Author: Don Rhodes
Publisher: The Augusta Chronicle
09/18/2008
Website: http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/091808/rho_476066.shtml
Ramblin Rhodes: Versatile Christine Kane does much of her work offstage
Westobou
By Don Rhodes
Thursday, September 18, 2008COMMENTPRINTShareEmail
AOL IM
Del.icio.us
Digg It
Fark It
Newsvine
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz
If you're looking for a one-woman entertainment factory, then you're looking for Christine Kane, whose melodic voice sounds like a cross between Judy Collins and Kathy Mattea.
Special
Christine Kane writes music, performs, teaches and encourages fledgling artists to work toward their potential.
Click photo for optionsAmong other things, she performs across the nation, writes clever and retrospective songs, co-produces her albums, teaches guitar and songwriting at music camps, gives motivational and creativity talks to corporate gatherings, writes an inspirational and upbeat blog on her Web site and organizes and conducts her "Big Dreams" retreats four times a year in North Carolina.
In 2006 and 2007, she even toured with the North Carolina Dance Theatre playing her songs for a ballet the dancers had choreographed around them.
"There came a point in my life a few years ago that I realized I didn't want to spend the rest of my life just standing on stages and having people clap at me," she said in a call from a stop in Alexandria, Va.
"I'm one of those people, if a door opens, I want to walk through it and see what happens. And when an opportunity presents itself and feels right in my heart, I want to see if that is a good place to go."
You can hear this Asheville, N.C., singer in a free concert at 8 p.m. Friday in the auditorium of Heritage Academy (the old Houghton school), 333 Greene St.
The concert is sponsored by Hammond's Ferry riverfront development, 89 Crystal Lake Drive, in North Augusta where Ms. Kane will conduct a creativity workshop from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Cost is $65. Contact Mary Lou Cianci, (803) 613-1641.
You can also see Ms. Kane perform her sensitive ballad She Don't Love Roses, her funny song about stereotypical women No Such Thing As Girls Like That, and her song Kathy Mattea recorded, Right Outta Nowhere, by going to youtube.com and typing Christine Kane into the search window.
Next week, she will head back to New York City to work on her seventh CD. Her first, This Time Last Year , was recorded in 1995 in a friend's basement.
She's working again with Grammy Award-winning producer Ben Wisch, engineer/mixer on the 2006 best Latin pop album Adentro by Ricardo Arjona Morales.
It was in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, while working on her fourth CD, Rain and Mud and Wild and Green, that she experienced one of the most emotional times of her life: watching the twin World Trade Center towers fall.
"I had just put on my jogging shoes and was going out for a run when my producer called and said we may be starting late because a plane had flown into the trade center. I thought maybe some pilot in a small plane had got drunk.
"Then right outside my hotel window was a helicopter hovering and I knew it had to be focused on the World Trade Center. I walked outside and had a straight, clear view and watched both towers fall."
Ms. Kane said she still has not brought herself to write any songs about that experience because "it was too intense." And she's not sure that horrific incident really changed that many people.
"I've always tried to live my life, anyway, of not taking anything for granted," she said. "Human behavior is such that most people get right back to what matters in their lives. People were shopping the next day in New York in spite of the tragedy."
At the heart of Ms. Kane's motivational talks is the theme that you can be successful at whatever you do, but you can't sit around wait for success to come to you.
"I see too many people who die before they die," she said. "I have people come up to me who say, 'I know you teach creativity, but I'm not creative.' I tell them, 'That's a lie you've convinced yourself.'
"I didn't grow up in an encouraging environment, and I didn't grow up in a big musical family that played music on the front porch," she added. "I grew up in an academic family with the messages that you're going to college, you're going to get married and you're going to get a job you will hate."
Her own real inspiration, from playing her father's classical guitar at age 10, came when she was at "my first real gig" at a bar in Asheville.
In walked a troupe of Shakespearean actors who were in town, some still in makeup.
"When I told them it was my first gig ever, they said 'no way.' One of them walked up to my tips jar and put a big bill in -- I think it was $50 -- and told me, 'Never give up.'"
That's the same message Ms. Kane now tells others to encourage them to reach their full creative potential.
THERE WILL BE a ceremony at 2 p.m. Monday at the Lincoln Center, 160 May Ave., in Lincolnton, Ga., to rename a section of U.S. Highway 378 as the James Roy "Pop" Lewis Memorial Highway.
The section will start in downtown Lincolnton and go to the Wilkes County line past the houses of most members of The Lewis Family bluegrass gospel music group. Mr. Lewis, patriarch of The Lewis Family for 54 years, died in 2004 at the age of 98. He had been inducted into both the Southern Gospel Music Hall of Fame and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.
Don Rhodes has written about country music for 37 years. He can be reached at (706) 823-3214 or at don.rhodes@morris.com.