Laura Cantrell Courts the Country Goddesses

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The New York Sun

For an increasing number of contemporary musicians romancing the American country and Western idiom, self-expression goes hand in hand with an archival zeal. There is arguably no better local example of this than the Nashville-born, Queens-residing singer, songwriter, and lapsed radio DJ Laura Cantrell. Ms. Cantrell, whose new EP of cover renditions, “Trains and Boats and Planes,” draws from such varied musical sources as Canadian folkie Gordon Lightfoot, British post-punks New Order, and country legend Merle Haggard, is set to host a similarly eclectic and backward-glancing musical showcase entitled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Women” today at 10 p.m. at the South Street Seaport’s Spiegelworld.

For 13 years, until the growing demands of touring, recording, and motherhood forced her to take an indefinite hiatus, Ms. Cantrell was the self-described “proprietess” of WFMU’s Radio Thrift Shop, a far-reaching and lovingly partisan showcase for country music old, new, and in-between. In a recent guest editorial on the boogiewoogieflu Web log, an increasingly popular clearinghouse for challenging the narrowing orthodoxy of American music history, Ms. Cantrell revisited one of her top priorities on her sadly mothballed Saturday afternoon radio stint.

“Folks,” Ms. Cantrell wrote, “if you know me, you’ve heard this rant before. There is one fact that bothers me to death — the dearth of female artists in the Country Music Hall of Fame.”

On the phone from her Jackson Heights home base, Ms. Cantrell put her graceful tirade into a broader perspective.

“I think sometimes that we love the myths of music so much that we forget that there were a lot of people having the same ideas at the same time that don’t necessarily get credit for the ‘eureka’ moments of music history,” she said.

But the curatorial onus behind tonight’s revue is more celebratory than condemnatory. “My rants have usually been about how the Country Music Hall of Fame has so few women in it,” she said. “But if you just stay focused on that, it becomes kind of bitter and not that interesting after a while and a sour-grapes-sounding topic.”

On her three full-length albums and six EPs, Ms. Cantrell has covered and paid tribute to such lost-and-found country chanteuses as Molly O’Day and Merle Haggard’s sometime wife, muse, and bandmate, the late Bonnie Owens. Presumably, Ms. Cantrell is qualified to front an exonerating showcase of the forgotten belles of musical Americana on her own.

“I could’ve scripted the whole thing myself and done an entire show of my favorites,” Ms. Cantrell said. “But while the people that I’m obsessed about are interesting to me, I thought it might also be cool to open up the idea to some other women, so it wouldn’t be just my own little private obsession.”

The idea flowered when the singer was approached by the booking brain trust at Spiegelworld. An ornate replica of the traveling Spiegeltent venues that emerged in Belgium in the late 19th century, the seaport’s Spiegelworld is an intimate, 350-seat venue that evokes belle époque nostalgia and a dreamlike timelessness in its Art Deco, mirror-lined interior.

“It’s a unique venue,” Ms. Cantrell said, with some understatement. “They asked me if I had an idea that would work with the space and some kind of thematic idea seemed like it would be a good starting place. The Spiegeltent environment’s European turn-of-the-century cabaret origins, Ms. Cantrell reasoned, seemed a good fit “for a show that saluted women artists that may be obscure now but who made influential music.”

Ms. Cantrell’s co-performers for the event have each brought their own musical causes célèbres to the Art Deco table. Megan Hickey, the lap-steel-playing front woman of Brooklyn’s Last Town Chorus, was the first to join.

“She and I have had this conversation every so often about women country artists,” Ms. Cantrell said. “I put the idea to her and Megan’s suggestion was Buffy Sainte-Marie.” The Canadian-born originator of the seminal protest song “The Universal Soldier” was, Ms. Cantrell said, a perfect conceptual fit. “Right away I was glad that I’d opened the evening up and have people bring their own ideas,” she said.

“We also have a girl joining us named Theresa Anderson, who is Swedish but has been living in New Orleans,” Ms. Cantrell said. “Her own music is not a retro soul thing at all, but she is really into the whole New Orleans soul scene that stretches back into the ’50s and ’60s.” Ms. Anderson chose to spotlight the Crescent City singer Betty Harris. Though Ms. Harris worked and recorded with such R&B luminaries as Allen Toussaint, Solomon Burke, and Cissy Houston, “she never really got above the regional hit level and kind of missed the gravy train of national success,” Ms. Cantrell said.

The violinist and vocalist Jenny Scheinman, who counts Sean Lennon, Bill Frizell, and avant-punk guitarist and sometime Wilco member Nels Cline among her prior collaborators, will get a chance to honor her roots.

“Jenny comes from a more experimental jazz background,” Ms. Cantrell said, “but she grew up in the Pacific Northwest in a folk-music-loving family.” Her choice, the genre-bending critic’s favorite, Lucinda Williams, perhaps represents the middle ground between a family sing-along and a Knitting Factory gig. “If we’d made the cut off ‘no Grammy winners,’ Lucinda would be out of bounds,” Ms. Cantrell said. “But I thought it might be interesting to have someone contemporary in the mix.”

As for her own choices, those familiar with Ms. Cantrell’s recorded and live tributes to America’s overlooked musical midwives will recognize some of the names, though perhaps not all of the material.

“When I’ve talked onstage about Molly O’Day,” Ms. Cantrell said, citing the Kentucky-bred singer who turned her back on a secular music career in favor of church music, “I’ve tended to play the Hank Williams covers and the tunes of hers that have remained a part of the country-music repertoire. But there are recordings floating around out there of her doing gospel shows, and for this I’ve picked a couple tunes from that part of her musical life.”

Will this leave room for any of the ringleader’s own recent recorded material? “I don’t know,” Ms. Cantrell said with a laugh, before referencing the top-40 oldies version of her EP title. “We can maybe do ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’ as a tribute to Dionne Warwick!”


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