CONTRIBUTED BY SUNDILLA
AUBURN —
Sundilla will welcome Deidre McCalla to the stage for a long-awaited concert. Showtime at Pebble Hill is Friday, June 2, at 7:30 p.m. If the weather cooperates, this will be an outdoor show. Advance tickets are $20 and available at Spicer’s Music, Ross House Coffee and online at sundillamusic.com, while admission at the door will be $25. Free coffee, tea, water and food will be available, and the audience is welcome to bring their own favorite food or beverage.
McCalla doesn’t merely take the stage, she owns it. Her songs embody hope and celebration, struggle, loss and longing — sometimes all in one song.
With five independent albums to her credit, including her most recent release, “Endless Grace,” McCalla has touched audiences from Maui to Maine, church basements and college coffeehouses to Carnegie Hall. In 2021, McCalla received a SERFA Award from the Southeast Regional Folk Alliance for distinguished service and exceptional contributions to folk music in the Southeast region of Folk Alliance International. Sundilla was a proud recipient of this same award in 2017.
The Austin-American Statesmen cites McCalla as “a highly distinctive voice in a crowded field of contemporary folk music,” and Sing Out Magazine lauds her CD, “Playing for Keeps,” as a work of “power, conviction and grace.” McCalla’s music taps a variety of musical styles, with her vocals the connecting thread drawing the listener in with rich warmth and a feather-light depth. Her powerful songwriting exhibits an unyieldingly honest perspective grounded in her life and expressed with a lyric touch that is simple and direct and fearlessly celebrates the power and diversity of the human spirit.
McCalla came of age in the fiery blaze of NYC’s folk heyday — a time when Greenwich Village clubs were filled with the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs, a time when Motown ruled the top of the charts and the streets of America screamed with anger and civil unrest. Her first album, “Fur Coats and Blue Jeans,” was released on Roulette Records when she was 19 and a student at Vassar College. With a theater degree tucked under her belt and an acoustic guitar tossed in the back of a battered Buick station wagon, McCalla hit the proverbial road and never looked back.
A much beloved performer, McCalla has shared the stage with a long list of notables that includes Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman, Holly Near, Odetta, Cris Williamson and Sweet Honey in the Rock. She has taught performance at Warren Wilson College’s Swannanoa Gathering and songwriting at Common Ground on the Hill.
For more information, go to www.sundillamusic.com.