Jane Voss is back, stronger than ever, drawing increasing attention and praise with a brand-new recording, Farther Down the Road. The new disc is a tour de force of roots-based original songwriting and singing, running the gamut from old-time country to rhythm-and-blues.
Farther Down the Road has seen strong alternative radio play and DJ response internationally. It charted among the National Folk Music Top 50 for two months, and has made other top-ten and top-twenty lists around the country. The album has also elicited warm praise from such periodicals as Sing Out! and Music Matters Review, which named the disc among its “Picks,” and a “thumbs-up” rating from the U.K.’s Folk Roots magazine.
Farther Down the Road showcases Voss’s formidable strengths as singer and songwriter. She works from a broad palette of American Roots Music, moving from one genre or style to another with utter naturalness and ease. Her use of Roots idioms is no gimmick, but rather her native and natural expression, borne of influences and loves dating back to her Midwestern childhood.
Her singing, says Dave Van Ronk, “is a model of passion and control.” She’s been described as “a force of nature” (Steve Gillette & Cindy Mangsen); “a tiny powerhouse of energy” (Old Colony Memorial, Kingston, Mass.); and as “an American Piaf” (Laurie Lewis, Ana Gilda Leon).
In performance, she is ably aided and abetted by her longtime partner, the extraordinary pianist Hoyle Osborne, who is known for his solo work in the field of ragtime. Osborne is also the producer of Farther Down the Road.
Farther Down the Road is her first all-original album, but Voss’s songs have long had an international following, and have been recorded and performed by a variety of other artists over the past twenty years, including Dave Van Ronk, Kate Brislin & Jody Stecher, Michael Cooney, Chuck Pyle, and Rosalie Sorrels. Among her most-covered songs to date are “To All My Friends in Far-Flung Places,” “The Thing That Makes You Beautiful,” and “Keep in Mind (That I Love You).”
At once personal and universal, her songs stand out for their honesty and emotive power, not less than for their inventive, memorable melodies, and lyrics lush with alliteration and internal rhyme. Her subject matter is wide-ranging, but she is perhaps at her best writing about hard luck and hard times, and the soul’s journey back from the cliff’s-edge of despair, with determination and sheer force of will, to hard-won hope. Laurie Lewis says, “Jane Voss is searingly honest ... She describes some difficult milestones on her journey down this road and turns ‘a long slow season’ into art and a tribute to the resilience of the spirit.”
Over the course of her career, Voss has time and again found herself out ahead of the trends.
Born and raised in Ohio, she began her performing career in San Francisco in 1970, and took to the road in 1972, appearing at folk festivals in the U.S. and Canada and becoming a familiar presence in the folk music scene on both coasts. Inspired by the music of the Original Carter Family, she quickly earned a reputation as one of the foremost interpreters of old-time country music, before that style had a wide following. This part of her career culminated in her 1976 release, An Album of Songs (Bay), which has been called “hands down, among the finest albums ever made by an interpreter of old-time country songs” (musicHound folk: The Essential Album Guide).
By this time, she was already broadening her stylistic reach as a performer to reflect the diversity of her influences, adding old-time popular, jazz, and classic blues to her repertoire. In 1976, she formed her enduring partnership with Hoyle Osborne. Her work with Osborne also took her into the territory of swing, a style now enjoying a new surge in popularity. As a duo, Voss & Osborne recorded four albums, to repeated critical acclaim, including Get to the Heart (Green Linnet), which won a Stereo Review Record of the Year Award in 1982, and the 1990 CD Sparkle and Shine (Front Hall). The duo’s recordings might be the very definition of “Americana” — only no one had a name for it then.
Jane Voss has been featured, with Osborne, on “Mountain Stage,” “Fresh Air,” “West Coast Live,”and “All Things Considered.” She’s appeared at numerous festivals, including the Great Hudson River Revival, Old Songs, and the Winnipeg, Toronto, Mariposa, and Philadelphia Folk festivals, and in concerts coast-to-coast at venues ranging from The Great American Music Hall (San Francisco) to Caffe Lena (Saratoga Springs).
