By Frank Matheis
Lauren Sheehan, who lives near Portland, Oregon, had a career as schoolteacher and director, and is she now devoted fulltime to performing folk roots and blues on guitar, mandolin and banjo. A superb fingerpicker and singer, Sheehan has earned her place among the finest women in the blues and Americana.
Her repertoire draws from the roots music of both the African American blues and spirituals tradition and Appalachian country music, mountain ballads, Irish and Scottish, and even popular songs of the 1920s and ‘30s. Over the last eight years, Sheehan has often performed with acoustic blues guitar virtuoso Terry Robb, with Sheehan on mandolin. Sheehan also plays in a duo with her very talented daughter Zoë Carpenter, a fine singer, who lives in Washington, D.C., where she is an editor for the progressive political magazineThe Nation.
Lauren’s experience is grounded in the Centrum Port Townsend Acoustic Blues workshop, one of the most important centers for the acoustic blues in the United States, where she connected with the traditional country blues roots and took advantage of themusical apprenticeship it provided with some of the genre’s most important practitioners. The intensive weeklong interaction with the teachers at Centrum over more than 20 years amounted to an apprenticeship literally elbow to elbow with the best living practitioners in the genre. The importance of the program, widely called “Centrum” or “Port Townsend” on the traditional blues in America is profound. Through her teachers and mentors at Centrum, she became an extension of that Piedmont blues scene, even though she lives on the West Coast.
The singer explained,[1]
“At Centrum, it was the first time I had ever really heard deep traditional blues– I felt the sparkle of John Jackson’s guitar and that velvety passion of Phil Wiggins and John Cephas. The first time you sit in a room with 12 people with John and Phil, the first time that you hear and see Etta Baker, the first time one is around Howard Armstrong – and this is all happening at once. Two hours later you’re with Lonnie Pitchford. Two hours later you’re hanging around Del Rey, Algia Mae Hinton, Lightnin’ Wells, John Dee Holeman plays. John Cephas and Phil Wiggins were huge influences – and Phil Wiggins is probably one of my most important influences because he is so generous of spirit. He sat in many, many sessions when I was first learning country blues and as I began to learn more and more as he continued to encourage me. He played on a couple of my albums. I took guitar classes with John Cephas. And I met with Eleanor Ellis – loved her, and have been influenced by her – perhaps more personally than musically – because she’s helped me understand so much about the scene and the music. I was influenced a lot by Howard Armstrong and Etta Baker.”
She elaborated,
“…the relationship of music to people, to hanging out and passing time together, is something that I think is really very important to my experience of the music with the folks from the Washington area. In addition to being artists, all these folks – Phil, John, Eleanor, John Jackson – they were gracious about time and being social together and having a relationship with each other and with other people and letting music be part of how we would socialize together.”
Lauren Sheehan and Zoë Carpenter now carry on the proud tradition of the Piedmont blues, as well as Appalachian folk music; and, even though Lauren Sheehan is all the way up in Oregon, she continues the legacy of her East Coast mentors most exquisitely.
[1]Telephone interview with Lauren Sheehan. June 30, 2015