If you want to chart out Susie Glaze's music career, you won't have much need for a ruler. Straight lines have been precious few in the path the bluegrass singer ---- who performs at 12:15 p.m. March 27 at San Diego IndieFest VI, and later that night at Wynola Pizza Express ---- has taken in her lifelong love affair with music.
Moving to New York City from her native Tennessee in 1978, when she graduated from college with a theater degree, Glaze said she found an agent and then took any and all jobs her agent could get her.
"I did everything: cruise ships, regional theater out of New York, supper clubs, national tours, whatever came my way," Glaze said by phone from her Los Angeles-area home last week.
Her time in New York culminated (and ended) with a two-year run as Mary Jane Wilkes in "Big River," joining the cast shortly after the show moved to Broadway from the La Jolla Playhouse in 1985.
And yet, after getting a foot in the door of a Tony Award-winning Broadway hit ---- a development that could have opened all kinds of doors for an aspiring singer and actress ---- Glaze and her husband at the time up and moved to Southern California.
"As soon as it closed, we moved. I was ready for a life change, and we just discovered Southern California. ... My husband was pursuing a career in television and motion pictures acting, and I was ready to settle down and learn about other things than a career.
"We ended up breeding Australian shepherds and competing them" in agility competitions, she said. "We got in on the ground floor. They're a herding breed, and they took to it so perfectly."
She wouldn't return to music for more than a decade, when she was asked to join a Southern California-based bluegrass and old-timey band, the Eight Hand String Band.
"It wasn't any 'big bang'" moment she said of joining the band. "I've known these friends, who were also in New York theater. The guys started a group for their own pleasure because they were in film and TV, they were directing theater, they were doing things in entertainment ---- but they didn't get their music fix.
"I started wanting to play with them and they graciously let me come into their boy cave!"
While Glaze said she enjoyed her time as an actress, she said being a singer offers her experiences acting couldn't.
"It's terrifying to be onstage when you have no persona to hide behind, as in theater. It's much more revealing,"
she said.
While Glaze struck out on her own a few years later, she's not strayed musically from the bluegrass and Appalachian roots of that band, although she said bluegrass purists can put a damper on the fun the music should possess.
"If you call yourself bluegrass in Southern California, you have to have a banjo player and three-finger roll and play songs that everyone already knows.
"We don't do that. We're writing new music" ---- albeit new music that sounds vintage, she pointed out.
She said Rob Carlson, the lead guitarist of her current band, the HiLonesome Band, is also their lead songwriter. Of his music, she said it hearkens to the "influences before bluegrass. The stuff that came before, that influenced Bill Monroe, is a vast body of work that really comes originally from all the old immigrants to America, from England, Ireland and Scotland."
Susie Glaze and the HiLonesome Band
When: 12:15 p.m. March 27
Where: Women's History Stage, San Diego IndieFest VI, University Avenue and 29th Street, San Diego
Tickets: $22-$25; free, children 8 and younger
Info: 800-486-9957 or sdindiefest.com
When: 6 p.m. March 27
Where: Wynola Pizza Express, 4355 Highway 78, three miles west of Julian
Admission: Free for diners
Info: 760-765-1004
Web: susieglaze.com
