SUSAN POWERS
Back to the Patch (Susan Powers, 2019)
Move over this surface
With some exactitude
Breathe the heavy metal
Find a deeper root
Oh take me back
To a stand of chestnut trees
I’ll remember your house number
It’s still calling me
Chorus:
Take me back to the patch
Same house same job
I’m going back to the patch
Where I know everyone
In the company town
Where I was born
In a worried bed
In a miner’s home
Mix flour and water
To make a formula
Give it to my daughters
Stoking from a coke oven
Chorus
Fragments and movements
From the lonely trees
Fog is getting thick
In those Hills where Jesus lives
Ah take me back for when the workers rest
Zuzy’s gonna get married
In a hand me down dress
Chorus
“Formula Twins”, ink jet print, Susan Powers, 2020
Sue Powers grew up outside of Pittsburgh in a family with deep roots in the musical landscape of Western Pennsylvania. She has been singing and playing banjo since high school. Both of her parents were sacred singers, and both her grandfather and her great grandfather were fiddle players who performed for local square dances in the Appalachian "old time" tradition. Powers is a founding member of the group Devlish Merry, where she pioneered the use of the five-string banjo in Celtic music. The group has released three recordings featuring her playing, singing and song writing. Powers has adapted her unique ‘claw hammer’ style to blues, rock and pop music, and is acknowledged as a songwriter whose personal imagery evokes the Pennsylvania landscape. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has written “...the primary element that makes Devilish Merry unusual is the prominent banjo by Ms. Powers... her polyrhythmic...clawhammer style [explores] inside the rhythm... an Afro-blues style applied to Celtic music...”. The Pittsburgh City Paper has written, “[her songs]... convey a sense of drama... her approach to the banjo - a bluesy variation on claw hammer plucking - makes her an original.”
Her music has been used in modern and traditional dance, performance, theater, and film, including the Smithsonian exhibit “Lewis and Clark: Clash of Empires”, Roger Sayers documentary about “outsider” folk-artist Howard Finster, and Jerry Starr's stage play “Burried: The of the Sago Mine Disaster.”
Powers has extended her educational outreach to “Beyond Appalachia” - a workshop and
residency/performance experience that highlights the influence of Appalachian music, from it’s roots in the British Isles and Africa to it’s branches in Country, Bluegrass, Blues, Jazz, and Rock music. She conducts lectures and demonstrations in schools and universities on the aesthetics of cross-cultural collaboration and creativity, and she was a featured presenter and performer at the last Festival of Woman's Composers conference at Indiana University Pennsylvania.