Patti Casey play guitar at her home in Montpelier. Photo: Photo by Jeb Wallace-Brodeur

Patrick Timothy Mullikin

"I would rather take out my own gallbladder with an oyster fork than play solo," says Patti Casey from her Montpelier home. "I get really nervous, but once I'm there I'm fine. As soon as I start playing I get totally goofy. And then I'm fine."

It's difficult to imagine Casey nervous. Full of energy, yes. She's been performing professionally for some 20 years in a musical career that has taken from her hometown of Vergennes to the hallowed Prairie Home Companion stage in 2001.

Casey remembers that Prairie Home experience with mixed emotions. She was among five contestants competing in "The Talents from Towns Under 2,000 Show."
"There were two children and four grown-up acts. First and second went to the kids. I would have voted for them; they were so cute. I won the toolbox. I was third place in the adult division." At a post-show reception for the contestants, Casey says, Garrison Keillor stopped by to chat with her. "He's just an odd duck. He called me over. We were talking — and then he was gone. We were no longer engaged in conversation. It ended abruptly," she says with a laugh.

What did endure, however, was a friendship with Pat Donohue, guitarist for the Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, the group that backed her on the show. (She says she never listened to that tape of her performance on Prairie Home Companion.)

Casey, 43, knows lots of musicians, hangs out with lots of musicians and plays with lots of musicians.

"Most people think of me as a singer, and I am. I also play guitar and flute, mostly Irish, Celtic." She traces her musical bent to her father, Martin Casey, who played trumpet in big bands and swing groups in the '40s and '50s — most notably The Vermonters, who were based in central Vermont and the Champlain Valley.

Although she is considered a folk and bluegrass performer primarily, Casey also has also delved into the jazz and popular song genres. "I'm not really a jazz singer, not at all, but I have a small body of tunes that I love to sing. I played with a couple of big bands, Michael Arnowitt and his Ella Fitzgerald tribute, a 26-piece big band."

Casey's first instrument was the flute, which she took up at 11. "That was my introduction to music theory." Of her life in Vergennes: "I was kind of a social outcast. I just was never cool. I didn't have a lot of friends or a social life, so I practiced all the time, mostly classical, played in concert band."

The singing/songwriting, for which she is famous, came much later, she says.
"I lived out in Duxbury in a broken down little old house, and I had a record player, and I used to listen to Joni Mitchell, Lui Collins — I listened to a lot of women singer/songwriter types, and I thought: 'This is what I'd love to do so.'" She bought a guitar and took lessons. She remembers when her guitar instructor suggested she sing. "My cheeks are burning, and I'm hyperventilating and sweating. … 'You should do more of that; you've got a good voice,' he said. So I started singing more, getting more confident."

Casey says she honed her skills as a guitarist and singer by playing with other musicians (a virtual Who's Who list of Vermont musicians), sitting in living rooms, attending folk and bluegrass festivals and playing in groups such as North Union and Redwing.

Songwriting, she says, is another matter. "I've always written. (She has a degree in writing from Vermont College.) I actually started writing in childhood. I even won a Boston Globe poetry contest. It was about a dog."

Casey refers to her own songs as little mystery stories:

"It's that Irish influence in a song that I write. … I won't come out and say 'this person killed this person and such and such'. … I like to plant that seed and let it grow into something terrifying. I'm also fairly voyeuristic. I have to say I'm always mining for stuff in people's lives that can be written in a song. I don't write a lot of deeply personal stuff, not overtly personal anyway. I consciously avoid that because I think I used to do it a lot, and it wasn't until I started looking around and looking at other people. Who wants to listen to this? People rip a page out of a diary, and play three chords, and don't even really bother with the melody. I hate that stuff. I really do."

In January, Casey shifts gears and makes her debut as musical director of the Vermont Stage Company's production of Woody Guthrie's American Song. "I'm not a terribly directive person, and I can't imagine barking orders at anybody." She is also a cast member.

At the moment, however, Casey's main focus has been as a band member, the only woman, in the five-year-old Bluegrass Gospel Project.

"Probably the most deeply rewarding, on many levels, has been the Bluegrass Gospel Project. Musically it comes the closest to reaching my very high standards. What I really appreciate about it is the commitment; we all seem to have to worked things out. It really is like being married to five guys."

The group, which is receiving rave reviews in Vermont and across the nation, has a generous streak: It has raised more than $50,000 for homelessness and hunger during a New England-wide fall tour.

As for the future, Casey is hopeful that some of her songs will catch the attention of established performers. "I'd like to have some of my stuff published and recorded by somebody way more famous than I. … to get the checks coming in," she says with a big laugh.

Patrick Timothy Mullikin writes regularly for Vermont Sunday Magazine.