Utah Green, folk singer/songwriter

by David Shelton
(Casar NC)

Utah Green, folk singer/songwriter

Kerry 'Utah' Green was born in 1982 in Miami, Florida. She moved to Asheville, NC in 2000, the same year her father gave her his guitar for a birthday present. Thus began her musical career, and since then she has written about 40 songs, learned to play the guitar, banjo and harmonica in a toe-tapping old time folk style, and performed her music in such distant places as Ketchikan, Alsaka and San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico. This summer (2008) she will be performing in Europe and the Middle East for the first time.

Her early influences have been the music of John Prine, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, to name a few, and her own music resonates with an original voice and style. Each song is different and stands on its own, but can be generally categorized as funny and quirky such as 'Tomatoes' and 'Nothing of the Sort', romantic and dreamy such as 'Love' and 'Diamond Road', complex, emotional, deep and reflective, like 'Gray Splendor' and 'Lost in Space' and combinations of all the above. There is wonderful imagery in her poetry that stimulates one's imagination and it can be very moving in a positive sense. It is sometimes a challenge to capture and comprehend the multiple meanings of some of her verse, but it's worth the effort.

As a performer, she seems able to sense the mood of the audience and to play the right song at the right time. She connects with her audience on a personal level, makes one feel as if she's singing for you alone. She is low key, and doesn't get excessively dramatic or passionate, which, thus understated, lends more force to the words she sings. There is no separation between her and the audience as there often is with popular artists.

She has available one 'official' cd called Totem, an 'unofficial' (home made) cd called Rhyming Words, and several individual songs which will be on her next cd, due to be produced in the fall of 2008, tentatively titled 'Fortune'.