Susan Christie

Susan Christie was a Philadelphia-based folksinger and a one-time member of the Highlanders, that city's top "big-band" folk ensemble of the early '60s. She attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and took easily to the new requirements of the booming folk-rock field in the mid-'60s. She was cheerful and sufficiently accessible as a singer to lend her voice to the song "I Love Onions" (popularized on the Captain Kangaroo show) in 1966. That was enough to get her a chance to cut a brace of demos during the years 1966-1968, comprised of exquisitely beautiful examples of what could only be called acid folk. Her prospective record label was unimpressed with (or, more likely, unprepared for) Christie's melodic yet thoroughly downbeat creations, mostly her unique takes on traditional country and folk material, which included one of the most hauntingly beautiful and eerily scary version of Stan Jones' "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky" that one is likely to ever hear. Her subsequent efforts at getting recorded came to nothing, and Christie has been something of a mystery, as to her fate and career, ever since. In 2006, eight of her mid-'60s demos were assembled for a CD release by B-Music, thus pulling Christie out of an obscurity far greater than that ever experienced by, say, Vashti Bunyan, and exposing her music to an audience two generations removed from the one for which she was aiming (and if only a downtown New York gig and the attendant press attention could follow, as happened for Bunyan...).
© Bruce Eder /TiVo