Connie Guy

  

Connie's Autobiography

I was born to parents who loved to sing and play  music.  My father and grandfather, now deceased, were musicians and worked all their lives as watchmakers.  They  also liked to tap dance, especially for me…everyone knows men don’t dance, especially tappers who were white men back in the 40’s.  Right!  My grandfather served in the military in the 30's as a Conductor in the Army Band and he played several instruments.  My father played trumpet in his youth…I have his first one…and he played guitar...my sister has his first one of those.  He also sang all his life.  He was in the Dallas Jamboree House band and played for a young 13 yr old Leann Rimes who later cut "Blue" just before his untimely passing.  My mother, who is an accomplished porcelain artisan, florist,  seamstress, gardener, mother to 4 daughters and  grandmother to 11 and great-grandmother to 3.  She still lives in the outskirts of New Orleans where I  lived during my teens and young adult life.  She was one of 9 children,  and not unlike me as a youth,  she loved to sing  and did so on radio when it was a regular live broadcast.  Anyone who knew my parents loved to hear their vocal harmonies.   Whenever my grandfather, who was also a Mason, took care of my sister and I in his watch repair shop in Kentucky, he would often sit me atop his counter and ask me to sing for his customers and I did, quite willingly.  He thought I was pretty good and with his encouragement I would easily sing along with the jukebox at The White Tray, where we went for sundaes.  I would also sing in the local dinner down  from his shop where we went for lunches.  He paved the way formy first "for real" stage performance when  I was all of  5 years old.  He had me sing a tune that was my favorite to sing then entitled “Let Me Go Lover”,  during his Masonic Picnic in 1952.  I do remember how mortified I was to sing before that crowd because up until then I had only sung to an audience of a few patrons in the local eateries. All I needed was to hear a tune that stirred me and I would be up from our table,  sing that tune and I'd even dance - which I also loved doing.   My knees  nearly shook out from under me at the Masonic Picnic that warm summer day in Bowling Green, but I managed to sing for my proud grandfather and  the very responsive crowd that day…as I am told.  

As a child, my parents  would  go to my grandmother’s or my aunt’s home for big family gatherings.  The sharing of stories would commence before, during and after our meal but at some point in the evening, my mother and dad and some of my aunts and uncles would slip away into a bedroom and start singing.  I was always alert to when this would happen so I would slip into the room with them and sing too.  It was the most incredible experience that one small child who loved singing, could imagine.  They sang a variety of songs, and they went caroling through the neighborhood at Christmastime.  I longed to tag along with them when they left but I was just too young,  so they  appeased me by including me in singing a couple of carols with them in front of my aunt’s or my grandmother’s home, before they left to share their gift of music.  Then they would tuck me under my grandmother's arm before they left. I  remember hearing the snow crunch under their feet as they left and I listened to their melodious voices rise up into the night's starlit  sky.  My heart filled with inexpressible joy to know that whoever heard them would feel that same joy.  Folks responded in kind too, by inviting them in and giving them hot cocoa, cookies and sometimes even money.    It was a time when we focused on gifts of the heart and one another, rather than the exchange of things.  

Those tender years of my life hold special memories because during those  influential years my parents,  along with my grandfather and our clan,  introduced me to the " gift" of my voice.  Their voices and musical abilities are etched in my mind, dwell in my heart, and are facets of who I am today.  I hear them in my voice and in the music of the wind that stirs the trees.  I will always remember and am thankful that while singing songs, we were gathered together sharing our lives.  I know that music is an expression of a loving heart that is eternal.

My parents  divorced when I was 7 and my younger sister was 4.  Mom remarried and we moved from Kentucky and lived all over “tar nation” before settlingin New Orleans when I was 13.  During the course of those years she had two more daughters so I became the eldest of 4.   After high school, I moved out into an apartment with a friend who was from Nicaragua.  Her family was in the entertainment business, and before I knew it, I was on an airplane to a tour of performances at the resorts in her country.   Very few of the musicians there spoke English, but we communicated quite well using the universal language of music.  In 1970, at age 23, I married my childhood sweetheart whom I had met when I was 14.   Before my marriage vaporized in 1990 we had a fine son in 1980.  In the summer of 1987, before my son’s first grade year, he and I moved to Maryland.    While seeking a job, I ran across an ad in the newspaper for a vocalist.   It was written in the stars for me to step upon a stage again.  So at the tender age of 40, I returned to the love of music to develop and pursue my professional career in music.  Little did I know that I was meeting my current husband, who was forming the band.  We fell in love and were married, with our 2 sons as witnesses, atop Gambrill Park in 1991.