Amy Speace will make her long-overdue Sundilla debut on Friday, October 22. This one will take place in Opelika at The Sound Wall. Showtime is 7:30, and you can get advance tickets for just $20 at Spicer’s Music, Ross House Coffee, and online at sundillamusic.com; admission at the door will be $25. If the weather cooperates, this will be an outdoor concert. The audience is welcome to bring their own favorite food or beverage.
Amy Speace might be a newcomer to Sundilla, but she is anything but in the world in which Sundilla exists. Amy is a folk singer, timeless and classic, and a bit out of her own era. “She has one of the richest and loveliest voices in the genre and her songs are luxuriously smart,” writes journalist Craig Havighurst (host of Nashville’s “Music City Roots“). “She’s profoundly personal yet also a bit mythic.”
Since her discovery in 2006 by folk-pop icon Judy Collins, who signed her to her own imprint Wildflower Records, Speace has been heralded as one of the leading voices of the new generation of American folk singers. Her song “The Weight of the World” was named as the #4 Best Folk Song of the last decade by NYC’s premiere AAA radio station, WFUV and was recorded by Judy Collins.
From her beginnings in New York City as a classically-trained actress with The National Shakespeare Company to the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village where she began playing her original songs to her move to East Nashville in 2009 to her most recent release, “Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne”, what ties all of her work together is a palpable empathy for the small struggles of the human condition. Rock critic Dave Marsh, long a fan, wrote “Amy Speace’s songs hang together like a short story collection, united by a common vantage point and common predicaments…it’s a gift to hear a heart so modest even when it’s wide open.” Her songs have been recorded by Judy Collins, Red Molly, Memphis Hall of Fame bluesman Sid Selvidge, and many others. In early 2020 the title track of “Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne” was named “International Song of the Year” by the UK Americana Association. And her 2021 CD, “There Used to Be Horses Here,” might be her best yet.
It took so long to get Amy Speace to Sundilla that she almost outgrew us, and you don’t want to let this opportunity pass; you might never see her play this close and this affordably. So join the lucky ones at The Sound Wall on Friday, October 22 — outdoors if we’re extra-lucky — to see Amy Speace at Sundilla for the first time.