This part of the country has had a rich and enriching history of folk music that is pretty unique to the area. Over the years, folks like Woody Guthrie, J.J. Cale, Bob Childers and others have blended straight folky sensibilities with other neat stuff like rock or blues or bluegrass or red dirt and have created an Oklahoma folk music legacy that lives on to this day as strong and as diverse as ever. As of 2010, the Oklahoma songwriter scene is one of the best in the country only because of the talented and original folks that live here and play the music the way they want to, which coincidentally, is the way it should be played. One of the best and prettiest singer/songwriters around these parts today is Susan Herndon. Susan Herndon plays the kind of music that you would expect from an amazing Oklahoma songwriter. She writes her own tunes ion her own way borrowing styles from the blues, bluegrass, folk, rock, French folk (she’s bilingual and sings like a songbird in both English and French) and the kitchen sink. Maybe the best way to define Herndon’s wonderful music is to utilize the ancient art of the metaphor.
It’s acoustic, folky, bluesy and as gorgeous as the rolling hills of Green Country; as ingrained in our ears as well as in our eyeballs like thunder during an explosive orange sunset. Her music skips flat round stones made smooth from Oklahoma silt and Oklahoma water across an Oklahoma creek. Her music waves at us from the back of an old wood-paneled station wagon as it rolls out of town crying a little though it knows it will be home soon. Her music is a picture in a high school year book of the girl you were secretly in love with but never had the guts to talk to. Herndon’s songs are like the bee stings that kept you out of fifth grade for a day and caused you to miss the spelling test you hadn’t studied for. Sometimes it’s like a birthday cake a lonely old woman made for herself and ate one solitary piece of alone in a dimly lit kitchen while a cat laps at a saucer of milk. Often its like the night you met your husband drinking tequila in a smoky bar and it was love at first shot while your lonely best friend felt like a third wheel wishing she could meet someone. Her music is like Ingrid Bergman, classically beautiful and soft-spoken. Herndon’s wonderful tunes are like so many more wonderful metaphors, but I will stop there and get on with the article.
Herndon released her first album, entitled Quiet Cave, in the year 2000. “The Drum” was a track on that album and made it so far as to be featured on NPR’s All Songs Considered. She followed her first CD up with 2003’s In the Attic which is filled to the brim with 13 wonderful tunes executed by a list of 12 wonderful musicians. In 2005, Herndon released Women and Children First which is a collection of six originals executed with the help of dudes like Tom Skinner, Rocky Frisco, Brad James, Gene Williams, Randy Crouch, Don Morris and a few other Oklahoma staples. (With a gaggle of musicians like that it is indisputable that Susan Herndon is Oklahoma as *@#!.) That same year with almost the exact line-up of players, Herndon released Mister Bed. Both of the 2005 albums are available together as one album entitled Peccadillos. Herndon’s latest album, 1,000 Pies, was released in 2007 (and is my personal favorite. She does a version of Dylan’s “Girl of the North Country” in French that will break your heart.) Fans of the woman and her music are awaiting her next amazing release which will hopefully exist soon.
As far as seeing Herndon play live, you can often catch her hosting the singer/songwriter night at the Crow Creek Tavern (3435 S. Peoria Ave, in Tulsa) which happens on Tuesdays as well as all over the place in Oklahoma. The best place to find her upcoming shows is www.myspace.com/susanherndon. For any other information you might need like where to get her amazing albums, head on down to www.susanherndon.com. Have fun getting beautiful earfuls of Susan and we’ll see you at the shows.