Singer
- Songwriter - Musician
Mary McGuire Is A Blood Sister
Singer
- Songwriter - Musician
Mary McGuire Is A Blood Sister
Michigan
singer-songwriter and musician Mary McGuire may be one of the most
underappreciated, yet most gifted artists in America today. Now living on
Mackinac Island in northern Michigan and raised in suburbs of Detroit, such as
Ferndale, Oak Park, Royal Oak and Berkley, Mary McGuire writes songs that reach
deep into the soul of both the individual and of society to express what many of
us feel, but are seldom eloquent enough to express. McGuire, who has toured
/opened for / shared the stage with a stunning and eclectic group of artists
including, BB King, Rickie Lee Jones, Patty Griffin, Anni DiFranco, Neville
Brothers, Lou Reed, Susan Tedeschi, Dave Matthews Band, Taj Mahal and Pat
Benetar, can easily hold her own as a solo artist, but she also is one of the
founding members of two incredible Michigan based bands, Blood Sisters and
Calamity Jane. Mary McGuire’s vocals are very good and her skills as a guitarist
are excellent.
McGuire explains how the
band Blood Sisters came to be, “Michelle Chenard was in a band called Leaving
Dodge and we met at Mackinac Island a number of years ago. She was playing at
one bar and I was playing at another one across the street. We became big fans
of one another. She is such a powerful vocalist, guitarist and songwriter and we
always wanted to work together, but we never really had the right moment. We
organized a remake of The Last Waltz and the next year I did Festival Express.
That was the year that Barbara, Michelle and I were all together, because I was
playing Traffic Tunes, Barbara did Janis Joplin and Michelle did “I’d Love To
Change The World,” by Ten Years After. We got to know one another, we had so
much fun together and we had so much in common. It was just like hey do you guys
want to come up and play with me for a weekend? We saw what beautiful influences
we had. We hung out for a few days, we got to know each other and we decided
that we had to become a band. Michelle is a powerhouse on her own.
She lived in Florida for a while, she lived up here in the UP (Upper
Peninsula of Michigan), she was in Leaving Doge for a long time and she was
out doing her own thing. She was also performing with another musician called
Pete Kehoe and songwriting with him. She received an Emmy Award for some film
work that they did. In any event, she is a powerhouse and she is great.”
The Blood Sisters “Come
Out,” featuring the powerful vocals of Barbara Payton and some spectacular
guitar playing by Chenard and McGuire is a sensational song.
Mary McGuire talks about
another one of her songs, the poignant “I Believe.” “I got married in 2002 and
my husband was going through a really rough time in his life. I wrote that song
to him and it is incredibly sad. I don’t know how to really talk about it. When
you get married you really believe in the whole situation and you work really
hard for it. Then there comes a day when you turn around and you go, I did
believe in that, but I don’t believe in that anymore.
I think it is a universal thing for a lot of different relationships,
whether you are married, dating or divorced or together or apart. You can even
apply it to your livelihood, your job, your career. You go I don’t believe in
that anymore and you have to find out what you do believe in.
I think that song is about the moment when you realize that you don’t
believe in what you thought you did.”
Calamity Jane’s song “Welfare State,” opens with acoustic guitar riffs by Mary
McGuire that get your foot tapping, your head nodding and your body swaying to
the music. Erik
Gustafson serves up a fabulous electric guitar solo and Gary Rasmussen is strong
on bass, while Donny Sorenson wields the drumsticks. The blue collar song makes
your ears perk up and pose the question, why the heck don’t more people across
the country know about this band? Calamity Jane is a band that you should be
listening to on radio stations across America.
McGuire talks about the song and the formation of
Calamity Jane, “I (began) living on Mackinaw in the summer in the early nineties
and the Governor of the State cut the funding to the arts. One day I was very
angry about it and I remember hearing about it in the car. I played a gig in the
afternoon. I think it was at the Rooster Tail a super fancy place and then that
night I played over at Mr B’s Goat Farm, which is a blue collar bar. Later that
night we went and played in this after hours joint in downtown Detroit. The next
day I heard about the funding for the arts being cut. I just felt at the time
the state was going through a lot and it was a bad recession that happened back
then, so I wrote the lyrics in my car. I did this cool riff and I wrote the song
pretty quickly. It has stayed pretty much the same ever since. Everybody loves
it and sometimes we will play it for a really long time in Calamity Jane. We
have played it for about twelve minutes with lots of solos and people come and
sit in, harmonica players or whatever. Everybody can solo. It is a real
straightforward, “It’s Alright Mama,” kind of a thing.”
As for her bandmates McGuire says, “Erik is my favorite
guitar player on the planet, Gary is definitely my favorite bass player in the
world and Donny is such a monster drummer it is a pleasure to play with him. It
is such a fun band and we laugh constantly, while we are playing.”
The songs “I’m Not An Angel,” and “Love Struck,” look at
the different nuances of love. Mary McGuire says the message of the former is,
“I am here to lift you up. I can’t be the one who makes you do whatever, you
have to do it yourself and I’ll fly with you,” whereas with “Love Struck,” she
says it was more a result of research that she did about love and how it has
been manifested in different cultures down through the ages. That gave birth to
a song about what it is to be love struck.
Mary McGuire grew up with
three brothers and on her maternal side she has ten aunts and uncles, while on
the paternal side her father had just one brother. She says her family was quite
involved in the Catholic Church, while she was growing up and they took care of
foster babies until adoptive parents were found. Her mom cooked at a convent.
“I left Catholic school in
the fourth grade and I went to a public school. A nun went ballistic on our
class and my mom decided, because they wouldn’t boot the nun, she would pull us
all out of school. We got shifted from going to a Catholic school to going to
public school, which was probably the best moment ever in my life, because the
musicians from the high school came over and played for us in the fifth grade,
all the band musicians, trumpets, trombones and all of that. My next door
neighbor played trombone and I loved the trombone, but I had never seen them
play it. I loved it. When they came to play I was, I want to play that! They
were all, no you’re a girl and girls play the flute or the clarinet. I said, I
don’t want to play the flute or the clarinet, I want to play the trombone.
Mr. Parker, Joe Parker was my band
director and he said stretch your arm out. I was stretching my right arm out and
twisting my body out, so I could reach each position on the trombone and I just
made it, so they let me play it. My dad took me to Sparks Music and we got my
trombone. That is where I really began as a musician in the fifth grade.
I was just in love with the trombone.
“I was really fortunate as
a teenager, because my high school band director had played in Glenn Miller’s
band, so he started a Jazz band. We were really fortunate to tour down to Disney
World and Florida at old folks homes and then we came back to Detroit. When
really cool musicians were passing through town our high school Jazz band got to
open for them. Back then I was sort
of a novelty and they would think, oh there is this girl trombone player and
they would let me sit in. I got to sit in with Dave Brubeck. I got to sit in
with the Count Basie Orchestra and all sorts of really cool (musicians). The
musicians were so helpful, so inspiring and so encouraging,” she says,
describing her mid-teens music education. 
“If I had never had these
opportunities I would never have thought about (a music career) or touring as
something that I could do or that it could be a lifestyle. Also one of my best
friends in high school was a guy named Dave Ramsey and his stepdad was a trombone
player Fred Grant who also played in the big bands. He would have music parties at his
house all of the time with professional musicians who would come over and jam.
We just lived and breathed to go over to Ramsey’s house, to hang out and to play
with these guys. I really got to cut my
chops musically on the trombone with professional Jazz musicians, but my heart
really lay in Classical musical and I started studying with Bob Jones who was
the principal trombone player for the Detroit Symphony. I studied with him from
the fifth grad through my twenties.
That was a great experience for me.
When I went to Michigan
State I majored on trombone, music theory and composition. I had a lot of
fortunate moments playing with the Detroit Symphony playing as the backup brass
player and with all the regional symphony orchestras. What I found with the
trombone is you are the last one hired and the first one fired.
It had nothing to do with your ability and it had everything to do with
budgets. When I looked around in my early twenties and I looked at all of these
guys who were in their forties and fifties, I realized it would be twenty years,
before I could even get a chair. Also, being a woman was a real, real problem in
the symphonies, they just weren’t hiring women in the low brass sections, so I
decided to focus my interest on guitar. I gave up my major love for the
trombone, but I saw the writing on the wall and that it was impossible to get
work.
When the Blues thing happened in the early eighties
people wanted horn sections again, saxophone players were getting hired
everywhere and then they would get a trumpet player. If they had enough money
they would get a trombone player, but it wasn’t very often. I just didn’t get
the kind of work that I was hoping for and I was getting it on guitar, so I
started playing solo acoustic. I was in a couple of different bands. I saw
interestingly enough that it was less sexist and less stressful to play in Rock
bands and to play guitar, but even that world had its own issues against women
back in the day. People always used to say you play guitar pretty well for a
chick and I was like, what does that mean?
In high school Mary McGuire was in a Progressive Rock
band called Transilence and she played twelve string guitar, as well as bass
pedals. In 1981, McGuire became part of the band Temptress, which included
bandmates, Cora “Benny” Benjamin, Juanita LaTasha Garcia and Beth Miller, all
from Detroit and Dori Reynolds from Lincoln Park. Following Temptress McGuire
played solo for a while.
“When I was twenty-five I was working in a vegetarian
restaurant and playing music and the owner of the restaurant and another woman
that I worked with, Camille Price who is a fantastic singer, handed me the Metro
Times newspaper. There was an ad for a band called Voices In The Room and they
were looking for a singer. (The band) was influenced by Crosby, Stills and Nash
and so was I. (Camille) gave me the dimes and said call on this ad and get in
that band. I auditioned and I didn’t get in, but the guitar players JC Whitelaw
and Billy Brandt and I had such a special thing that they quit the band and we
started our own band called Ash Can Van Gogh. We were songwriting, recording and
we were doing really well. We got a lot of radio play and we were playing really
big shows. That band was from about ’86 to ’90. During that time we played in a
place in Birmingham called the Mid-Town Café and we were the house band for
Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
We ran the band like a business and we put all of our
money in the bank and we worked on recordings. During that period I opened a
music store. We started rehearsing there and we got all of our gear cheaper. I
shut the music store down and the band broke up, so I started playing solo
again. I was in a band called Cosmic Dali and that was the band that we moved
out east. We moved to Martha’s Vineyard and then those guys moved to Alaska. I
stayed on the Vineyard.
It was really cool and when I moved out to the Vineyard
all sorts of things started opening up, because there were a lot more
opportunities out east than there were in the Mid-west. Definitely at Martha’s
Vineyard there were a lot of celebrities and a lot of people were coming and
going. I was called on to open for people like Lou Reed and Taj Mahal. I started
getting some really nice opportunities there to do stuff.
That is just how it worked out. I didn’t play in those bands at all, we
were on the same bill and considered as equals or we were opening for those
bands or I was by myself. I made myself available and I worked really hard with
the radio stations. I just put myself out there, so I was fortunate to have a
chance.
The reason I wanted to go
back to Harvard is because I didn’t graduate from Michigan State and I always
felt that was a missing component of my life. I was living in Martha’s Vineyard
and I was going up to Boston and playing in a club called The Plough & Stars,
which was about one-half mile away from Harvard. I was managing a gallery called
The Golden Door and my boss would go to Southeast Asia and sometimes I would go
with him. I would have to research a lot of the antiquities that we had. The
curator of the Chinese art was a man named Bob Mowry. I would take things up to
him in Cambridge when I was playing my gigs at The Plough & Stars and Bob
suggested that I enroll at Harvard. He said you are really into art history and
you are really into research, why don’t you consider a career in the museum
world. I thought that would be an awesome retirement thing to do. I said how do
I take a class? How do I get into Harvard? He said just enroll in the Continuing
Ed department. You can take a class, get credit and then you can see if you want
to apply formally to the university. My first course was Baroque Architecture,”
she says.
While at Harvard Mary
McGuire was the recipient of several scholarships and she was on the Dean’s List
throughout her entire time at university.
“When I was bartending my
way through Harvard University I didn’t want to tell too many people, because
(when they found out) they thought you were smarter than them or something. They
would think, what you went to Harvard, what are you doing here? Why are you
doing this? Shouldn’t you be a lawyer?
What Harvard did was to teach me how to think. It taught me how to
rethink. It taught me how to write
and how to view the world through many different lenses. I did not have that
before. It made me have more empathy and compassion and to not look so much in
the mirror, which is a danger when you are a musician. There is the potential
for narcissism every time and I didn’t want to be that person.
Harvard humbles you and the professors
are the best in the world. The difference between going to Michigan State and
Harvard, I can’t even compare the two. Michigan State is a very good school, but
Harvard is like you are in a cradle of the ability and the encouragement to
think,” she says.
There are a lot of experiences that have shaped the life
and the music of Mary McGuire and the result has been a superbly gifted
songwriter, singer and musician who has the ability to attract other gifted
artists who want to perform with her and collaborate with her.
You can visit Mary McGuire
at
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