Katie Henry is an award-winning songwriter, a refined performer, a teacher, and a mom. She grew up performing in Alaska with her father, influenced by a quirky and eclectic mix of musical generes from early childhood on. She lived and performed for years in the Pacific Northwest, spent some time in Chicago starting a family and working in a genetics research lab, and is now based in New Hampshire. Her distinctive rhythmic fingerpicking guitar style is largely rooted in the jazz and blues-y guitar of her father, Pat Henry, and she plucks a passionate clawhammer banjo with new old-time sensiblility. Her vast vocal landscape and well-crafted songs offer a fluid vision of social, political, and personal experience with attitude and grace. "I grew up playing and performing with my dad," she says, "our kitchen was always filled with music and characters weaving riffs and tales and wisdom long into the night. Somewhere around that table I absorbed a deep love of words - their shape, their sound, the way they line up and tease and hold hands when you put them to music."

Katie has performed in many of the Pacific Northwest's most respected venues as a solo act as well as with the four-woman-songwriter band Babes with Axes, with Women with Hair, and with Joanne Rand and the Little Big Band. A longtime favorite of the Alaska Folk Festival and the Oregon Country Fair, Katie was featured in a French National Tlelvision Documentary on the "new Alaskan folk musician" and on the nationally broadcast The Best of the Alaska Folk Festival. She has appeared on numerous other artists' recordings and several compilation recordings including Eugene Folk and The Best of the Fairbanks Summer Folk Festival. She has shared billing with many popular contemporary folk musicians, including Greg Brown, Ani DiFranco, and Dan Hicks. Her evocative and many-textured voice, powerful rhythmic finger picking style, claw hammer banjo, and spunky, impressionistic songs have earned her a place as "one of the most popular folk singers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley" and throughout the Pacific Northwest (Northwest Independent News).

Katie's first solo CD, Bears in the City, was deemed one of the finest new acoustic recordings to be released out of the Northwest in 1995, and receives continued national airplay from Boston to California. This sparkling collection of songs, like Katie's live performance, is marked by an immediate intimacy and strength of presence which have drawn and captivated audiences wherever she plays. Independently produced and recorded in Eugene, Oregon, it features many of that region's finest musicians, including Gregg Biller, Jeff Martin, Tom Hughes, Pat Henry (Katie's father), and fellow Babes with Axes members Laura Kemp, Debbie Diedrich, and T.R. Kelley. Babes With Axes has also released two critically-acclaimed live CDs, W.O.W. Live Babes! (1995), and Live Axe! (1997), which receive continued airplay across the country. The group is currently working on a studio recording, Solo Axe.

Katie Henry 's "highly poetic songs captivate the listener and take them on a remarkable journey of discovery" (Sing Out! 1997). They span a breadth of imagery and story that bends the mind with sweetness and feisty wit, and reverberates with sensual experience that is "as big as all Alaska" (Eugene Folklore Society).

In addition to performing original adult contemporary folk music, she is the founder of Laughing Tree Music, a teaching and performance business, with the goal of encouraging joyful musical development in young children and their families through hands-on musical experience and play. Katie conducts musical playgroups and family music workshops, performs, teaches Music Togetherâ classes for Green Mountain Family Music, and facilitates children’s fundamental music education at preschools, early childhood programs, and libraries throughout the Upper Connecticut River Valley. Participating programs include the Orange County Parent-Child Center, Randolph Success By Six, Claremont Even Start, Dartmouth Child Care Center, Hampshire Cooperative Nursery School, Tiny Treasures Preschool, Magic Mountain, and The Family Place in Norwich. She also teaches private guitar and banjo lessons to children and adults.

"Dynamite!" -Victory Review

"Captivating and riveting songs." -Notes From the Center

Katie's "highly poetic songs captivate the listener and take them on a remarkable journey of discovery." Sing Out!

"This is Real Writing." -Don Ross, Don Ross Productions

"Katie Henry has created music whose subtlety, depth, and beauty make it a great pleaseure to listen to."

Chris Roth, Heartsong Review.

"Katie Henry's new album, Bears in the City, reveals a captivating poet and song stylist with sophisticated arrangements and superb production values. This album is an instant Northwest classic!"

-Mike Myer, Acoustic Junction, KRVM, Eugene OR

"Bears in the City is the best recording ever to come out of Eugene."

-Kobi Lucas, Friends and Neighbors, KLCC, Eugene OR

"Katie Henry is a treasure. A powerful performer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, her pure, blues-tinged voice and simple, elegant arrangements slip into our everyday world, disguised like bears in the city, to report back new insights on such commonplaces as hopscotch and haircuts and roadside cafes, loving, hurting, and the healing power of a waltz."

-Frank Gosar, Saturday Cafe, KLCC, Eugene OR

"The ease with which she puts forth her well-written thoughts in clear concise tunes and her clear, even vocal performances are the mark of a true professional with a bright future before her."

-Northwest Independent Music News

Katie Henry

Bears in the City

"Katie henry creates folk music that delves below the surface: lyrically compelling, instrumentally rich and largely acoustic, socially and ecologically aware and at the same time an expression of the artist's unique vision. Sometimes jazzy or bluesy, Katie's wide-ranging, sonorous voice perfectly expresses the introspective complexity of her world, taking us into landscapes of personal experience with music that is memorable, profound, able to evoke deep feeling.

It's hard to choose favorites among these songs, their high quality is consistent. They range in theme from emergence from childhood (Hopscotch), to love (Emerald) and the pain it can bring (Sometimes a Waltz, Shoot the Moon), to hairstyles (Hairsay) and social expectations of women as childbearers (Lonely Grain of Corn). The haunting Long Way To Texas is a response to a parent's illness; Dun-bar's is a humorous portrait of a Texas lunch spot; Look Higher Up, a protest against federally-sponsored environmental destruction; Folk Festival Song, a celebration of musical community; Bears in the City, an inspired look at the veneer of urban civilization, "nature in disguise." Seek and You Shall Find closes the album with a hopeful acceptance of inevitable change.

Katie Henry has created music whose subtlety, depth, and beauty make it a great pleasure to listen to. -Chris Roth

For information and booking:

Laughing Tree Music

420 North Main Street, West Lebanon, NH 03784

(603) 643-7675

email: khenry@efn.org

Web: http://www.efn.org/~khenry