Titles by: BARBARA MENDELSOHN
BARBARA MENDELSOHN
Josie (aka Barbara) Mendelsohn learned her first French- Canadian songs in the early 1960s. She has played a considerable amount of Quebecois music since, including piano on fiddler Yvon Mimeault's Yetait temps! [1998] and fiddle as a member of Guy Bouchard's group Les tetes de violon at the Festival Memoire et Racines and on their albums Airs tordus /Crooked Tunes [1998] and Les deux rives / Two Shores [2010]. On piano, she has accompanied, among others, fiddlers Lisa Ornstein and her husband Kevin Carr, at contra dances and camps. In San Francisco, she and singer-songwriter Laurie Lewis formed the first all-women's bluegrass band, The Good Ol' Persons, with whom she played mostly banjo, sang, and recorded their eponymous album [1976]. Prior to that, she was a member of and recorded with the Bay Area old-time band The Arkansas Sheiks [1976]. The New Lost City Rambler's John Cohen made a documentary, Musical Holdouts [1976], in which she appeared with the Sheiks, and her hammered-dulcimer playing with them is featured on a cut of Cohen's CD, There is No Eye [2001]. She wrote the book- well, a chapter, anyway-on spoons-playing in How to Play Nearly Everything, Oak Publications [1977]. Josie, Kevin, and their children, Daniel and Molly Carr, recently formed a family band whose repertoire is partly Quebecois. They have performed on the West Coast and in Spain. Josie has won national and international awards in graphic design, typography, and illustration, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. She and Kevin live in the beautiful Applegate Valley in southern Oregon, where she spends much of her time these days oil painting, as well as playing music.