Mary Lee Kortes Tickets

“As a writer, you get in a zone. You get possessed by something. If you're lucky,” says Mary Lee Kortes.

Kortes has found herself possessed by many different forces over the arc of her 25-year career, be it as the lauded front-woman of Mary Lee’s Corvette, a solo artist, author, or social worker. Sometimes the possession comes in the form of Bob Dylan, whose 1975 classic Blood on the Tracks she covered as a live album in 2002, and later revisited in her 2018 non-fiction collection, Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob. Sometimes, as a short story writer and novelist, it’s by the way fiction roots itself in emotional truths. Other times it’s by music's ability to be used as a tool in an expressive arts therapy program she created. All of the acclaimed songwriter and performer’s endeavors find themselves connected by the same thread: a deeply empathetic understanding of, and belief in, the power of stories to bring people together.

Will Anybody Know That I Was Here: The Songs of Beulah Rowley, Kortes’s new stunning and immersive album, was born from one of those all-encompassing possessions, from a feeling she couldn’t shake, one she had to write through to fully understand. The singer-songwriter was on tour in England, promoting her 2006 album Love Loss & Lunacy, and already thinking about what her next album would be. She knew she wanted to expand upon a typical album format, wanted it to be less a batch of loosely connected songs and more a cohesive work with a sense of character and purpose to it that could incorporate her love for writing fiction. “I went to sleep with all of this on my mind,” she says, “and I woke up in the morning with this woman in my head named Beulah Rowley, a depression-era singer-songwriter, from the Midwest like me, and I immediately started writing the song ‘Born a Happy Girl.’” There was something interesting there, she thought, a spark in this dream of a woman she felt compelled to explore and understand on a deeper level. She finished her tour and came home to write the biography of Beulah Rowley—and her complete songbook.

The story Kortes wrote is one of tragic brevity: Beulah Rowley found regional fame throughout the 1930s playing at county fairs and her father’s Michigan movie theater, performing original songs she wrote and stored locked inside a custom-made, wrought-iron piano bench. At just twenty-one years old, she died in a house fire with her husband and infant daughter—but the piano bench, and her songs, survived, and would be passed down over generations and through flea markets before ending up with Mary Lee Kortes. On her tenth birthday, Kortes asked her father to open the bench, and came upon all of Beulah’s handwritten melodies and lyrics, alongside her personal diaries. It was then she decided to one day bring her story and songs back to the world where they belonged.