How do you describe that voice?
Others—including music professionals—have tried, with varying amounts of hyperbole and accuracy, very often in the same line:
“If Aretha [Franklin] is the Queen of Soul, [Mary Ann] Redmond must be considered an official Lady in Waiting.” –Dave Nuttycombe, Washington City Paper.
“It’s startling when the petite blonde with a perky smile opens her mouth and out pours an amalgam of Gladys Knight, Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin.” –Christopher Loudon, JazzTimes.
Amateurs in Amazon reviews fare slightly better:
“Her voice has huge power, considerable passion and a great blues feeling … She can do Motown, McCartney and old blues with appropriate skill for each.”
“With lungs of steel Mary Ann sings rings around most singers. The power of her voice combines with phrasing lasting longer than a sunset … ”
One critic summed it up succinctly:
“This lady can sing.”
Got the idea? Franklin, Turner and Knight, all in one vocal package. Lung power, superior breath control and uncanny skill at phrasing. Blues and jazz performed with operatic force.
So you would think the woman on the brown leather couch in a dog-dominated living room in Great Falls would be the second coming of Barbra Streisand or Whitney Houston, but Mary Ann Redmond is far too self-deprecating and deferential, with too quick of an honest laugh at herself, to be a—dare we say it?—diva.
Redmond has been a fixture in Northern Virginia since moving to the area in 1989, playing in bands, in clubs and teaching anyone who believes they can actually compete on The Voice. (If you can’t, she will tell you flat out that you are flat; there may be tears, but that’s showbiz.)
As a child in Richmond, her hometown, Redmond regaled her mother and schoolteachers with her sudden outbursts of song. The kindergarten teacher commended her mother on how little Mary Ann could speak French, which surprised her mother because, well, Mary Ann didn’t speak French. But she could sing French, doing a pitch-perfect impression of the Singing Nun’s (Jeanne Deckers) catchy “Dominique,” an AM radio staple in 1963.
When she was 9, Redmond was listening to Blood, Sweat & Tears’ “And When I Die,” a pop ballad by singer-songwriter Laura Nyro. When she was finished singing along, the young Redmond realized she could match the singer’s pitch. “I got excited and went straight to ‘We should put on a show in the backyard,’” she says.
Not so fast. As Ringo sings, “If you want to sing the blues, you’ve got to pay your dues, and you know it don’t come easy.” For Redmond, who sings the blues like few others can, not only did it not come easy, it was tragic.
“Hurdles make you stronger,” she says. “Hurdles make you more complex. It depends on how you take adversity and work it into your favor and still come out with an open heart and a gracious spirit.
“It’s when you get bitter and shut down …” she says, trailing off. “As hard as it’s been losing two dads …”
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When Redmond was 7, her father was severely injured in an accident as he was hooking his truck up to a car on the road. “He was smacked in the back by a car,” she says. The accident proved fatal: He died a month later from a blood clot.
Her mother, Jean Zacharius Redmond Lewis, remarried. The marriage included a once-removed stepbrother who had obvious problems after serving in the Vietnam War. Redmond suspects “he was planning on killing the whole family” but stopped after cutting his father’s throat in the middle of the night.
“Cousins came to get me at 3 o’clock in the morning, and I went upstairs to get a hairbrush and saw blood on the ceiling and on the walls,” Redmond says. “I was 12. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Her mother, she says, “bless her heart, was really banged up for a while. And rightfully so. She had ‘nervous breakdowns’ after that.”
Redmond believes being so young was her saving grace. “Being 12, you are in your own little world anyway, and that probably saved me.”
Salvation by music continued when her older brothers decided to start a Top 40 cover band. “‘And you’ll be the singer,’” she says they told her, without asking.
“I’m sure that saved me,” she says today. “I loved music so much.”
Brother Jimbo played bass, brother Jack played guitar, and they hired a bass player to tour, such as it was, with the quartet called Oasis.
Despite the musicians’ juvenile status, Ramada Inns and exotic dance clubs south of Richmond welcomed a band that could actually perform the music that was on the radio.
“We’d come in, exotic dancers in their pasties got off the stage, and this Top 40 band of teenagers would play Donna Summer and Doobie Brothers,” she says with a laugh.
Being in a cover band at 15 and performing six nights a week to indifferent or inebriated audiences isn’t as much a lark as it is an apprenticeship. You are learning a craft by copying the songs of others; it’s no different than learning, say, carpentry at the elbow of a craftsman. Eventually you figure out if you like it enough to keep at it.
Redmond, for her part, wanted to keep singing once the band dissolved. She studied voice at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, getting exposure not just to the academic side of learning (and teaching) music, but also to opera.
College lasted one year.
“I ran off with a band,” she says.
Redmond admits that she’s “a dog person that sings.”
For proof, meet Moses and Indie, the energetic, loveable border collies whose range of facial expressions knows no bounds. They follow in the paw-steps of Merlin, the “bad” rescue dog no one had hope for but Redmond managed to work with until he achieved an official obedience degree—not an easy task.
Moses is restless pretty much all the time; Indie will occasionally lie down under a desk unless alerted to something that’s happening with Moses that needs investigating. It goes without saying: They own the room, probably the house. Not only is Redmond OK with that, but she says that if she wasn’t in the music business, she would be “doing something with dogs and animals.”
A veterinarian?
“No. I don’t have the stomach or the heart for the hard part—putting them down and things like that. I love the training aspect.”
When she first moved to Northern Virginia, part of her rent to live in a Great Falls barn was to care for the horses that lived below her. “I was there for a year. It was wonderful,” she says.
Eventually she moved into a log cabin—a genuine, bona fide log cabin—on 2.5 acres in the deep woods near the center of Great Falls, close enough to walk to the Old Brogue for a gig, if that’s what she wanted to do. The cabin had a two-story addition on the back that Redmond turned into a studio.
Through those rustic doors paraded a decade or more of teenaged girls—and some boys and adults—from around the region, their parents dropping them off on the gravel driveway. More than one parent noticed how spending time with Miss Mary Ann energized and empowered them. What was going on in that studio?
The studio is now in the lower level of her new house in Great Falls, but the effect is the same. In Miss Mary Ann’s studio you can sing or scream or cry, sometimes all in the same lesson. Miss Mary Ann will play chords on the piano and guitar and have you sing your favorite radio song (Miss Mary Ann seems to know every song in the world), and you will be filled with pride and joy even if you are off-key or you forget the lyrics.
Miss Mary Ann’s studio is a magical place, a thrilling sanctuary where they practice scales, learn music theory, sing their favorite songs out loud without judgment and engage in something akin to an emotional therapy session.
And if they are really lucky, they get to sit in with Miss Mary Ann at the Old Brogue. Miss Mary Ann will strum the guitar, you’ll get to sing your favorite songs for your parents and strangers, and your world will change, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
Sometimes talent walks in that takes even the veteran Redmond by surprise. One of those was Chelsea Lee, a student at Langley High School who visited the cabin at age 14 and ended up with a multi-disc deal with the mighty Atlantic Records at 18.
“She is really, really rare,” Redmond says. “When her parents came to pick her up after that first time, I said, ‘I’ve never said this to anybody, but if she wants to do this, she can do it.’ It depends on the energy of the universe because the music business—I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It’s a tough way to go. You have to just love it, and it has to be its own reward to be happy.”
McLean native Lee, who this fall was touring with her EDM band Shaed, said in an email: “Mary Ann helped fuel my love for music. She took me from a very introverted, shy girl who liked to sing in the shower to someone who loved being on stage. I can’t thank her enough for the experience she gave me.”
Also instrumental to Chelsea Lee’s success is Northern Virginia singer-songwriter Todd Wright, who was with her as an accompanist and mentor when Atlantic came calling. And now, it seems history is repeating itself: Wright recommended that Noah Poncin, a 16-year-old student at Loudoun Valley High, visit Miss Mary Ann.
When she heard him, Redmond’s ears perked up like those pointy ones on her border collies.
“He walked in here and just, holy crap—three chromatic octaves and can sing like Ed Sheeran and John Mayer all put together.” she says. “He’s really got a nice instrument. Every once in a while, you get people like that.”
“She teaches you how to use your voice in ways you didn’t know were possible,” Poncin says. “She shows you how to hit notes you didn’t know you could hit and how to breathe right, things like that.”
Those are the tools a vocalist needs—all the great ones were masters at singing from the diaphragm, controlling their breath and carefully phrasing their lines. Redmond’s favorites are some of the best: Phoebe Snow (“I wore out her ‘Harpo’s Blues’”), Chaka Khan, Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin, Jonatha Brooke (“You have to look her up!”), Alison Krauss and Rachelle Ferrell (“One of the best voices on the planet.”).
Closer to home, her favorites include Mary Chapin Carpenter, with whom she’s worked, and the late Eva Cassidy. It’s only fitting that Redmond and Cassidy became friends: Maryland native Cassidy is generally acknowledged as one of the best vocalists of her generation. (An English survey placed her rendition of “Over the Rainbow” ahead of Judy Garland’s version.)
“Eva was my buddy,” Redmond says. “She was just otherworldly with her vocal ability—the sound of her voice, from this whisper to this hair-raising bang. Even if I’d never met her, I’d still say the same thing. She was just amazing.”
Their duet, “Tears In Heaven,” recorded in 1995 at Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood’s fleeting nightclub in Alexandria, remains a soul-shaking experience.
Todd Wright not only discovers top-shelf local talent, but he also writes terrific songs. He and Redmond worked up a duet called “Love Me Anyway” that Wright placed with an agent specializing in shopping songs to other artists.
“Two years go by, and we get a message that Johnny Hallyday wants to do it,” Redmond says. Hallyday is a pop icon in France, where he’s known as “the French Elvis.” A sale to Hallyday is a coup for any songwriter—and he wanted to record it with someone who sings in English.
“And I’m like, ‘I sing in English,’” Redmond says, meekly raising her hand. “But they laughed and said, ‘We want somebody more like Celine Dion,’ and I was like, ‘Good luck with that!’”
A little time passed, and then the email came. Subject line: “SIT DOWN!” Celine Dion—that Celine Dion—agreed to sing the song with Johnny Hallyday, and not only was it going to appear on Hallyday’s record, but it would also appear on Dion’s.
“Love Me Anyway” and the other songs on the discs have gone platinum six times, Redmond says. In the U.S., a platinum record sells 1 million units.
“That’s Todd Wright,” Redmond says. “If he had not been co-writer extraordinaire [with] his fingers on the pulse of music publishers, the song would still be sitting in my basement. I’m terrible at that stuff.”
Redmond and Wright won the 2012 Song of the Year and Songwriter of the Year awards presented by the Washington Area Music Awards—the Wammies—for “Love Me Anyway.”
Redmond has 24 Wammies—one of them was handed to her on stage by Mick Fleetwood, in 1995, the year she collected five—so many that the judging body finally said that someone else had to win those categories once in a while. Now they give her an emeritus award instead. Her trophies are in her basement studio, unassuming and out of the way, otherwise they would overwhelm the students.
♦
Life’s hurdles take all shapes. After walking her dog in the woods of Great Falls in 2008, Redmond noticed a bull’s-eye-shaped rash on her upper arm. She felt like she had a bad flu, and that’s what the physician assistants treated her for.
Then the headaches came. A visit to the emergency room revealed the undiagnosed Lyme disease, which was often severely debilitating. With Redmond, the show must go on—teaching and gigging with the band—but she needed help. Single and living in a log cabin was isolating, but there was this guy …
“Poor guy,” Redmond jokes. “He would call and ask if I needed anything, every day, and he was always there. For two years I was pretty much on the couch, but Mike kept me going.”
Michael McDermott, who earned a law degree so he could be a better expert witness in courtrooms, is the president of the company his father founded, Frank M. McDermott Ltd., which analyzes data in transportation black box recorders.
“He’s really smart and really humble,” she says. “He’s a Photoshop genius, a brilliant photographer, made the guitar he plays. He built a drone. He’s that guy. But he’s just so sweet.”
The Lyme disease, harsh as it sounds, brought them together. Last year, at age 56, Redmond married for the first time.
“I’m the luckiest person,” she says. “For all the hurdles I’ve been through, I’ve found the best partner. The best guy I could ever find.”
Redmond’s Sunday gig at Flanagan’s Harp and Fiddle (4844 Cordell Ave., Bethesda, MD) has been going on for “335 years,” Redmond says. The band these days consists of drummer Deren Blessman, guitarist Dan Leonard and Scott Ambush, bassist for the well-known jazz-fusion band Spyro Gyra.