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Gwen Avery, Sugar Mama

"Music has been the balance in my life. It's led me to love - - it's led me to God, salvation, freedom. I didn't know it. I didn't know anything else, It's been my gift."

Fair to say that music is Gwen Avery's life -- the gut wrenchin,' belly laughin,' music of classic blues. It's the music Avery heard as a child hanging around her grandmother's speakeasy in Verona, Pennsylvania, the town where she grew up. Like roadhouses and juke joints all over the South where so many of the early blues and jive artists came up, her grandmother's joint rocked with the music, the laughter and loud talk, the drum of feet keeping time.

Early years . . . the jukebox roots

In an atmosphere heavy with smoke, buzzed by whiskey, often overwrought with the heat of the moment, Avery watched, listened and absorbed the elements that were to inform her own musical style. It was aplace where every itinerant musician passing through could find an audience for a night. Their sounds and styles were as varied as the records that played on the joint's jukebox. It was from that jukebox that Avery first heard the voices of Aretha, Jimmy Reed, and sucked up the sounds of The Drifters, Esther Phillips, Ella Fitzgerald, Gloria Lynn. And there was the gospel music that Gwen has said, "flowed in that house of ill repute with the whiskey and beer as frequently as there were church services."

Go West, young woman

That life and those sounds invaded Avery's soul and set her on a course of personal exploration and professional growth. Born of a musical family, she grew up singing first at home then at church and in local clubs. The pull of the West Coast music scene and the need to express herself musically was too great to keep Gwen in Verona for long. In the early Seventies she

hooked up with Gregg Young and for three years sang in his hard rock band, Full Moon, before the Women's Music Movement drew her to San Francisco and a whole new set of musical influences. Gwen has toured, recorded, and played venues as diverse as outdoor music festivals and prisons. Through it all her music, style and stage presence continue to evolve.

The soul connection

As a songwriter she reaches down into the recesses of her heart and the collective experience of the generations who came before her. Without artifice or pretense she writes music that connects with heraudience in a way that only music which comes from the soul can. Grammy nominated producer, Linda Tillery, performed with Gwen in the early days during the Varied Voices Tour, and has known Gwen for over 30 years. She has said simply, "To hear Avery's music is to be gifted with hearing the Real Thing."

Sugar Mama: the colossal voice

As a performer Gwen, dubbed Sugar Mama, is an irrepressible life force reaching out for another big handful of life. She grabs her audience by the lapels when she rattles the piano and raises her colossal voice. She means to connect with her listeners in ways that make them feel like they've just run into an old friend they haven't seen for years. Welcoming everyone into her realm with huge gestures of down home hospitality, she jokes, teases, shocks, charms, instructs, and preaches her way into their heads and hearts. The air vibrates with the expectation that something big, something provocative is about to happen.

Of her music Gwen Avery says it best

"I want people to brighten up and lighten up. I call on them to participate and to take that with them. My singing is for people who want to be uplifted . . . moved until their foot can't stand no more sittin,' till their butt can't no longer be flush with the chair…"

-- Gwen Avery