Monica Grabin: Music/Programs

The area had been an encampment of the Continental Army during the Revolution. All the streets were named for Revolutionary War heroes, and the remains of the walls that had surrounded the old farms ran through all the woods. Although Sodom and Gomorrah was only an hour's train ride away, Continental Village was a sleepy, country place where we could sled and play baseball in the middle of the road and I actually used to take a piece of bread and a safety pin on a line and walk to the lake to catch fish. It was a great place to be a kid.

Musically, I also grew up in a continental village, hearing songs from the West, the Caribbean, Canada, Mexico and the South. It was a vast palette or music that I absorbed through records and concerts, books and the radio. Here are collected songs I have been singing since I lived in Continental Village, as well as some I have written and some which have caught me a little more recently. They're all songs I've lived with for a very long time and that I needed to sing for someone besides myself. In this I have been helped by very generous and extremely talented friends, and I can't possibly than them enough!

This CD is dedicated to the memory of my father, Edward Palmes, 1916-2004