10-13-06 Dorothy Zerbe writes songs. She sings beautifully. Her songs carry a message of hope and wonder, and when she covers another artist’s tune, it is with honest sincerity and true interpretation. Dorothy combines years of classical piano and voice training with the guitar and folk tradition that has shaped her life. She loves nature, art and people, and her strongest gift is creative emotion. Dorothy is a musician by vocation- she has spent years teaching piano, tuning pianos, playing organ (as a desperate act), crafting her guitar skills and trying to find the time to learn the mandolin. She says it was fun to bring her newly acquired mandolin onto one of the songs in her new album “Rooted and Free”. She chose a song that was simple to fit her beginner fingers, one of her own compositions called “ChiefSong”, played with the savvy group of drummers called the Oshkosh Rhythm Institute, including her own son Stephen. Dorothy has also put in time on the committee and one year as co-director of the Shawano Folk Music Festival. But currently she has put piano teaching and festival planning on hold while she attends nursing school at UW-Oshkosh. She hopes to combine nursing skills with music to bring whole-spirit healing to others. She has two CD’s out, “A Long Way to Go” (2001) and “Rooted and Free” (2006), each one generous, generous, with 18 of her original songs on each album. Actually, 2 of them are by other artists –“Some Kind of Love” by Kate Wolf which was a special request by Brittany Montgomery, a very special friend of the family. And “Moscow Nights” which is a beautiful Russian tune by Vassily Solovyev-Sedoy, played along with Joel Kroenke on his very European-sounding harmonica. Dorothy remembers this tune as a more upbeat version when the Tijuana Brass recorded it in the 60’s. But one had to be upbeat to get through the 60’s. One of Dorothy’s gifts is taking a poem she is moved by and making a song out of it. She has done that with Kahlil Gibran’s poem about children from “The Prophet” in the song “Bow and Arrow”. Her song “Emerge” – a beautiful vocal arrangement – is word for word from a Robert Browning poem she found as a student in college and scribbled down on a piece of paper. The song “The TrueLove” is based on a beautiful poem by Washington-based poet David Whyte. “ChiefSong”, the above-mentioned song that her mandolin found simple enough to play, is based on quotes from two Native American chiefs from the Spokan and Nez Perce tribes. Thank you to Dori Jerger, fellow folk festival organizer, for helping to pen these words and for saying so many kind things about me. You can contact Dorothy at her email address, which is altogetherdot@hotmail.com and listen to a couple of minutes of each album cut on http://CDbaby.com or you can go to Dorothy’s site on myspace – http://myspace.com/dorothyzerbesongs