Pamela Chappell

Description

As my song, The “Big Blue Water” says, I was born on the shores of Lake Michigan. Raised in the small resort town of South Haven, I grew up with the sand between my toes and the old red lighthouse in full view. Our house was always ringing with music – Burl Ives, the Inkspots, Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, & Mary, Teresa Brewer, the Kingston Trio, Odetta, Rosemary Clooney. . . My mother loved Luciano Pavarotti, theatre, and poetry. She played the piano while the entire family stood around, singing. Dad sang “Old Man River”. . . badly, and my sister and I laughed until we cried. It was a Norman Rockwell painting, and it was real. When I was eight, I began singing for audiences- talent shows, service clubs, resorts, school programs, etc. I took piano and voice lessons, and eventually picked up a guitar. I was in the high school musicals and the choir, and sang in church too. For six summers, I worked at Van Buren Youth Camp in Bloomingdale, Michigan, and learned by the seat of my pants how to lead songs with children. In college I became enamored with the music of Joni Mitchell, Buffy St. Marie, and Judy Collins. With that inspiration, I began my first efforts at guitar playing and songwriting – most of it quite forgettable, but it was a start. After college I lived in Florida for a while, where I had my first teaching job and met the man I would marry in 1970. He and I moved to upstate New York and formed a folk duo. We sang together for 17 years as Fred and Chica Sang. Beginning in 1974, we spent year in London, England, teaching in an American School and collecting songs. After returning to Michigan, we had two sons, Brennan and Philip. I became a thyroid cancer survivor in 1979. Initially I could not sing at all - a very scary thing for me - but in time my voice came back, thank goodness. I became very active in community theatre. I also taught in a public school for 17 years. Fred and I parted amicably in 1987. I set out to sing on my own, and eventually performed on a riverboat for three seasons with Glenn Coleman, and after that with a jazz trio, with a Dixieland Band, and on my own with just me and my guitar. At the same time, I worked as an educational consultant for a county-wide agency in the fields of Gifted and Talented Education, School Improvement, and Curriculum Development. My first CD, Coming Down Easy, came out in 1995. I loved the recording process, and was blessed to work with amazing musicians. It was like the birthday of my life! My mother had Alzheimer’s Disease and needed care, so I took an early retirement in 1977 and moved back to South Haven, the small town on the shores of southwest Michigan where I had been raised, to take care of her. She passed five months later. I was blessed to have had that time with her. I stayed on in South Haven and began my own consulting business, all the time singing and writing new songs. In 1999 I released Joy in My Heart, a collection of mostly original songs that reflect a new spiritual direction for me. I had become a seeker – and it all came shining through in the lyrics of the CD.

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