Rain City Tales & Tunes

Tickets: $8.00 advance, $10.00 at the door.

Click here to purchase tickets.

Rain City Tales & Tunes is a brand-new radio show which brings the Northwest’s best storytellers and musicians together onstage.  Taped in front of a live audience at Empty Sea, the show features acoustic music and tale-telling.  Each episode features a unique theme, and audience members are invited to volunteer for the storytelling spotlight.

Produced jointly by Empty Sea Studios and KBCS storyteller Auntmama (Mary Anne Moorman), Rain City will be available to public radio stations this fall.

January 7th’s show theme is about families and the roles we play in them.  You’ll hear as a baby sister becomes a wise elder, the family jester becomes the family hardass, and the ancient bigot becomes something else entirely.  Neo-oldtime prodigies Cahalen Morrison & Eli West will share their tight harmonies and banjo-driven tunes with us, telling their stories through haunting melody.

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Cahalen Morrison is not like many other 20-something musicians out there. He is genuinely old-time, but from a region (rural New Mexico) not often associated with a thriving string-band music scene.  His multi-instrumental and songwriting talents were developed in small circles, privately, over many years, far outside the mainstream.  He shows definite influences of kindred old spirits like Norman Blake, Greg Brown, and Doc Watson that were obviously instilled at a young age and not picked up in a “back-to-acoustic” fad. But he is very much his own man, traveling and playing with a determined Western independence and an easy hospitality towards those he encounters along the way.  And so it was that along came Eli West – another unique twenty-something who came by this music more circuitously, but sharing the same authenticity and Western spirit – and their mutual musical easy-goingness found some common ground in which wonderful things grow.  The roots are strong, the branches are shady, and the guitars, banjos, mandolins and voices carry you far off the beaten path to a Good Place out under open Western skies.  -Kevin Brown (KPBX, Spokane Public Radio)

A Suzuki violin kid that took a left turn early on, Eli West has been busy multi-instrumentalist since, sitting in with members of the Wailin Jenny’s, Crooked Still, Michelle Shocked, and others.  He was the voice and guitar behind the Seattle-based Loose Digits, and now finds it quite comfortable to be in a Duo with Cahalen Morrison.

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Greg Brisendine is a writer and performance poet based in Seattle. Greg has performed on stages across the Pacific Northwest and is the author of two chapbooks: One Lap Around and A Cautionary Tale.

Greg’s work will make you better at parallel parking. It will make you appreciate yogurt more – the fruit on the bottom kind. His work is always fat free and carb-free with only a small hint of cheese. When not writing, Greg is dispensing relationship advice through his alter ego: The Bitter Single Guy.

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Named Auntmama by a nephew of choice, Mary Anne Moorman gathers audiences up in her blend of music, and storied southern lore. Her voice is a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains at dusk, rolling and misted sweet. These stories are conversations with memory as well as with the audience that’s enjoying them.

“I’d be a singer if I could sing, but I like music too much to mess it up,” she says. Her Appalachian roots are intertwined with the music she grew up with, many of her stories reflecting that harmonic heritage through influences from Gershwin, Cole Porter, Flatt & Scruggs, and Porter Wagoner.

The Stranger has written of Auntmama’s tales: “As a precious, southern belle, she’s conflicted and her extremes and voice boil out the sweetest words I think I’ve ever heard in my life. A real gem, she is. Glad I saw it, haven’t stopped hearing her lilting voice in my head.”

Moorman, a former machinist, management consultant and journalist, teaches storytelling at Washington State’s famous Wintergrass festival, Northwest Folklife Festival, Hugo House’s Write-O-Rama, as well as offering workshops throughout the country. She is the recipient of grants from Artist Trust, 4Cultural and the City of Seattle. Her three albums are available through her website, in local bookstores or through iTunes. She can be heard every Sunday morning on KBCS 91.3 FM.