Biography

The Last Trip Home: Wendy Grossman wasn’t born to the music she does, but she’s certainly steeped in it for the last half century. On this CD she delivers a mixed-up baker’s dozen: five pedigreed British ballads, six more contemporary ones from here and there, and a couple of instrumentals to balance everything. Her strong voice and fine chops are true to the material, new or old. Over-tracking on a few of the songs, she’s completely at home on guitar, baritone guitar, banjo, autoharp and concertina.

Wendy Grossman is about as steeped in musical and ballad traditions from all over as anyone is or could be. During her college years, she fell in with the Cornell University Folk Song Club crowd, who were justly famous for being a very serious bunch of Ballad and Old Time Music scholars, and for supporting one of the liveliest ongoing music scenes, anywhere, ever. She is well grounded in the breadth of all that.

She is a multi-instrumentalist on guitar, autoharp and squeezebox, going pro from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. She issued one LP-record, Roseville Fair, in 1980. She gave up touring (but not playing!)

She rarely writes songs. She doesn’t need to. The likes of Bill Steele, Archie Fisher, Bill Staines, Stan Rogers and a host of other writer-singers have done that for her. What she does do is unique, very clear arrangements of their best ones. She knows how to handle the old Love Songs too, and betimes, makes up ‘just music’ of her own. All of that is represented here.