Kaley Lane Eaton

Arts & Culture

Composer and singer-songwriter Kaley Lane Eaton’s new chamber folk song cycle Maverick Granddaughter imagines the lives of her maternal line: six generations of only daughters born and raised in the Boulder Valley of present-day Montana, challenged and shaped by the land they encountered over a span of 165 years. Like the folk songs, family stories, and local wisdom that inspire it, Maverick Granddaughter rewrites the romance of the Wild West and presents us with realism: a humbling equality where the land wins, and the people on the side of it prevail.

This piece honors the many first peoples of the Plains and Rockies, who were there for thousands of years before Eaton’s ancestors, and whose knowledge helped so many to survive this harsh, magnificent and complex land in a deeply violent time.

In her poem, “Petrified”, Eaton imagines her third great-grandmother, Susan, as she first saw the Rockies from her covered wagon, age five:

When I first saw the Tetons
I saw freedom beyond
I saw hope
I saw petrified man

Opening up the night will be a world premiere of a new piece by Tom Baker, Prairie Stillness. Prairie Stillness is the first of three extended songs by Tom Baker forming a kind of mini-opera-folk-song-cycle “Prairie/Desert/Mountain.” The songs are ruminations on the pioneering migration across the American West in the 1800s. They are about hardship and perseverance on a very personal, intimate level. All three songs are preceded by short preludes called “Walking Music.” The lyrics for Prairie Stillness were written by poet Lara Candland in 1995 for an opera collaboration with Baker that never materialized. But this small, “pocket-opera” of songs has finally begun to take shape, 30 years later. Prairie Stillness marks the journey of a family of five crossing the midwest prairie on their journey to the west, to a new life.

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