Susan Shore
Susan Shore is a New Jersey expatriate (via New England and Iowa) now living in the Arkansas Ozarks. Her father was a professional musician who played with Klezmer musicians and later toured with Clyde McCoy’s big band in the ‘thirties and early ‘forties. Susan joined the family business when she took up guitar and songwriting at thirteen. Susan's first performance ever, at age 15, was at North Bergen, NJ's "Music Feast" which took place in a football stadium in front of an audience of mostly stoned hippies. Eventually Susan left northern New Jersey's field of eternally burning tires for New England, where she wrote the score for the Boston Shakespeare Company’s 1977 production of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" and performed with the company during the play's run. Later that year she spent several months in Ireland, and took to arranging Irish songs to suit her voice and intricate guitar style. Jittery but ever-hopeful, she played her handful of ballads at open mics in and around Cambridge after her return to the States. She hoped someday to shed her terror of performing and learn to speak coherently onstage. Occasionally she thought about returning to performing in New Jersey football stadiums, but couldn't get her passport renewed.
After a five-year stint working for Rounder Records, Susan joined forces with singer/songwriter Nathan Bell and moved to Iowa, where they began to tour as Bell and Shore. She learned to play rhythm guitar and mandolin and to sing harmony with Nathan's gritty vocals. Along the way, Susan lost her stage fright. She also learned to string words, and then sentences together in front of many people. The duo’s musical influences were all over the map; their trademark high-octane performances took them from intimate coffeehouses to major music festivals, radio and television. They released "Little Movies" on the Flying Fish label in 1987 and "L-Ranko Motel" on ROM Records in 1989 to rave reviews. In 1990, after seven years of touring, they called it quits and went their separate ways.
In 1990, Susan founded the performance series "Wild Women", playing to packed houses in the Midwest for over four years. She continued to perform as a solo artist, and took up the pen again. She began writing songs in earnest, and released her first solo album, "Old 218", in 1995. Two years later, "Book of Days" was released on the Waterbug label to critical acclaim.
Susan moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1999. She continues to perform nationally, having added mainstage performances at The Kerrville Folk Festival, The Woody Guthrie Folk Music Festival, and on syndicated radio shows such as River City Folk on National Public Radio. She performed for several years as mandolinist/harmony singer with Fayetteville singer/songwriter Effron White (who also sings gritty), and with the band Likely Stories. Now, in addition to her solo shows, Susan and formidable singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Michael Cockram are performing as a duo. Stay tuned!