Nancy Thorwardson: In a Swing State of Musical Happiness!
By Kathy Foster-Patton
Music aficionados in the Boulder and Lyons, Colorado area only have to blink and they’ll find Nancy Thorwardson on stage performing in one of her many bands. Nancy is an extraordinary songwriter who has taken a style of music typically found in Texas and Oklahoma and imprinted her own Colorado stamp on it. Thorwardson was eager to share her background with the SPPS on a recent weekend in March.
Thorwardson just had a birthday and she is very excited about the future. “It’s looking great right now, I have to say! I’m playing in tons of bands and I just feel like there’s a really new breath of life for me right now in terms of my music. I feel really excited about it and I just hope I can keep on playing for years and years. It’s a really rich musical time for me. I just had my 54th birthday on Monday and I just think it’s so exciting to have all this—it’s just exhilarating. It’s also really fun to spend time in groups with a broad demographic base.”
Thorwardson explained how she got involved in playing music as a child. “I went to graduate school in Stillwater, Oklahoma in geography and one of my friends who was a student was a musician in a western swing band—he played fiddle and guitar. We used to go out and dance to him and one day I said to him ‘it’s just amazing that you can play music like that’ and he said ‘well you can play music’—I said ‘no I can’t!’ Well he loaned me a guitar and showed me some chords. I was an adult and off and running with it. Shortly after that I moved to Colorado and got involved with Swallow Hill—that was when Swallow Hill was just starting—and I kept on playing and playing…”
Thorwardson is a multi-instrumentalist and plays rhythm guitar, ukulele, drums, other percussion instruments, and a little bit of piano. Many folks in the music scene around Boulder see Nancy playing swing music, which is mostly popular in Texas and Oklahoma. She talked about her favorite genre of music. “Western swing and standard swing really do speak to me the most—somewhat in that order—there’s a lot of overlap. I love and always have loved old timey music. I played old timey and contra dance for years and years when I first was getting going here in Colorado—which is great for stamina. I also really love Cajun music—I played in a Cajun band out in Port Townsend, Washington for a number of years. I played drums and triangle and washboard and sang a little bit of Cajun songs.”
Thorwardson has a wonderful body of original work that she showcases on her two CDs. She explained how she got started writing music. “I started writing by writing second verses to songs. I was playing in a western swing band here in Colorado back in the 80’s—the Cactus Crooners. The gal that was the lead singer in that band did a lot of Patsy Montana songs, and others of that genre and she thought they weren’t long enough, so I started writing second verses. Then it wasn’t such a big leap to write the whole song.”
Thorwardson’s latest CD is composed of her original songs with various bands playing the tunes with her. This is a different spin from some recordings which list out the guest musicians, but don’t normally have guest bands on tap. She explained, “I had this idea for a while. In 2006 was the first CD of all my songs. I thought I would really like to show more variety—variety of styles—as a composer you don’t
want to be cubbyholed or pigeonholed. I thought about getting a bunch of different singers. I still have that in mind maybe for some other project to make it more variety. I thought, well I know a lot of different bands that I really like. I wonder what it would be like for the Hi Beams to do my songs—more rock-a-billy and I thought—why not?”
She is already busy with new songs for a future recording. “It’s kind of funny, and I don’t know if it’s like this for all songwriters. When I’m working on recording I don’t really write very much. As soon as I’m done with that project I start thinking about the next one. I have some new songs and I have some songs that I have written over the years that might be on the next recording.”
There was a time when Thorwardson was in almost a holding pattern in terms of creating original work. “I played a lot of music when I moved out to Washington state but mostly I moved out there to take care of my mother who was infirm and had some health situations. I did that for 7 or 8 years and I didn’t do any pursuing or traveling. Port Townsend is a very musical town –there‘s tons of musicians there and music camps right in town, so I played a lot of music but I didn’t do any recording, that kind of stuff. So when I moved back to Colorado it took a little while to get the boost, and I started working on the recording projects and then I started playing in a bunch of bands.”
Thorwardson has some stories to tell about some of her original tunes. “Well, the first song that I wrote that actually stayed intact and became a song and is in the world now is called “My Prairie Home.” That one has been recorded by a whole bunch of different people and it’s got a life of its own. It’s really thrilling—it’s the most exciting thing to me. It’s like if you have kids and they do well, and they’ve gone off in their own world. So, writing that song, it just kind of came out of that time when I was writing second verses for other western songs. I grew up on the prairie and had a mid-western outlook and it almost wrote itself. The band I was playing in at the time did it, and it got recorded, and at that time in the western music world there weren’t that many people writing songs that actually sounded sort of old and that one really caught on, as well as a couple of others that I wrote shortly after that. The Western Music Association has an annual music festival—it used to be held in Tucson every year—and I walked into the lobby of the hotel and there was a jam session going on and people I didn’t know were singing that song and I was so thrilled—was I in the right place or what?”
Another song that is special to Thorwardson also has a story associated with it. “There’s another one called “Paint the Town,” that I wrote—it was kind of an emancipation song. I wrote it one summer when I had just changed a bunch of things in my life. I was on a road trip back east with a friend of mine and we went to a music camp and that’s another one that just sort of came out, just wrote itself practically. That’s another one that I had an experience where I was at a music festival or party and someone asked me to do that one and I did and the first person to record it was a gal named Jill Jones down in Texas and she had put a yodel in it and everybody had learned her version of it. So I did it without the yodel because I don’t yodel, but everybody started yodeling!”
Thorwardson’s mother played music but in general Nancy didn’t come from a huge musical family. “My mother was a musician when she was in college and shortly after college she played a bunch of piano. She played big band kind of tunes and show tunes. My sister was also a musician. But we really didn’t play music around the house.”
Predictably, her major musical influences come from the swing world. “The early western swing folks are the biggest ones: Bob Wills, Bill Boyd and all those guys that had the big swing bands—and I think mostly because that’s what really gripped me to play. I sort of grew up listening to more big band and show tunes.”
She has six bands which are: The Silver Stars (swing), Swing State (swing), Gadzukes! (ukulele), The Ringtones (folk combo), The Blue Mountain Ranchhands (western swing), and The Quarry Gals (gal vocal group). Like every part-time musician, Thorwardson juggles work and music. “It can be a little challenging and would be more challenging if my boss was not one of my band mates. I work for Jani Little and she’s in the western swing band I’m in—The Blue Mountain Ranchhands.”
Audio: Swing State Live 9/27/08
stream | zipfile of mp3s | individual mp3s | info
Nancy is a role model for the SPPS. She has taken a style of music that is part of our Americana heritage and modernized it with her original tunes. Her recordings inspire enthusiasm in her work and also promote interest in the old time and swing music of the past. Keep track of her goings-on at www.nancythorwardson.com.
From her new CD Something In The Air:
Trouble (mp3)
Times Like These (mp3)
Barbara Says:
