NEWS YOU CAN USE

Spring 2024

Back On The Road!

The daffodils here in Georgia came up weeks ago and the cherry tree in my backyard is bursting with delicate pink and white blossoms. Yes, Spring 2024 is upon us and I am about to take to the road again. After a few wonderful February warm-up shows in Berkeley, CA, San Diego, CA and Albuquerque, NM I am once again channeling my inner long-haul trucker and heading out on our nation’s highways. The mid-west is seeing the most of me and I’m even getting as far north as International Falls which I love to call Almost Canada, Minnesota. Even the eastern seaboard is in play with shows in Florida and slightly upstate New York. I am once again doing a series of shows with my comrade-in-peaceful-arms Joe Jencks and the Spring touring will culminate in June with my first ever main stage appearance at the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival.

Details about these shows are available on my Concerts page. I do hope you can join me if I’m within driving distance of your town.

The Berkeley, CA show I mentioned was done with the multi-talented Julie Wolf and below is a video from one of the songs. The evening was memorable in a number of ways. First of all, the sound system in the club was not working so Julie and I did the entire two-set show acoustically. Julie played piano, accordion, and GUITAR that night and as you can hear in the video was a lot more prominent vocally than she usually is onstage. And, discovering we are both Joan Armatrading fans, we decided to try our hands at her classic tune The Weakness In Me. Not perfect but definitely heartfelt. All things considered it was a fun night. Two additional videos from that show are posted on my Deidre McCalla YouTube Channel. Big thanks to videographer Irene Young for capturing the evening for us!

2023 National Women’s Music Festival Jane Schliessman Award

In July the 2023 National Women's Music Festival presented me with the Jane Schliessman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Women’s Music. I was very moved to receive this honor and the statuette sits proudly on my living room mantle. This is the write up in the program book:

In 1975 Deidre McCalla walked off the graduation dais at Vassar College directly onto the mainstage of the 2nd National Women’s Music Festival in Champaign-Urbana, IL. Since that time Deidre has maintained a consistent presence in what came to be known as Women’s Music charming audiences from Maui to Maine with her engaging stage persona and songwriting chops that reveal an unyieldingly honest perspective expressed with a lyric touch that relentlessly celebrates the power and diversity of the human spirit. Deidre McCalla worked with the ground-breaking lesbian owned recording company Olivia Records for 11 years. Her first Olivia album "Don’t Doubt" It is included in the LGBT Collection at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History and listed by Ms Magazine as one of 25 Classic Women’s Music Albums. "With A Little Luck,” her second Olivia album, earned a San Francisco Cable Car Award. Her current album, "Endless Grace", has been embraced by the greater folk community as one of the 10 Best Folk Albums of 2022.

Thank you, Women In The Arts, for this marvelous recognition.

JOIN DEIDRE’S EMAIL LIST!