Shannon Murray: Press/Ravings

"like Angelina Jolie with a guitar"

You kick Ani's ass.

The best folk musician to come out of Minnesota since Dyl----actually, ever.

House Concert for Shannon Murray


The May 18th House Concert hosted by Mark Hobbs and myself (Jo Parrish) went wonderfully. Shannon Murray was outstanding. She has a contagious and sincere energy...Although she has a sweet, yet powerful voice....I found myself not only listening to the melodic flow but to the actual words she was singing...

Words...we all use them...I say it isn't always what you say but how you say it...as musicians there are opportunities for us to reach people on a level that often leave people absorbing, savoring and remembering what those words are and possibly even understanding the intent of those words that may otherwise not stick. I tend to let some words in and then, discard them just as fast as they enter...Many of Shannon's words stuck...

Shannon has some pretty spectacular things to say through her music...if anyone reading this ever has an opportunity to go see Shannon perform please don't miss it...I will remember Shannon's words for a long time...She's a powerful young lady...probably more powerful then even she knows....

Folk troubadour gives new voice to old music
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Just when you might begin to think that radical folk music is a thing of the distant, idealistic past, a little red songbird arrives to say it ain’t so.
Not a cardinal, but a young woman troubadour named Shannon Murray. With guitar and barefooted verve, Murray has been traveling the Midwest carrying the banner for feminism, workers-of-the-world ethos and punk spirit.
“I feel the weight of 500 years of progress,” she sings in a typical song about nature, death and Wal-Mart. “…revolution is on my mind.”
Murray, a native of small-town Minnesota, was studying clarinet at Wichita State University when she got the urge to ditch school, hit the road and follow her passion for bumming around in the great long lineage of Woody Guthrie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Michelle Shocked and their folk-singing kin.
She landed at Bloomsday Books in the Crossroads on a recent Monday night, playing for a small audience, young folks and graybeards alike.
On this night she has a cold, a remnant of a bout of mononucleosis (“too much making out,” she says). Yet despite that and a few memory lapses, she produces a raw, fetching, neophyte set that ranges from labor tunes by the legendary Joe Hill to her own social rants. She wraps a light, melodic soprano around punk-poetic raps. She strums an acoustic guitar and bends her raggedy-bluejeaned leg in time.
She used to think Guthrie was kind of a reactionary drag, believing that “This Land Is Your Land” was a celebration of property rights until she discovered the verses that most people never sing. (In the squares of the city — In the shadow of the steeple/ Near the relief office — I see my people/ And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’/ If this land’s still made for you and me.)
Murray sings about aliens, authority and abortion. One song honors a grassroots movement of Chicago women who created an underground network of abortion services in the years before Roe v. Wade. (“The capitalist medical industry will never take care of you or me,” goes a refrain.)
Another evokes the injustice over the rape of a friend and apparent complicity on the part of an uncaring sheriff’s deputy.
“I wrote a song,” Murray says after playing it. “It doesn’t do enough, but it’s something.”
Shop owner Tom Shawver blurts out at that moment that “this is what we grew up with,” meaning a generation of boomers who listened to Guthrie and the Weavers and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and found substance and compassion in their songs. The happy implication, of course, is that political folk singing was still alive in an age of mass-media dominance and red-state power, where not all shades of red were related.
For her part, Murray has not much interest in her fellow Minnesotan, Dylan, but points to Baez as “the mother of us all.”
Murray invites singalongs on “Dump the Bosses Off Your Back” and “Solidarity Forever,” a leftist anthem of old.
Murray is no capitalist greed-hog. She passes the hat and gives away her recent CDs for donations. In that she is aligned with such organized anarchists as the Riot Folk collective (“Making folk a threat again!”; see riotfolk.revolt.org) and the Solidarity! Revolutionary Center and Radical Library in Lawrence (lawrencesolidarity.net).
And she does have a Web site where she keeps in touch with fans, posts her tour schedule, invites feedback and sells her recordings (shannonmurray.com).
Hallelujah, she’s a bum.