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By Kathleen Litchfield
Special to the Rappahannock News
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Anna Wolfe remembers making up songs as a little girl, while playing beneath the summer sun on her parents’ Kirtland, Ohio horse farm.
She even remembers her first-ever performance, in her day care class, at age three. The blond-haired, blue-eyed Annie, donned in brand new, trainengineer overalls and a striped jacket, stood in front of her classmates on the rug and sang, “She’ll Be Cornin’ Round the Mountain.”
“What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was writing songs all the way back then,” laughed the 31-yearold singer/songwriter, whose latest compact disc, “I Never Was Cool,” has won rave reviews.
Wolfe’s talent has been compared to that of folk s tars Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. Rob Williams of the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Crosswinds Weekly described her voice as “a potent instrument” and Michael Koster of Santa Fe’s Thirsty Ear wrote that it ranges “from whispery folky to a compelling, almost bluesy holler.” They reviewed her performances in New Mexico where she lived before coming here.
Wolfe, now a resident of Slate Mills, has come a long way from the elementary school days she spent strums ming her father’s nylonstringed guitar and taking occasional voice lessons.
Hailing from a creative family, Wolfe has performed live since high school, when she made her own four-track tape with a musician friend and won a scholarship that paid for studio time.
After two years at Emerson College in Boston, Mass., she returned home and performed regularly at Cleveland-area coffeehouses and pubs. Here, she made two additional recordings before moving to Albuquerque where she played with two short-lived bands. In 1999, she hired studio musicians and recorded her latest compact disc, “I Never Was Cool.”
After three years of successful Albuquerque-area touring with her band, “Anna Wolfe and the Hounds of Carlisle,” Wolfe said she began feeling limited by the venues in the desert. She also missed the trees and the rural environment of her childhood.
Last summer, she and her husband, Philip Vaandrager, set out across the country in their KV on a solo tour of small, East Coast venues.
It was during this tour that Wolfe fell in love with the Shenandoah Mountains, while attending one of famed singer/songwriter Paul Reisler’s and Julie Portman’s intensive, weeklong Song Camps in Little Washington.
“I had met Paul at a song school in Lyons, Colorado the summer before and he was one of the many teachers I found extremely inspiring,” said Wolfe, who plays guitar and piano.
“Being a songwriter is a quirky
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