Cathy DeWitt
Cathy DeWitt is a composer, arranger, vocalist, pianist, guitarist, and harp therapist. She is the Musician-in-Residence at the world-renowned Shands Arts in Medicine program, where she uses music to transform the hospital experience. She has been a Unity Music Director and touring New Thought musician and speaker for over twenty years, working with Revs. Sharon Connor, Marciah McCartney, Peggy Hostetler, Mary Masters, and more. She has been a guest musician and speaker at churches and spiritual retreats throughout the country, and has provided music for Alan Cohen, Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer and others. Her songs published in Unity Association songbooks include “Spirit of Spring (Joy Chant),” “Sweet Spirit,” and “For the Pure in Heart,” and her song “Everybody’s Somebody’s Child” was a finalist in the Posi-Awards video category in 2012. Her original melody for James Dillet Freeman’s “Prayer for Protection” is used at many Unity churches, and is available on her latest recording, “The Traveler: New Music to the Words of James Dillet Freeman,” which is a collaboration across space and time with the poet laureate of the Unity movement. A professional musician for many years, Cathy is a jazz vocalist as well as a bluegrass and folk musician. Growing up in a musical family, she always felt a sense of responsibility to go along with this gift of music, and after playing at countless benefits and writing songs for numerous causes, playing in the hospital and joining the Positive Music movement has been a natural evolution.
Seeing, from the Cheap Seats
There are gifts that
come of breathing,
that come of blood
driving through veins,
no charge. Just being.
One is the noise of existence.
Another is when the noise stops.
After the theater
of the self has closed;
after the season of the self
goes to reruns, music
begins, slow, silent.
Then, you hear . . .
it was the thought itself
that created the chains,
the blinders. When the
mis en scene is struck,
gifts come, without
breath, without blood.
Bil Cusack
Bil Cusack started music lessons at age 8 in his hometown Chicago, and by age 11 was the youngest member of a local band. Throughout life he has played guitar, saxophone, piano, vocals and been an arranger. The songs on Speak With Your Life came at a time when he wanted to express lessons learned on the spiritual path. Bil is married with a son and daughter, works as a piano technician in concert production, and directs music at a Unitarian Universalist Church.
Steve Crump
Steve Crump, jazz vocalist and UU minister, from Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge, was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and comes from a musical family in which he and his four siblings each played a band instrument. Living now in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he conducts a popular Jazz Worship Service the Sunday before Labor Day, and has done so for 30 years.
Steve is lead vocalist for Relationship Jazz, a concept album of original jazz tunes and lyrics that examines the relationship themes of our lives. Steve is songwriter and vocalist on the project. Pianist-arranger Mike Esneault led the combo of horns and rhythm section in a New Orleans studio session on the west bank of the Mississippi River –before Hurricane Katrina hit the region.
CD or lyrics and lead sheets are available by contacting Steve Crump directly at: Minister@UnitarianChurchbr.com or 225.751.3207.
Lui Collins
Lui Collins, folksinger/songwriter, has been performing, writing and recording since the 1970s, earning international recognition for her music and releasing several highly-acclaimed recordings, on Philo, Green Linnet, her own Molly Gamblin Music, and Waterbug. A native Vermonter, Collins’ early music education included classical studies on piano, violin and French horn, followed by music theory studies at the University of Connecticut. While these formal studies provided a solid foundation for her music, folk music has been her inspiration and her path.
The Boston Globe has described Lui as “one of New England’s first and brightest stars,” and Sing Out! Magazine calls her “incomparable.” Renowned guitarist Dave van Ronk called her “one of the best guitarist-arrangers I have heard in years.” Michael Devlin of Music Matters Review wrote: “…there are relatively few artists who are bringing a traditional sensibility to modern songwriting, and in the process creating new traditional music. Lui Collins is among the barefoot royalty of this group…”
In 2003, after training with the international early-childhood music program Music Together, Lui founded the educational branch of her work, now called Lui Collins’ Upside-Up Music. Along with teaching Music Together and her own curriculum for older children, Kids’ Jam, Lui’s current focus is on adapting this 8-season traditional music based curriculum for use by homeschooling families – and others – with lower elementary-aged children.
For concert schedule, recordings, and more information see www.luicollins.com.
Richard Bruxvoort Colligan
Richard has a strange and wonderful job: he makes songs for people to sing together.
A full-time freelancing composer, Psalmist, retreat leader and concert performer, he is committed to what he calls “adventurous and imaginative songs for the ever-evolving church.” Across Christian denominations and global faith traditions, Richard helps communities voice their heart.
Richard’s degree in Theology and the Arts and his experience as a spiritual director weave together a leadership style that is inviting, generous and empowering. His songs have been published by the UU, UCC, ELCA, UMC and PCUSA traditions.
Be welcome at Worldmaking.net and PsalmImmersion.com to connect with his music. Richard enjoys life with his wife Trishy and son Sam in Strawberry Point, Iowa.
Namoli Brennet
Tucson-based songwriter Namoli Brennet has been touring the country with her own brand of moody and inspiring folk since releasing her first CD in 2002. Since then she’s played over 1000 shows and logged over 274,000 miles on her still-running 87 Volvo station wagon (“I have a great mechanic”, she says). Touching on often poignant themes, her music and lyrics ultimately paint a vivid and redemptive portrait. She’s a breathtaking and moving performer, and her sweet, road-weary voice is as quick to deliver her wit and humor as it is a turn of phrase. She’s been described as a cross between Lucinda Williams, Patty Griffin and Sheryl Crow, and Zocalo magazine called her music, “Gorgeous and introspective.”
Although the themes of identity and freedom weave their way subtly through her songs, being transgender is not the focus of Namoli’s music: “I know it’s kind of a quirky and interesting part of my story, but as a human being I’m interested in life, spirituality, meaning, social issues, justice, compassion…and these are the things I write about.”
Namoli’s 9th CD, We Were Born to Rise, was released in September 2011 and she’s currently working on a live CD with a release date in fall 2012. You’ll often find this prodigious musician in the studio dividing her time between engineering, producing and playing most if not all of the instruments on her recordings.
A 4-time Outmusic award nominee, Namoli has also won the Tucson Folk Festival Songwriting Award and was a finalist in the ISC songwriting competition. Her recent release ‘Black Crow’ garnered critical acclaim and was named one of KXCI FM’s top albums of 2010. Her music has been featured on NPR, PBS and in films including the Emmy-award winning documentary “Out in the Silence”, which details the struggle of a gay teen growing up in rural Pennsylvania.
Ysaye Barnwell
Dr. Ysaye M. Barnwell, a native New Yorker now living in Washington, DC, appears as a vocalist and/or instrumentalist on more than thirty recordings with Sweet Honey In The Rock and other artists. She has spent much of her time off stage working as a master teacher and choral clinician in African American cultural performance.
Her workshop “Building a Vocal Community®: Singing in the African American Tradition” has been conducted on three continents, making her work in the field a significant source of inspiration for both singers and non-singers, a model of pedagogy for educators, and cultural activists and historians.
Dr. Barnwell has been a commissioned composer on numerous choral, film, video, dance and theatrical projects. Three axioms have proven significant in Barnwell’s life.
- To whom much is given, much is required.
- As one door closes, another door opens.
- Everything matters.
Meg Barnhouse
Meg Barnhouse grew up in North Carolina and Philadelphia. After graduating from Duke University and Princeton Theological Seminary she spent a chapter of her life in Spartanburg, SC, working first as a college chaplain teaching Public Speaking, Human Sexuality, and World Religions, trying not to get them mixed up. Earning her credentials as a Pastoral Counselor, she ran her own counseling practice while raising her two sons who are now in their twenties. She was active in the community, preaching and teaching in many churches, recording commentaries for NC Public Radio and “Weekend All Things Considered,” serving as Interim Minister in several congregations and helping to found the SAFE Homes Network for battered women. Along the way she earned a second-degree black belt in American Karate. She finished up that southern chapter with seven years as the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg. After two years as Interim Minister for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton, NJ, Meg is settled as minister at the First UU Church of Austin. She travels nationwide as a speaker, preacher, and singer/songwriter.
Her books, Rock of Ages at the Taj Mahal, The Best of Radio Free Bubba, Waking Up the Karma Fairy, Return of Radio Free Bubba, Did I Say That Out Loud? and Broken Buddha are compilations of stories from the radio and of her columns for the UU World online. Her CD, July Blue, is a mix of 12 original songs and 3 stories. The CD, Mango Thoughts in a Meatloaf Town, contains more original songs, including All Will Be Well. Her newest CD, Heart of Compassion, is a collection of Meg reading her favorite stories from her books.
The Endless Seconds of Good
letters of schoolchildren
I was feeling a little shaky earlier this week, and it took me a few days to sort it out. I could point to this or that as the reason, but really I know a big part of it is that on Monday morning, there was another shooting. This time the shooting was in a building near a fountain and park where my family and I have gone to play and hang out, and a few blocks from a library where we just were last week for an excellent-and-fun Storytime. We were planning to go again to that same library for that same excellent-and-fun Storytime on Tuesday morning, but it seemed like the best thing to stay home, out of the fray and mayhem of the recovering area, and so we did. And just that would be enough to make me a little shaky—that we didn’t go to a public library storytime because of a shooting.
Then you add to it the photographs and stories of the victims and their families in the newspaper this week, and the choked-up voice of the shooter’s mother on the radio on Wednesday, and it’s all just a little bit too…real. And then you add to that the sense of hopelessness that is palpable right now amongst people trying to pass what I consider totally reasonable gun laws–um, mandatory background checks on people who want to purchase guns? Banning assault weapons? These things seem totally reasonable to me! I feel like our elected representatives are being held hostage by the NRA. So that makes me feel shaky, too.
In Monday’s paper, the one that was printed and delivered well before Aaron Alexis entered Building 197, there was a front page article telling the stories of some of the victims struggling to recover from the April 15th Boston bombing. Halfway into the article, another survivor of the bombing is introduced—Jarrod Clowery. The article talks about how “Clowery’s early days as an inpatient were the darkest; besides his physical injuries, he was deeply depressed and heavily medicated. Then letters began arriving from all over the world, many of them from schoolchildren. ‘They saved my ass,’ he says. ‘I could’ve gone down a dark path.’ His perspective began to change. ….’I got to see in the hospital what we’re capable of in terms of love and compassion,’ he says…. ‘The bomb is one second of pure evil, despicable, the worst. But it’s followed by endless seconds of the good people can do.’”
I know that what I need—what my heart needs, my spirit needs, and my family needs—are more stories like this one. I do not need to absorb more details about what precisely went on, moment-by-moment, in Building 197 on Monday morning. Instead, I need to immerse myself in all the endless seconds of good that followed, that are still unfolding, that were and are already happening, all the time, the little and large kindnesses that create a mostly-civil, mostly-functional society. I need to just take a breath and sit still for awhile and recognize that, without ignoring how much pain there is in the world, in many places, right now, there is also great joy, love, beauty, grace, peace, and gladness. There is goodness, right here, in this apartment that I am tidying up, in the child and parent that are sleeping peacefully in the other room, in the beauty of the fall day that will unfold tomorrow and that has the possibility, still, of being transformative, in a good way, for all of us. There are countless, endless seconds of good that vastly outnumber the awful seconds of tragedy. Yes: we have so much work to do to make this world a more peaceful place. But that work must spring from love of this world, not fear; calm and grounded determination, not panic.
I want to live in the endless seconds of good as much and as often as I can. It is a constant mental adjustment for me, a continual tuning and re-tuning of the instrument that is my brain. If I remind myself to, I gently smile at people, I trust that the person driving behind me is alert and paying attention, I offer a kind word and a breath of patience to those who are helping me. We are all human beings with families and stressors and challenges. May we believe and live in “the endless seconds of good” so that we may, ourselves, contribute to the goodness in our world and reduce, in whatever ways we can, the oceans of pain.
