Songwriters in Concert at Herndon Gallery

Wednesday, May 18 at 7 p.m.

Cosy Sheridan and TR Ritchie have between them won most of the major songwriting contests in the U.S., among them the Kerrville Folk Festival, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, The Sisters Folk Festival, The Napa Valley Folk Festival, The Silverton Folk Festival and the Snowbird Mountain Festival in Utah.

Often traveling together but also performing as solo artists, for the past 20 years they have toured the U.S., singing their songs in coffeehouses and concert halls, house concerts and festivals.

Sheridan has been called "one of the era's finest and most thoughtful singer-songwriters.” A storyteller as well as a songwriter; she weaves children’s fables into metaphors of modern adulthood: The Little Engine That Could talks with Ferdinand The Bull. Her modern renditions of mythology (we meet Hades the biker) have won her fans and praise from the press. The Cornell Folksong Society wrote: “Sheridan is frank, feisty, sublimely and devilishly funny. She fuses myth with modern culture; Persephone with Botox.”

She first appeared on the folk scene in 1992 when she won the songwriting contests at the Kerrville Folk Festival and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and released her critically acclaimed CD Quietly Led on Waterbug Records. Folk Music Quarterly wrote: “When she’s accepting her Grammy, we can say we knew her when.”

Since then she’s released 5 more CDs, taught songwriting at workshops and camps across the country and written a one-woman-show entitled The Pomegranate Seed – An Exploration of Appetite, Body-Image and Myth in Modern Culture.

Ritchie, who learned his musical chops as a street singer in Seattle’s Pike Street Market in the early 80’s, is a master of understated yet powerful imagery in his songs. Dubbed a “classic folk troubadour” by Performing Songwriter magazine, Ritchie’s roots-influenced music has a timeless appeal. This past July he was invited to accompany Alexandra Cousteau and her Blue Legacy crew of photographers and writers on a trip though Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River to add musical perspective to the National-Geographic-sponsored expedition. The crew filmed him singing “Let This Mighty River Roll,” his song for Glen Canyon.

Sheridan and Ritchie met at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1992, and moved to Moab, Utah in 1994. In 2008 they co-founded the Moab Folk Camp, a folk and acoustic camp that takes place each November in conjunction with the Moab Folk Festival.