Episode 20 – Louise Coombe

Louise Coombe is a songwriter of great poise and a voice that will give you goosebumps. She grew up in McEwen, TN, on a cattle farm, riding horses and writing poetry, and began writing songs after college while working in TV/radio in Knoxville. She moved back to the Nashville area in 2004 and began co-writing with country, bluegrass and folk artists. 

Louise had a major creative breakthrough in 2007 when a song she wrote with famed Americana producer and writer Ray Kennedy was picked up for a PBS documentary. She started writing songs about the South—what she knew and where she grew up.

In 2008, Louise began working on a new album, entitled called “Home,” a mix of bluegrass, country and folk. She entered some song contests connected to festivals and ended up winning top awards at Kerrville Folk Festival, Wildflower! Festival, Telluride Bluegrass Festival and Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. “Home” debuted at #1 on the Folk DJ charts in January 2010 and went on to be one of the most played albums that year for that chart.

Today, Louise lives in Massachusetts, where she is a fixture on the Northeast acoustic circuit.  She’s played at The Bluebird Café in Nashville, Club Passim in Boston, Caffé Lena in upstate NY and many more venues. She is also a good friend of the pod and we were delighted that she sat down with us! Her most recent album, Paris, was released in 2025.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:10

Hello again, everybody, and welcome to another edition of Acoustic Northeast, bringing you the singers, songwriters, and acoustic music scene of the Northeast. US. We talk about the music scene and topics that affect the artist. We interview singer-songwriters who play live for us in studio. And our studio is located in historic Brewster, New York. I am co-host George Malice.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

And I am other co-host, Dave Goldenberg. And we're brought to you today by HearItThere.com, where you can find everything you want to know about what's happening musically in the tri-state. Also by Hudson Harding, folk radio promoters. All you folkies, that's where you need to go to get your songs on the radio. And WBXO Internet Radio. That's uh WBXO what's the dot com.com. WBXO.com. Streaming classic rock and other great stuff, including this podcast 24 hours a day on the internet.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

And you can listen to our show wherever you get your podcasts. And please subscribe. Also, we're on YouTube and acousticnortheast.com. We post the song performances of our guests on YouTube. And you can also listen to our Acoustic Northeast Spotify playlist. Today in studio we have a wonderful singer-songwriter, Louise Coom. Louise, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_04 1:41

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

It's a pleasure to have you, and we would love for you to kick off the show with a song. Can you tell us what you're going to play?

SPEAKER_04 1:50

Well, um, I'm going to play a song uh that I wrote uh uh several years ago now that's on my newest album, uh Paris, um, that uh produced by Cliff Eberhart um that I made in Northampton, Massachusetts a couple of years ago. And this is a song, this is the first track on the album, and it's called October.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

One day every autumn a certain breeze blows by a cold kiss of winter in a clear blue sky. A whisper, a warning, a shot across the back. It's a turning of the world going around October in the wing, leaves falling right on time. Every view like a painting, every breeze a baby sigh. You will never be mine. Summer's giving up for lovers one petal at a time, and maybe love is overrated. Says my second glass of wine. You will never be mine. Oh, I saw it at the paper. It gave me the blue A wedding dress for sale never used. Sunday crossword sits unfinished with winter closed behind. Oh honey, we will never override it. Says my third glass of wine. You will never be man. You'll never be mine. You'll never be.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

That's Louise Coom. Welcome to the podcast. We are so glad to have you. I can't tell you how much I loved listening to your voice.

SPEAKER_04 4:35

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

It sounds really well trained, but not with any manner of artifice to it. How did you learn to sing so beautifully?

SPEAKER_04 4:45

Thank you. That's very kind. Uh I did take a lot of vocal lessons when I was in my twenties. Um believe it or not, I was painfully shy as a kid, and uh I literally didn't start singing until I was out of college. And um I took I did take lessons. I had some vocal lessons from a voice teacher in Knoxville, Tennessee, who's sadly not with us anymore, named Mary Ann. And she um she had me singing jazz standards and Italian arias to try to train my voice and train technique.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

That's where I went wrong, George. I I skipped the part about doing the arias.

SPEAKER_04 5:25

Hey, you know what? That stuff was really cool. I mean, it's very cool stuff to sing, but it's hard. And it does just sort of train it trains your body, you know, and your technique. You can't sing that stuff without being on point with your technique. And not that not to say that I was an expert at it, but it really did change the way I sang uh my own songs um in concert. And so um I think too, we are all influenced by somebody. I think I was influenced by Maria Moldar and Nancy Griffith and others, and I and and you just kind of, you know, as you grow and keep singing, you grow into your own voice. So it was a process.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Your writing, um, especially on the new album, which is called Paris. And for those of you who want to listen to Louise's music, the new album is under your previous name, Louise Coombe. C-O-O-M-B-E.

SPEAKER_04 6:24

That is my current name.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

Correct. Well, which was your maiden name. Oh, my maiden name, yeah. Is what I meant. Yeah. But your other two albums, Home and Lay It Down, are under your former married name. So if people are looking for that, tell them where they can find it.

SPEAKER_04 6:38

So uh I put out a couple albums under the name Louise Masrie um in 2010, the album Home, and 2014, Lay It Down. And so I have two different profiles on Spotify, and I try to let people know on those profiles that hey, this is not the only stuff, but uh so it's Masrey and then it's Coombe. So anyway, yeah, you can but it's all under like if you go to Louisemazrie.com, it redirects you to louiscoomb.com. So I'm there, I'm out there.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

I wanted to talk to you about your songwriting and especially on this album. You've got a few co-writes going on. Tell tell the audience about that.

SPEAKER_04 7:16

So um back in 2022, at the very end of the year, um I had I started writing co-writing with um the folk icon and legend Tom Paxton. I had met Tom Paxton at Swannanoa Gathering in North Carolina um uh through my partner Cliff Eberhardt. Um they taught together at the camp. And Tom and I became friends, and he kind of took me under his wing a little bit and was coaching me on songwriting. And then he he said, Hey, you know, during the pandemic, a lot of you know, everything went online, everything became virtual. And Tom started co-writing with people like John McCutcheon and um Tim O'Brien and others uh online. And so he asked me, he said, Hey kid, you want to wanna try co-writing sometime? And so I was like, Are you kidding? Sure. So uh we started co-writing every Friday morning that we that we're both home, and um we we have written many songs together, and three of them ended up on the album.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

So, what's that process like a little bit?

SPEAKER_04 8:24

So Tom's process is very different from mine. It's interesting. Co-writing is something I started when I was living in Nashville, and it's one of those things where you either get along with the person, like you you mesh as writers, or you don't. It's sort of like having a relationship. I mean, there's either you you can come away from it going, nah, this is not working, um, or you feed off each other and you you end up writing stuff. And so Tom's method of writing is is he's so creative and he's so uh smart. Uh he just pulls ideas out of thin air, you know, and and for me, I I sort of I'm more internal. Like I um I have to sort of go away and be very quiet and and get very inside, you know, to write. And he just sort of plucks things out of midair. So it was a it's a challenge for me only because that's not my method of writing, but it it's great for me in that it challenges me to step up and write on the fly and try to pluck things out of midair and trust instinct and trust um, you know, the ideas that are coming that let them flow, you know what I mean, in the moment. Um that's where co-writing can be really interesting. So it it's uh so the the songs that are on the CD are the ones where we really went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth and wrote the whole song like pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Um so yeah, it was just it's great that that Tom Paxton is still going strong. He must be in his eighties right now.

SPEAKER_04 9:58

He is eighty-eight. Yeah, he I went to his Cliff and I went to his birthday party last fall at the Birchmirror in Virginia, which is a great club. Um and he does a birthday show uh because he was born in Halloween, it's every Halloween, and he called it his piano birthday, eighty-eighth. And he and it was just a it was just a blast um to see him still out there. He could still sing, he can still play, he's you know, he's very, you know, he's just really a vibrant guy. And uh yeah, no, he but he has retired from the road. Um the travel became too much. But um, yeah, no, he's he writes every single day with a different co-writer, like Monday through Friday. Like I'm his Friday, 10 p 10 a.m. right and then he has someone else at 11 a.m. You know.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Sounds like fun, actually.

SPEAKER_04 10:52

Yeah, so he's just on Zoom, you know, every morning with somebody, um, trying to knock out another song. He's just he's um he's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

As our listeners can hear from what we up here would call an accent, you're not from the northeast.

SPEAKER_04 11:07

I ain't from round here.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

So tell us about where you grew up and about your musical childhood.

SPEAKER_04 11:12

So I grew up in Middle Tennessee, um, about an hour outside of Nashville on a farm. My parents are transplants from England, they're immigrants. Uh my dad worked for DuPont, uh, my mom was a homemaker, and um we're five of us kids, and we grew out grew up out in the country. So my parents had British accents, and then we I just picked up what was around me. So I had a British accent until I was four.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

That's not a British accent now?

SPEAKER_04 11:42

No. Southern England, yeah, southern England, that's right. Yeah. So but uh my early musical influences are just the radio. I mean, I was just obsessed with the radio from age three on. As soon as I could reach the knob to turn it on, I was I just was in it.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

You have a musical family?

SPEAKER_04 12:04

No. No. My mother can could sing a little. My dad is a mathematician and of sorts, and so he he showed me the piano once in a mathematical kind of way, of which I was and I was not interested at all. I was like, what? That's crazy. Like, I don't, you know, but so he was interested in it math-wise. Mother sang, but nobody there no there's nobody that really worked on an instrument or anything.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

You've you've written a lot about what you know, which is the South. And um, you know, there's um I think your your biggest song, I guess, on Spotify is what is Blair Mountain. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that then and how that evolved and where that came from.

SPEAKER_04 12:50

So the song is called The Battle of Blair Mountain, and that evolved out of a co-writing experience in Nashville. Um I was singing at an open mic writer's night kind of thing right on the main drag West End. Um, and a publisher approached me after he heard me sing and said, you know, I have a writer in my stable of writers that I think you would write well with. And uh, you know, I was new to Nashville and I was like, great, I would love to, you know, I was always looking for co-writing opportunities. So he introduced me to a guy named Mike Richardson, who was from southern West Virginia. And Mike, uh, Mike and I would get together every two weeks. Uh, he worked at the Gap Factory, and I worked at um, where did I work? I guess I worked at um back then I was working at the wine store. I was working at a wine store just to make you know money part-time. And and so he and I would meet in the evenings every couple weeks and try to write, and he would he came in one day. He had a whole he didn't write music, he wrote lyrics. So he came in one day and he had he has this whole notebook of ideas, right? And so we flip through the notebook and he would read me ideas and I would go, that one. I'd wait to feel like a zing, you know, like a physical, visceral zing, and I would go, that one, let's do that one. And so um he came in one day and he said, uh, he said, Well, I was watching TV last night and I found out where the word redneck came from. And he said, you know, and we were like, oh, okay, so because right at that time it was like 2006, 2007, something like that, and redneck woman was on the radio as a big hit, and everybody was a redneck on the radio. I mean, the country radio was a wash in rednecks, and so um it just kind of caught his ear. And uh he said, Well, I was watching the History Channel, and they were talking about the coal mining wars in West Virginia back in the 1920s, and they called themselves rednecks, people who identified with the union effort. I was like, Oh, okay. So I just was like, and I had seen the John Sayles movie Mate One years ago when I was in college, and it just stuck with me. I loved that movie. Um and so I had a lot of that imagery in my head from the movie, and then I said, Okay, well, let's, you know, I always brought my laptop and I crack out the computer and we start doing some research. And he was talking about the Battle of Blair Mountain, so we looked it up and everything. And um it turns out that the word redneck was from the red bandanas they would wear around their necks uh to show that they were members of the Union effort, and um the red was a wink to the communist revolution that was going on in Russia at the same time. So I I thought it was hysterical that the word redneck had communist ties, and nobody in the Nashville writing community seemed to know or care, and that's you know, uh cool or whatever. But um you know, we're we just kept researching it and I found lines like there's a song, there's a line in the song in the chorus, um uh put your Bibles down and pick up your guns. That's not my line. That was what the preacher said the Sunday before the Battle of Blair Mountain when uh their sheriff who was part of the union effort, uh, he was shot in broad daylight on the steps of the courthouse square by one of the mine owners' thugs that were trying to dissuade the organization of miners. And so it was so such a brazen and awful moment of violence that the whole town was in an uproar. And the preacher said that morning, Boys, I think it's time we put down our Bibles and pick up our guns. And I'm like, that's going in the song, you know. So yeah, I was looking, you know, I'm looking for ideas, I'm looking for images, I'm looking for lines, I'm looking for dialogue that can tell the story. And it's interesting because we just wrote it from that point of view. Like, I just love the story and I love the movie, and it was fascinating. It was also um it was also a story that's not been told much. Like this, they in West Virginia, the schools suppress the telling of that history. Um and it's really not been discussed. I mean, no one's done a movie on the Battle of Blair Mountain, which is incredible. There were 14,000 men that went to go fight with mine owners and nobody talks about it. And they dropped the American government dropped bombs on these people from the air.

unknown 17:28

That's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_04 17:29

None of them exploded. They found some mines in the woods. Yes, nobody has done a movie or talked about it, right? So you don't hear about Blair Mountain 1921.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Wait, wait, wait.

SPEAKER_04 17:46

So I don't know, we're probably getting way off on this tangent.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

That's okay, but we want you to play another song. Yeah, okay. I love that there's you know, uh folk songs have a lot of really fascinating stories in them if you if you listen closely. And and Louise is quite a storyteller in in her music.

SPEAKER_04 18:02

Uh I I you know, I just am interested in that, you know, and so uh interestingly, the so the song has gotten picked up by um uh labor pro-labo groups on Spotify. So that's why it's I went to go look at Spotify one day because I don't even really look at it, and all of a sudden I noticed that the one song that gets all the most plays is the Blair Mountain song, and it's because it's it's all these pro-labor playlists. And I was like, what? That is crazy. And then um on the in 2021, uh NPR used this song on their broadcast um because they were doing uh they actually did a piece on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

Find a vein and drain the black gold. Open it again, let the timbers hold. Like my father before me. So I know we live only harvestable, harvestable unknown's mercy. That is a massacre, we're living in shiny towns and god knows what take an o ships in such a meeting, mother jumps, take a smell anyway, take the trees bumps, tick the red bandamas, the tell us what's a drum with the redness, unality, thousand strong tickets, come I fight for my father, still buried in the mud. I fight for my son, so he'll never better lie. We're soldiers of the Great War who don't seem right to treat a man like a dog just to make Sophie Vane drain the black gold. You better hope to God let those timbers hold.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Louise Coombe with the Battle of Blair Mountain, what a great song from what a great story. Thanks. So you you kind of broke through in 2010 with your album Home. Um but it it was a success. People sat up and and took notice. But uh everything is changing uh technologically in our world. What what is success for a folk singer these days?

SPEAKER_04 23:25

Uh great question. Um I think for me uh success is um it has changed. It is I don't even know what success commercially is anymore for uh songwriters. To me, the only thing I focus on is trying to write a good song. That's it. I have no control over the rest of it. None. Like I mean, I don't know if what I'm gonna write is gonna hit, is gonna connect with the zeitgeist. All that stuff is luck, and it's yeah, you've got you can hire people to promote, you've gotta, and that takes capital, which is a whole other discussion, right? So um, because you don't just get picked up by radio anymore. You don't get, you know, you don't get picked up uh by television and it we're not all listening to the same music. Everything is so uh niche oriented now.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

So do you write for yourself or do you write for, and I'll put it in air quotes which you can't see on the radio, um, success?

SPEAKER_04 24:34

No, I write for myself, without a doubt. I don't I when I was in Nashville and I was co-writing with my friend Mike and other people I was writing with, often the publisher would come in and go, You guys gotta, you know, you gotta write more commercial, you gotta write more commercial. Like you heard that Blair Mountain song, and he goes, I can't do anything with that, you know, and he couldn't. It's not that somebody like in Americana couldn't cut that, because they could, and that would I mean I think it would work. But he just didn't hear it for country commercial radio. So we would try. We would sit down and try to write commercial country, which is a whole other animal, and people do it and they're really great at it. And I know several writers in Nashville that are great at it. I'm terrible at it. The more I tried to write like that, the worse it got. And in fact, the funniest moment for me, a real aha moment, was when I finished writing a song with Mike and it was the worst piece of crap I'd ever written. It was so schmalzy, it was called Southern Fire. And uh yeah, just like that. And uh and it was awful, but I wanted to s write like a big country ballad, you know, so that's what it was, and it was Southern Fire, and it was lots of big singing and everything, and and I hated that song with the heat of 10,000 sons, and that publisher came in and said, That's the best song y'all have ever written. And I went, I'm done. I I hate that song. I would never play it, no one will ever hear me sing it. And yet he loved it. So I mean that's just one publisher. I'm just saying that, you know, and there are great country songs being written all the time. I'm just saying, like for me, trying to write to the radio was a disaster.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

I just think that's no satisfaction in it for you.

SPEAKER_04 26:22

Not for me. Right. I can't speak for other people.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Well, you've you've won a lot of songwriting contests. Tell I mean, I think there's an importance there today for the singer-songwriter for to get recognition also.

SPEAKER_04 26:35

No, the songwriting contests um as brutal and kind of bizarre as they can be, um, because being competitive with art is really, really weird. Um it it does open a door. I mean, I I entered the Kerrville new song folk contest, folk singing contest for 10 years before I got in. And um and after I got in, you know, yeah, the doors uh some other doors opened. I was able to play and tour and sing um full time, and uh that was you know back in 2009. So it um it definitely it definitely does make a difference. Uh it just it's it just sometimes can be a lot of no fun.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

So I find I find your music from from 2010 from the home album to the I thought there was like a big change going to Lay It Down and also to the new one to Paris. What's been the difference there? Has it been has it has it been working with Cliff Eberhardt? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I know and I know that you guys, you know, he's your partner and you guys talk songwriting and chord progressions all the time. Yeah. And you do and you teach some songwriting too. You do some camps.

SPEAKER_04 28:01

I I do very, very little teaching. Uh I'm not that's not really my strong point. Um I have done some vocal coaching. I have done uh like I did a workshop on storytelling, songwriting um last week or two couple weeks ago. Um but it's not really something I do a whole lot of. Um I don't know. But yeah, so so um as I've progressed in my writing, I I've always just been a writer, like not stuck to a genre. I mean, I used to write in more of a pop format before I wrote in an Americana format, and now I've gone back to a little bit more of a pop format. So and I've brushed up against jazz and I've brushed up against bluegrass, but I don't really fit into anything. Um but yeah, so when I met Cliff Eberhardt in 2000 and uh well, we met in 2009, but we didn't start dating until uh several years later, and um yeah, his you know, if you know anything about his writing, he uh he's uh extremely uh well-versed in music, like just um all the American standards, all he understands you know the straight line between Irving Berlin and the Beatles. And um, so yeah, it's just we started a conversation in 2012 and it's still happening. And so I've learned a lot and um try to absorb as much as I can, and it definitely has influenced my writing because um you know, the more chord vocabulary you have and the more knowledge of music and progressions and um and melody uh the better your songs will be, I think.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Yeah, you've always been melodic.

SPEAKER_04 29:46

I think you I think yeah, you can have a sensibility of melody. I mean it definitely I like I didn't grow up on folk music, I grew up on pop music. So, you know, you singing in the shower and singing with my favorite singers, yeah. You you sort of develop a melodic sensibility um that I think is probably innate. I'm not sure. I think you can develop it. I don't know, but I I was I've been singing since I was three years old. So um yeah, so the you know, but you can you can learn to write melodies more deliberately, and that's what I'm trying to do now. So the progression of home being very Americana, very uh stripped down um sort of country almost, and then lay it down was a little bit more into a singer-songwriter realm, still quite folky, um, still uh you know, uh, but very stripped again, stripped down. And now, and then years later, you know, I came out with Paris where I really had sort of stretched out some um chord uh a little bit more imaginative chord progressions.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

So it's a beautiful album. They're all beautiful. Louise Coombe, thank you for thank you for joining us. I get choked up when I hear you sing, I guess we're playing this. Um thank you for joining us on the pod today. It's been great to see you and listen to you. And um, we'd like you to take us out with a song. Tell us what you're gonna play.

SPEAKER_04 31:21

Um, well, let's see. Um boy. I'm gonna play a co-write that I uh wrote with the great Tom Paxton. And um so we uh we met and we decided to write a song about how we both rode horses as kids, and he asked me about my horse, and her name was Nameless Lady.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

Napalousero Boss Mere the heard she was mine, my own friend I was tennin at the time nobody only she was still my Into the woods we'd read over fences and fallen trees, old Indian trails past the halves of the honey bees cross the creek we'd a wheat Up the hill we'd climb nobody on nameless She was still mynocence when they stretched out forever, and all my dreams were there within my reach. After circumstance on just this side of never beauty exceeded the power of speech I whispered nameless, hey girl, bad guys would come in straight down the path we'd run away now Quick as lightning now Close to the tree like nobody old nameless She was still my Now as ears go by Think about her still Strong and dignified She called me across the field I'd give the whole world here one more time She will always be able to do that.