had to look up how to do a certain period of music.”
Around the same time they began playing on a riverboat cruise where they were the front women for a cover band that played mostly contemporary country music.
“We did two years of that for BB Riverboats,” Schultz said. “It was on the Kon Tiki party barge, but we called it the Cow Tiki because it was a Hoedown Cruise.”
After the cruise, they continued to play historical music at various events and played at Leo Coffeehouse, a mainstay in the area folk scene. Schultz and Webster both play acoustic guitar and Ellis plays keyboards, so it wasn’t long before they were writing some of their own music. It helps that Schultz is also an accomplished poet.
About 10 years in, Schultz said they joined the Kentucky Arts Council’s Performing Arts Directory, as well as the Ohio Arts Presenters Network, which took them touring around the region. In 2009 they joined the Southeast Regional Folk Alliance (SRFA). The organization hosts a large annual get together for artists across the southeast, meeting in different states.
A place for traveling artists
It was through the SRFA events that Raison D’etre met other folk artists who traveled around the region. They wanted a way to invite some of the songwriters and musicians they’d met to our area.
“I’d been trying to do house concerts for several years to feature the traveling artists I met at SRFA,” Schultz said. “So I would host a concert in my basement for them, or at my sister’s community room at her condo. We would just book a concert on the spot, play with friends, have some food and have a house concert. So, we’d done that a few times, and we thought it was a good idea.”
It was fun, but Schultz said it was hard to get the artists the exposure they wanted. Then she came up with an idea. She knew the poetry community was very active, coming out to each others’ readings.
“Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky have a really supportive poetry community,” Schultz said. “I thought it would be a good idea to have an opening poet with a song writer, so we decided to do the Poet and Song series.”
The girl singer
The June event title is taken from The Girl Singer, a book by Worthington published by the University of Kentucky Press. Worthington teaches communication studies and media writing and is the co-founder of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists and musicians with ties to the Appalachian region.
Singer songwriter Biales is a member of the folk duo Prairie Orchard with Sarah Goslee Reed. She released her first album in 1991. Her latest album, “The Beat of My Heart,” combines jazz, blues and folk.
For more information on the Poet and Singer series and to register for the June 16 event, see the Raison D’etre website.
