|
Lovin'
That Lonesome Sound: Wearing a prim, flowered summer dress and sitting in a kitchen as spotless as a laboratory, Kim Cyr seems a modern-day June Cleaver — the quintessential homemaker. On a nearby wall hang the requisite family photos. The hospitable hostess offers her guests coffee or a cup of tea. Then come the first hints that Ward and the Beaver aren't just around the corner: Cyr pads around her rustic Salem home in bare feet and gleefully admits she has a housekeeper and doesn't like to cook. Another more obvious sign is the twanging and nasally sounding music issuing from the nearby living room. A visitor might start to wonder if the host is even aware of the sound until Cyr explains that she listens to it all the time because it has long been her muse and passion. “It sounds like something old and country,” she says, a faraway look in her eye. “It makes me think of the mountains.” As founder and president of the Connecticut Bluegrass Music Foundation, Cyr, for the past several years, has served as the fulcrum for all things bluegrass in Connecticut. Until recently, she hosted radio and cable television shows focusing on the music; she went into local elementary schools to teach young children about the musical genre, and now she's working on developing a DVD for libraries to use to introduce people to bluegrass music. Also through the bluegrass foundation, Cyr promotes and hosts a series of bluegrass concerts at a family friend's barn in Salem. For a while she held them at Evans Hall at Connecticut College in New London, but it was tough filling the bigger venue. She tried small house sessions for a time before convincing David Bingham, a retired doctor who lives in Salem, to let her use his small barn on White Birch Road. For the past two years, her Salem Valley Barn Concerts series has drawn big-name bluegrass musicians from across the country and has begun to draw national attention. Cyr and her bluegrass association were recently featured in a New York Times article. Cyr says the barn has become the perfect setting for bluegrass concerts. It holds about 70 people, usually sells out each month, and provides the fitting country ambience that bluegrass evokes. The events are informal affairs, but that's OK by Cyr. In fact, it's a reflection of the down-home style of the music and the musicians. People bring their own coolers and eat and drink at the concerts. And while she may eschew housework, for her bluegrass concerts every four weeks Cyr cleans the barn each time to ready it for its Friday night performance. Cyr earns nothing from all that work. She asks for a $15 donation from those who attend the concerts, and all of the money goes directly to the musicians. Bigger name performers bring in $20 per person. The names Ricky Simpson and Wyatt Rice may not mean much to most people in Connecticut, where bluegrass is commonly associated with folk music and neither musical form is burning up the music charts. But those names are icons of modern bluegrass and they are to Cyr what Jessica Simpson and Jesse McCartney are to pop music fans. They are also among the top bluegrass acts she has booked for her barn concerts. “Being a promoter is the ultimate groupie fantasy,” Cyr says. Michael LaRocque, a bluegrass musician from Bristol who has worked with Cyr on educational programs in local schools, said she provides a valuable venue for bands and musicians in an area of the country not known for a deep connection to bluegrass. “There really aren't many venues here in Connecticut for bluegrass except for a few festivals and the barn concerts Kim promotes,” LaRocque said. “And there aren't many people like Kim who bring it to the schools. If she can get kids interested in playing some of these (acoustic) instruments, it would be good because those really aren't instruments played in school bands.” So how did a Connecticut Yankee and former pharmacy and nursing major, a total “left-brain” kind of thinker who works as a pharmaceutical consultant, become such a devotee of bluegrass music? Cyr thanks family for that. An only child, Cyr was exposed to elements of bluegrass at an early age. Her father played the banjo, and her parents used to take her to folk concerts when she was little. Other family members who lived nearby played acoustical instruments as well. She and her husband, Gregory Cyr, and the couple's 12-year-old daughter, Taylor, live on Gungy Road. Surrounded by woods and set at the end of a long driveway, Cyr and her family live in the home her father, Donald Urbanik, built decades ago. The property is part of a larger parcel of land that has been in her family's possession for years and on which extended members of the family still live. “It's like a compound out here,” Cyr says. Until recently, both of her parents lived in an apartment above the garage. Her mother, Frances Urbanik, died in July after battling cancer for several years. Cyr's deep sense of family ties and tradition are partly what drew her to bluegrass, a musical genre steeped in the traditions of the South and extended families. It wasn't always her passion, though. She came of age in the 1980s and confesses a brief flirtation with pop music. “I loved REO Speedwagon. I used to go to all their concerts,” she says. But after spending part of her early college years in Tennessee, where bluegrass is so prevalent, Cyr was hooked. It's not just the “high lonesome vocals” of the singers that draws her to the music, though that's part of it, Cyr says. It's also the history of the genre, it's unique American sound, and its reflection of a simpler time and lifestyle that make her such a passionate advocate. Bluegrass, she patiently explains, developed in the 1940s in Kentucky by a local group called Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. Most people think of Appalachia and moonshine when they hear bluegrass, but its roots derive from the traditional music of Scotland and Ireland; music immigrants from those the countries brought here. She admits that the nasally quality of the singing is an acquired taste, but it reminds her of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the romantic qualities of the south. “I still think someday I'll return there, get a little house on the side of a mountain and live there. That's my dream.” She doesn't, however, play a musical instrument or sing. She tried for a time to learn, but gave it up because “it took some of the enjoyment of the music out of it for me.” Her daughter, Taylor, however, now plays the mandolin. Cyr figures she has a more important role in bluegrass than performing it. “You need someone like me who's not a musician to concentrate on promoting, so the musicians can be musicians,” she says. “I just want to listen to it.” She's All That. |
Click
on photos to enlarge.
Kim Cyr poses before one of the Bluegrass barn concerts she produces.
Bluegrass musicians Laurie Lewis & Tom Rozum perform at a Salem Barn concert.
Kim Cyr, 38, lives in Salem, married with one daughter. President and founder of the Connecticut Bluegrass Music Association. Pharmaceutical Consultant NeighborCare Inc., based in Windsor.
Medical consultant Kim Cyr, right, talks to nursing supervisor Brenda Hovanec, left, during a recent visit to the Village Manor Health Care facility in Plainfield. Cyr travels to health care facilities throughout the region where she examines charts and medicine storage areas checking for things like expiration dates on medications.
The audience listens as Cyr introduces the musicians.
Cyr pauses to pet a goat at the Salem farm where the monthly concerts are held.
|
