Center Valley Folk Singer to Release Fourth Album

Add two parts Joni Mitchell for taste, a cup of Lucinda Williams for flavor, a dash of Patti Smith for tang and a sprinkle of Carole King.

Bake for 10 years, ice it with four independent albums and top it off with a juicy national songwriting award. When hot, she will serve 6.3 billion people.

Fill up on the folk you’ve grown to love and finish it off with an enticing Jackie Tice dessert.

“If you asked me 20 years ago if I’d have record deals, songs in movies and radio and all those career-oriented values and fame, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Jackie said. “Although they’re nice to have, the most important is the art of creating music and the space in life to do that…”

Jackie Tice, of Center Valley, will be a catalyst in the evolution of folk music, and with her fourth independent release, “Second Skin,” on the way, she’s not packing up her guitar anytime soon.

Jackie began her folk-singing success at 17, plucking the guitar and writing down songs. It would take two years before she was confident enough to hit the bar and club circuit, playing original tunes as well as folk-oriented songs from Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Carole King and Paul Simon. “That was the music I cut my teeth on, the beginning of my performing and songwriting.” “I waited until my own songs held up in sets, performing them here and there,” she said.

Jackie would play the bar circuit for 10 years, even during the raising of her two children, Sage and Jason, in her late 20’s. Yet a point came when she wasn’t comfortable with the setting anymore.

“I wanted to go to the next level, performing my own music at folk clubs and festivals,” she said.

A move to the Lehigh Valley in 1994 would, unbeknownst to Jackie, help to change her life. It is where she found her element and people to help commit her to her vision.

In 1996, she won the Kerrville New Folk Award for Emerging Songwriters. It was a prestigious, national award for the folk genre - and her piece, “The Marijo Tonight,” a song about Dublin, Ireland barflies and their goings-on, was selected out of a field of 800 entries.

“It’s about how they view the world, how we have choice to change or not,” she said. “You view choice through the eyes of different characters in the song.”

A year later, Jackie would relish in the release of her proudest effort, “Blue Coyote,” which received international accolades. It was released to 100 world-wide college and commercial radio stations and reviewed in Italy, Canada, Australia, and by Acoustic Guitar Magazine and Sing Out!

She toured the East and Midwest in support of it.

Her sophomore effort, “Let in the Joy,” ended up being used by psychotherapists to create catharsis in patients. “The record was geared toward the consciousness-raising demographic,” she said. “There are a lot of positive, uplifting songs.”

It was her hobby of painting that inspired her third recording, “In These Bones,” which was recorded live at Godfrey Daniels Listening Club in 2001. Each of its 13 songs reflects 13 of her paintings.

“As I was painting, I heard prose in my head—lyrics, as if the painting themselves had stories to tell,” she said.

Even on of her songs, “Domestic Delinquent,” was included in Random House’s “Life’s A Stitch: Humorous Writings by Contemporary Women.” The collection includes poems and songs by Delia Ephron, Kathy Najimy, Gloria Steinem and Christine Lavin.

Jackie, who also is a massage therapist and teaches piano and guitar, says it’s a big life and she wants to get as much out of each breath as she can. The gift of life is too precious to waste.

“Who you are through art is what’s being transmitted to others,” she said. “Who you are is really unique. I’m moved to write songs, and if it moves others, then I’m doing what is my purpose in life.”

Her goal is to stay committed to her vision and to continue doing it the rest of her life.
“The important thing is to stay committed to my truth and my art.”

--Tony DiDomizio, June 2004