Amanda Pearcy's Americana music is rooted in in her hardscrabble history. Testifying to her southeast Texas upbringing, with the region's multicultural mix, its Gulf of Mexico coastline, and its shared border with Louisiana's Acadiana, Pearcy's songs carry a sense, and the sensuality, of the South, weaving themes of home and its loss; love, both surrendered to, and longed for; the casting of spells; the ties that bind old friends; and our human experience's collective memory. Her voice - as a singer and a songwriter - is authentic, earthy, and soulful, with lyrics that are interspersed with wisdom, warnings, compassion for the human condition, and hope for genuine connections. In a relatively short time, Pearcy has emerged as a brave, eloquent, and unique musical talent. Accolades for her album, Royal Street, abound. It spent an unprecedented three straight months at #1 & #2 on the EuroAmericana Chart upon its release in 2013, and landed at #7, behind Steve Earle and Guy Clark, on that year's EuroAmericana Year End List. Pearcy and Royal Street were John Conquest's picks for Songwriter and Album of the Year in his 3rd Coast Music's Best of 2013, and the album also charted on two other prominent Americana year end lists: #1 on Johnny's Garden and #4 on AltCountry Forum. For Amanda, 2013 wasn't only the year of the release and success of Royal Street. Beginning that summer, she lived on the cusp of homelessness for a year and a half. Never out on the streets, Pearcy took care of travelers' and friends' homes while they were away, couch surfing amongst friends for the in-between times when she couldn't find the trade of home care in exchange for a temporary roof over her head. This transitory time in her life coincided with the incarceration of a beloved family member in the oldest prison in Texas, whom she'd travel across state to visit regularly. It was during this time that most of the songs on her newest album, scheduled for a fall 2015 release, An Offering, were written. In An Offering, Pearcy explores freedom and confinement on the home front, as well as what we reveal about who we are by what we hide, what we give up, and what we offer. These themes go hand in hand with those of this release's sole cover, "Ode to Billie Joe". Several pieces in this musical collection are infused with imagery from hearth and home: An iron pan. The kitchen sink. A back door. Lipstick. A favorite coat. Pearcy also deftly employs snapshots from the urban landscape in her storytelling. With Tim Lorsch once again in the producer's seat, An Offering is a true album, a collection of songs that settle in for the ride through Texas to the deep south and back again; the journey being a testament of life's tougher lessons learned too young, the dark places of struggle prior to surrender, and the hope for the insight that comes with getting to the other side of them. The youngest of four, Amanda Pearcy was born and raised in Houston, Texas, in a modest, and at times, turbulent home. Her father lost his father when he was a boy, and he and his widowed mother shared a tiny downtown Houston shotgun duplex with extended family before his mother remarried a railroad man. Likewise, Pearcy's mother was left motherless at a tender age, and was raised along with her brother by their oil derrick building father in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and later, on a farm in Muskogee County, where they were no strangers to picking cotton. The foreshadowing of her parents' lives to her own cannot be denied. Although as a child Amanda Pearcy yearned to express herself creatively in a musical way, day to day life took precedence in her childhood home, and continued to do so on into her own widowed single motherhood. Years after grieving the loss of her first husband, Pearcy picked up his pawn shop guitar and got to the work of finally feeding her soul. Too prideful to answer to "roughneck", he worked seven days a week as a derrick man in the oil fields around south-central Texas. Falling quickly in love and with a baby on the way, they married behind a double-wide mobile home on the banks of the lower Colorado River. They made their home in the (now sadly lost to wildfire) Lost Pines thirty miles east of Austin where she hung laundry on the line to dry, and depending on which weekly shift he was working, had either breakfast or supper ready for him when he came home. He passed away when their son was two years old, leaving them with not much more than a couple of classic Oldsmobiles a hard top Cutlass Supreme and a Delta 88 Royale. Regretful wanderings and bittersweet reminiscences are among the stories that inevitably work their way into Amanda Pearcy's songs. Apparently the restlessness, the missteps, and the tragedies that brought her so much pain, and thus a resilience of hope, have also planted her firmly in the garden of authentic songwriting that comes from one who's lived it. Amanda's maternal grandmother, one eighth Cherokee on her mother's side, was born and raised in NW Arkansas on the foothills of the Ozarks, about 60 miles from Tahlequah, Oklahoma, which was founded as a capital of the original Cherokee Nation for those forced west on the Trail of Tears. She found delight in the circus, medicine shows, mustard on everything, and making home brew. She bottled and capped it right in her own kitchen and made root beer for the youngsters. She kept family healthy with sassafras tea, onion poultices, and steaming water vapor. Ten years into her marriage, she passed on in Tulsa, OK, from "sleeping sickness, by way of a horse fly from the mule" (encephalitis/West Nile virus). She rests in peace beside her first born, a baby girl with coal black hair.
October 2015
