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.
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.
Jon Arterton and James Mack
Jon Arterton and James Mack live in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Both lived in Greenwich Village in New York City, two blocks apart, but didn’t meet until moving to Provincetown, where their mutual love of singing brought them together. Thanks to the “activism” of four courageous Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court judges, they were able to legally wed on April 16, 2005. They released their first CD in 2011 entitled “Legally Married… and the sky didn’t fall!”
Jon Arterton is a singer-conductor-vocal arranger-actor who began his musical journey as a choirboy at Washington’s National Cathedral. He holds a Master’s Degree in choral conducting and voice from The New England Conservatory of Music. He was the founder and vocal arranger of The Flirtations, the proudly gay a cappella group seen on HBO, Good Morning America and in the film Philadelphia. He toured with the group for a decade, singing in such places as Carnegie Hall and Yankee Stadium. He also holds an MFA degree in theater and appeared as an actor in The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall on Broadway. Jon moved from New York City to Provincetown at the very tip of Cape Cod in 1993. There he conducts The Outer Cape Chorale, a 140-voice community chorus he founded in 2002. He gives periodic Singing Workshops, and serves as the Director of Music at Provincetown’s U.U. Meeting House.
James Mack was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised Southern Baptist! In high school, he was president of the Bible Club. He went to a Southern Baptist University to become a preacher, but when he came out in his early 20’s he decided to become a choir director instead, and transferred to Memphis State University where he majored in voice. He soon moved to New York City and began a career in men’s fashion as a store manager and buyer for Paul Stuart and Ermenegildo Zegna. James moved to Provincetown in 1997and began singing in the choir at the local Universalist Unitarian Meeting House where he met his future husband Jon. He is now a chaplain at the Meeting House where he performs weddings and commitment ceremonies.
AGAPE* (Dave Scherer)
AGAPE* has inspired youth from Brooklyn to Bosnia with his relational ministry “Hip Hop Outreach.” Combining rapping, dancing, storytelling and his fluency in Spanish, this Minneapolis-bred music minister connects with his listeners in a way that they really “get it.” In recent years, AGAPE* has worked with critically-acclaimed producer Ant (Atmosphere, Brother Ali) and grammy-award winning Billy Steele. On his recent CD “Rise Up,” he tackles issues of faith and justice with help from Chris Brown’s producer Ra Charm. While AGAPE* loves performing in football stadiums, his main gig is rocking church basements and youth gatherings. He would love to help old ladies in your church throw their hands in the air like they just don’t care. Have your people call his people!
