In these contemporary times, it’s not easy to create something that lasts for decades. Seacoast musicians Susie Burke and David Surette have been able to figure out how to sustain a professional musical existence that celebrates 30 years of pickin’, pluckin’ and singin’ in 2018, all-the-while navigating marriage, a family, and everything that life throws at you in the midst of making any combination of these things work. In preface to the following conversation, I’d like to personally extend a tip-of-the-cap to both Susie and David. We’re all better off for having a piece of your lives and the work you’ve created within our own.
Susie and David will kick the anniversary celebration off with a performance by the Burke/Surette Family Band at the Dance Hall in Kittery on Friday, Feb. 2. They’ll have both their daughters in tow for what is sure to be a mesmerizingly beautiful celebration of music, love and life.
EDGE: 2018 marks the 30th anniversary of you two creating music together. That’s pretty special. How does one celebrate such an occasion?
Surette: Well, we are taking a novel approach: playing more music together! Actually, we are trying to do just that, but ever more of it. We’ve been booking a lot of stuff around New England, trying to both re-book some of our faves, like the Book & Bar and the Stone Church, and getting into some places we haven’t played before, like the Dance Hall. We’re also doing a 10-day swing down south this spring, going as far as Asheville, N.C. Same kind of deal, touching base with some old friends and fans that haven’t seen us down there in a dog’s age, but also connecting with folks we’ve met at various other places along the way.
EDGE: For starters, you’ll be calling things in with the entire family when you guys play the Dance Hall in Kittery on Friday. That seems like a fine time. What excites you about it?
Surette: We don’t get to do the family band gigs very often, so each one is really special for us. Isa is really busy with her band Lula Wiles, and her musical life in Boston, and Julianna is equally busy with her senior year at Bowdoin College. They are both so musical, and it’s been just a really natural, organic part of our family over the years. Sharing music together is something that’s just been there. And for fans of great harmony singing, I have to say that those family harmonies really sound amazing. I just try not to get in the way!
Burke: I remember driving in the car with the girls in the back and singing with them when they were little, and thinking how cool it would be to someday sing with them when they were older. And that fantasy came true. Isa and Julianna are both wonderful, soulful singers, and singing with them doesn’t happen often enough. It is a thrill every time. Also, my first CD release concert was at the Dance Hall in ’91! And Drika (Overton, executive director of the Dance Hall) and I used to be roommates in Portsmouth. Crazy, right?
Kind of a full circle kind of thing, although the circle is still being drawn. We have been blessed to have people in our audience who have known us from the start, who remember me playing when I was pregnant with the girls. We are always so grateful to see new faces, too, and we hope for a good crowd at the show to share this milestone with us.
EDGE: I understand there’s a record in the works. Being a person that loves new records, this is very exciting to me. Please, go on.
Burke: The record is another way we want to honor this anniversary. It will include some of our new original songs, and hopefully an original by each of the girls. We also will include some songs in the family tradition. This last group of tunes is under consideration, but we are talking about the Wood Brothers, the Carter family, Avett Brothers, the McGarrigle sisters, the Louvin brothers for an old country duet, that kind of thing. It will be the four of us, with an occasional additional player. I really love working in the studio; it will be great to get going on this one.
EDGE: What are the pros of navigating and building a career with your spouse? What are the cons? Would you have it any other way?
Burke: The No. 1 pro is that we get to play music together, to share in the joy of connecting with listeners, and to travel and spend time together. That we both understand the ups and downs of this path that we are on, this life we have chosen, is a definite plus. We are both comfortable with a certain amount of uncertainty; it's not for everybody. We meet so many people who say that they played or were in a band and gave it up because of the unpredictability or the late nights, etc., which I totally understand, and that is definitely one of the cons, but it works for us.
Surette: I simply would not have it any other way. The pros: you are working with someone with whom you share a love and a life, and then you also share this great passion for music, so there’s a lot of common ground and common purpose. It’s nice to feel that your work partner really gets what it is that you are both trying to do, and I have always felt that we share a really compatible outlook on music, its role in people’s lives, its importance, and its ability to be relevant in so many different situations.
I think the cons are mostly logistical. We have always done other musical things as well as playing together, so scheduling and juggling is a challenge, and it’s easy for the balance to get out of whack. And neither of us married a doctor or lawyer.
EDGE: What are some key highlights that have emerged from 30 years of playing?
Burke: Early on, playing Tuesday hoot nights at the Press Room, with a cavalcade of great players and friends who would gather on our off-night to try out new stuff, jam and hang. (This area is lousy with talent in many styles of music!) It is where David and I met, and where I started playing and gigging with David, Cosy Sheridan, Harvey Reid, John Perrault, the band Hot Ticket (Dave Kiphuth, Cosy Sheridan, Linda Schrade, David Levine, me), and others. Playing wonderful clubs and festivals like Clearwater, Philadelphia Folk Festival, Ossipee Valley, Memoires et Racine in Quebec. We have played there five times; starting when the girls were young, and they loved the bilingual childcare they offered performers' kids. I saw that David mentioned the time Tom Paxton and his wife Midge sang Isa to sleep at the first gig I took, a few months after her birth. She was crying as I went on stage and I could hear her during our set, but then she quieted with their singing and playing.
Our Christmas concerts with Kent Allyn, which we have been doing for 18 years, I think, are always very meaningful. And every time we get to play with the girls is a highlight!
We have played a lot of great clubs, festivals, and music camps over the years — Passim, Café Lena, the Folkway; Folk Club based coffeehouses run by dedicated volunteers; Clearwater, Old Songs, Philadelphia Folk Festivals; Maine Fiddle Camp, WUMB Radio’s camp, Fiddleheads, places closer to home, like the Press Room, Stone Church, Book and Bar, Prescott Park Arts Festival, and many more. And the common denominator is the wonderful and warm people we get to work with, audience members, presenters, our musician pals, students ... This is probably true across the genres, but in our experience, this acoustic music world attracts some of the nicest people.
Surette: Too many great late-night jam sessions to mention, especially at places like Maine Fiddle Camp; the CD release party for Susie’s Lucky Stars CD at the Dance Hall in 1990, back when it was the Kittery Grange; having Tom Paxton and his wife Midge sing lullabies to baby Isa backstage while we did our set opening for him; performing Utah Phillips' “Rock Salt & Nails” in a pub in Saratoga, and having him (unbeknownst to us!) come up out of the audience to tell us how much he liked it; being a part of the amazing local music community for all these years, starting with open mics, hoots and bar gigs back in the '80s; a special tip of the cap to the Press Room, which is where we met, and where I started wooing Sooze by bringing my mandolin to her solo gigs; winning over the entire festival crowd at Memoire et Racines in Joliette, Quebec, back in the mid-'90s with all the French speakers responding to the universal language of Susie’s singing; being part of the “music crew” for a week on the schooner Shenandoah off of Martha’s Vineyard.
EDGE: What have you learned from each other along the way? How does one influence and/or inform the other (and vice versa)?
Surette: I have learned so much from Susie about singing, both through her technical skill as a singer, and even more so from her ability as a communicator and connector with people through music. She has definitely influenced me to pay more attention to the lyrics and the meaning behind them, as I have always been much more focused on the music and the overall mood and feel. I’ve also learned that as an accompanist, sometimes less is more. She has great musical instincts, so I try to always pay attention to her feedback, because it’s almost always spot-on!
Burke: David has taught me a lot about guitar playing — he is a much better player than I am, so I can go to him with questions about all kinds of things. I may have never told David this, but I am grateful that he exposed me to the whole world of Celtic music. I am half Italian and half Irish, but my dad died when I was 7, and I was not as in touch with my Irish side. I remember a day early on when we were dating, he taught me to play a back-up part on bouzouki to some traditional Irish tunes, and it felt so organic and real to me, still a very tangible moment to me today.
I think we have taught each other to more fully listen to music. Very early on, I was much more lyric- and melody-driven and David was more groove-driven. We might talk about a song we both liked and I could quote the words and David might not even recall the words, but could totally recreate the groove on guitar. We still are drawn to different styles, different things in music, but we both listen better because of each other.
Oh, and on late night drives home from gigs, listening to classic rock radio, David teaches me what bands recorded what hits, who played guitar in what band! Really, he is an encyclopedia of this stuff!
EDGE: What’s a bit of solid advice you can give to a young couple walking down a similar unified path of exploring life as musicians and partners?
Burke: Well, this is advice for any musician, and that is, keep the music first. We are here to serve the music. It really helps to control your ego at every turn and be as supportive of each other as you can be. And when you have personal issues to discuss, and what couple doesn’t, save them for a day when you don’t have a gig. Big talks on the way to a gig — not a good idea. We learned that long, long ago.
And if it gets tough at times, if music is what you each are passionate about, think how hard it might be if only one of you were doing music. If it is what you both love, look for a way for you both to do it. Neither one should have to give it up, unless that path brings you happiness.
EDGE: Okay, back to the Dance Hall gig for a moment. It’s a family jam. Set the scene for us: What did the Burke/Surette household sound like while raising a family? I’m not talking about the screams of wee children; I’m talking about the music. Your family is so steeped in it. It’s gotta feel pretty darn cool to have both your daughters share the stage with you. How has music shaped the core of this familial unit?
Burke: Oh, geez, this question brings up images of the kids banging on our guitars, on pots and pans, putting on shows and singing and dancing in the living room! Growing up with parents who make and teach music for a living and who had lots of musical pals, it seemed very normal to them to make music. They both have such natural musicality. We never pushed anything at all; we just exposed them to lots of music at home and on the road. We took them to lots of gigs with us, and we would listen to music together, which is so great and far preferable to everyone plugging into their own device. We still will do that, with everyone choosing a CD for us all to hear.
Surette: Well, we weren’t the kind of family that would make the kids practice, or insist that they had to choose an instrument by the age of 4 or something. We had a load of music around the house, both live and recorded, and we always made it available to the kids and shared it. When they were really young, it was singing, and then later came various instruments. It’s something that is really important to all of us, and we all relate to it in slightly different ways. It’s kind of like a musical Venn diagram. All the Burke gals, for example, love Broadway show tunes, which is not really my cuppa joe. We all get excited about turning each other on to new stuff; it was great to turn them onto Nick Drake, and fun to have them hip us to the Wood Brothers and the Stray Birds.
EDGE: Alright, let’s take a family trip to the ice cream shop. What’s everyone ordering? What do said flavors say about each family member’s personality?
Surette: I’m a trad guy in my ice cream choices, too: maple walnut, pistachio ... The kids are so sweet; they’re always going for those flavors, like choco-caramel-cookie dough.
Burke: I go for the salted-caramel-chocolate-pretzel-ish things. I like to mix the sweet with the salty. I have always loved ice cream with pretzels.
Go & Do
What: Burke/Surette Family Band 30th anniversary concert celebration
When: 7:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 2
Where: The Dance Hall, 7 Walker St., Kittery
Tickets: $12 in advance, $15 at the door
More info: Visit thedancehallkittery.org. For more information on Susie Burke and David Surette, visit burkesurette.com