The Song Catcher I Know

It must’ve been a few years ago, maybe more, when Kath and I caught her at Lucky 32.

We went to see what my friend, Ogi Overman, had put together. He was the maestro of those weeknights at Lucky 32. Ogi sat in a booth, all sharp in his jacket and fedora, and singer-songwriters took to the stage a few feet away from Ogi and played their originals they had written on their heart and shared with the world.

Kath and I had seen Laurelyn Dossett and Molly McGinn there. But here was this tiny woman with long brown hair, playing her guitar and singing in this smoky soprano with the lilt of homegrown South in her voice.

Kath and I sat at the bar, nodding to one another. We listened to her entire set. A guy behind her played bass and turned a box he sat on into a drum. And there, she played, singing with her eyes closed, her legs tucked underneath her.

We liked her. Much. After her set, I went up and told her so.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling.

“Your name again?” I asked.

“Abigail,” she responded. “Abigail Dowd.”

Abigail in the backyard of my friend, Geoff.

That’s how it began for Abigail and me.

I saw her play in various places after that – in living rooms, in big front rooms, in an expansive backyard in front of a fence, surrounded by those I see before daybreak most mornings supine on a yoga mat.

They are some of my most favorite people in the city I call GSO.

Abigail is, too.

So, when she asked me this spring to write a bio for her website about her latest release, “A Beautiful Day,” of course, I said yes. I’ve written about musicians for years during my professional life chasing quotes.

So, this time was no different. And yet …

As Abigail told me her story, what I saw were details that could resonate with many of us.

It shows us the importance of paying attention to the serendipity in our lives. Once we do, opportunities materialize, and our lives blossom in the most unexpected of ways.

I’ve seen that happen firsthand.

Maybe you have, too.

Abigail’s story is one of love, sure, as well as family and leaps of faith.  But it’s also a story of the Mysterious South, that surreal terrain where spirits seemingly exist in that liminal space just beyond our fingertips. We never can touch it. But we feel it, sense it, and we know it’s there.

Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, a writer I read most mornings before daybreak, knows that space.

“This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy.”

— Richard Rohr

Now, to Abigail’s story. May it reveal something for you.

Photo by Todd Turner

Abigail told me herself.

“I’m more of a song catcher than a songwriter,” she says.

What?

“Really,” she says.

Really?

“Really,” she responds, laughing. “I’ll be playing my guitar, picking out these riffs and lyrics will come out fully formed from some creative place. I can’t explain it. But it happens.”

So began our conversation about how her creativity springs from that deep, spiritual place that is so much a part of her.

From that creativity has come her third album, “Beautiful Day.”

Twelve songs.

Twelve beautiful songs.

She sings about her childhood in North Carolina and her five years she flew to Maine to recalibrate her life. But mostly, the songs mine her present life in North Carolina. She and her husband, Jason Duff, discovered firsthand the ferocity of Mother Nature, the warmth of neighbors and the resiliency of the human spirit.

And for me, that’s where it gets really interesting.

That … and her Grandma Webb.

First, to Mother Nature. Then, we’ll talk about speaking in tongues.

The rain did come.

Breathe, Abigail, Just Breathe

During a 13-month period, from September 2018 to October 2019, their home in Greensboro, North Carolina, was flooded six times. Two weeks before Christmas, city officials bought their house and demolished it because the floods, brought on by hurricanes and torrential rain, caused so much damage.

“It was a series of shit storms,” Abigail tells me.

In the beginning, after the first two floods, Abigail had to live with her in-laws for three months because the house made it hard for her to breathe. Jason moved back into their unheated house to repair and remodel it and take care of their cat, Scout, and their dog, Oscar.

Meanwhile, Abigail saw specialists at Duke Medical Center because of the pain in her chest. The water damage had affected her lungs and caused so much pain that she worried she would have to quit singing.

After Jason renovated the house, Abigail moved back in and stayed for seven months. But that summer, while touring through Georgia and Florida and attending a songwriter retreat in Colorado, the house flooded again –– worse than before.

When Abigail came home, she became a nomad.

For five months, she bounced from friend’s house to friend’s house. She didn’t know where she would be or what would happen from one day to the next. It became the most uncertain time of her life –– and the most abundant.

The songs came. Abigail’s “Beautiful Day” was born.

‘It’s Going To Get Better’

Abigail remembers her friends’ front porch.

“My neighbors had a beautiful front porch, and I’d go out there and drink my coffee because I didn’t know what to do with myself,” she says. “But the good thing was I wasn’t surrounded by distractions. So, I’d go out with my guitar and just sit, playing chords over and over. Those chords became ‘Beautiful Day.’”

Abigail never writes anything down. She simply memorizes most of the lyrics. On this particular morning, she started singing words that surfaced immediately in her mind. Those words turned into the lyrics for ‘Beautiful Day,’ her title track.

I have seen the darkness

I’ve got shadows inside

But I hold on for the light

I have never known a sorrow that didn’t make me stronger

There’s never been a day that the sun don’t rise

As the song took shape, Abigail thought about her life.

After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill with a degree in anthropology, she came back to her hometown of Southern Pines, a small town known more for golf than music. Abigail opened an art school and got involved with politics because of what she saw as irresponsible development and unnecessary destruction of historic homes in her quaint hometown.

Abigail in her art school.

At 24, she became the youngest member of the town’s planning board. At 25, she ran for a seat on the Southern Pines Town Council. She won and became the council’s youngest member.

A year later, she resigned.

She had spent so much time in local political fights she lost sense of herself. She hated it. So, she looked for a place to land. At 27, she moved halfway around the world to Florence, Italy.

She took with her only a duffel bag and her great grandfather’s guitar, a 1975 Hofner classical.

She stayed three months.

Abigail discovered her great grandfather’s guitar early. And this is the very one she took to Italy.

There was a time right when she arrived in Italy where she laid in bed for weeks asking herself, “What am I doing?”

What she did do was play her guitar ––  all the time. She tapped into the wonder she first felt when she started playing at age 13 and having her mom, Wanda, teach her a few chords.

 “You just have to figure it out,” Wanda advised her.

When she was 13, Abigail played songs from Janis Joplin and tunes she discovered after seeing the 1994 movie “Forrest Gump.”

She bought the songbook and taught herself how to play by learning songs by Scott McKenzie and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

By high school, she turned to the music of singer-songwriter Jewel and started pursuing a dream she had longed for since she was 9 –– a full-time musician.

She didn’t think about music as a career until she moved to Italy and played for her roommate, a shoemaker from Switzerland, and her roommate’s friends. Every time she played, they encouraged her to take that chance.

“This is what you’re supposed to be doing,” they told her.

“Yeah, but I don’t know where to start,” Abigail would respond.

Those memories came back to Abigail as she sat on her friends’ front porch, dealing with her ruined home and finding so much joy playing her guitar.

“Going through not having a home because of a flood was parallel to leaving the art school and everything behind,” she says. “It was amazing. In Florence, I laid in bed for three weeks straight. It was a super dark period. But I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t gone through that back then.

“At my neighbor’s house, I didn’t know what the day was going to look like, and that line just came –– ‘I have never known a sorrow that didn’t make me stronger. There’s never been a day that the sun don’t rise.’

“I knew I had been here before, at such a dark place, and thank God, I kept going. It may be a bad day, but I knew I had to keep going. I knew it’s going to get better.”

The Magic of a Creek

For Abigail, it did get better.

Her rootlessness caused by Mother Nature helped her creativity blossom. She found herself finger picking, memorizing lyrics, hitting record on her iPhone and working on songs by herself in all sorts of places, at all times of the day.

One of those places was a rock in the middle of a creek in Colorado.

That’s right, a rock.

In August 2019, Abigail attended Song School, this wicked cool songwriting camp in Lyons, Colorado.

She had been there twice before, and one day, feeling exhausted from her constant touring, she skipped a songwriting workshop and stayed in her tent.

Yes, a tent.

It’s below.

Abigail’s creekside digs.

She pitched her tent beside St. Vrain Creek, and 20 steps away, she saw a boulder as big as a couch. She walked out to the middle of the creek, sat down, propped her iPhone on her knee, hit record and began to play.

She played a riff over and over. She remembered her six years of studying classical guitar and her four months living in rural North Carolina, in the tiny town of Norman. She was 4 years old, surrounded by four generations of her family.

One of those family members was her maternal great grandmother, Lena Webb. Abigail called her Grandma Webb.

I do love me some Grandma Webb.

Abigail with Grandma Webb.

Grandma Webb was a deeply spiritual woman and a devout Pentecostal churchgoer who had the power to heal. She’d travel around the county visiting the sick. Now, when I say county, I mean Richmond County — flat, rural, a place of two-lane roads and wide open sky near the blink-and-miss border of South Carolina.

Grandma Webb would lay her hands on the people she would see, pray hard and sometimes speak in tongues.

It sounds so Flannery O’Connor doesn’t it?

But to the young Abigail, that was real life.

She’d be there at Grandma Webb’s side. As her great grandmother prayed, Abigail would sing. That was nothing new to Abigail. She sang all the time.

She sang in church.

She sang in her room.

She sang in her great grandfather’s music shop in downtown Norman.

Her great grandfather played banjo, and her mom played the upright piano by the front double doors. And there was Abigail singing — that is when she wasn’t running around barefoot in the three-aisle shop that smelled of chewing tobacco and old wood.

The music shop where Abigail ran barefoot and sang was run by her maternal great grandfather, John Hancock. Abigail called him Grandpa John. The other half of the store called Hancock Music? A barber shop. All right there in downtown Norman, about as big as a dime.

She was a “little sparkler.” That’s Abigail’s phrase.

But when she went around the county with her great grandmother, she became serious. As Grandma Webb healed the sick, Abigail sang “Love Lifted Me.”

She learned that hymn at the Church of God of Prophecy, the Pentecostal church her family attended in Norman. She grew up loving to belt out this particular line. Imagine Abigail singing this loud:

But the Master of the sea, heard my despairing cry

From the waters lifted me

Now safe am I

Amen.

Abigail remembered that line sitting in the middle of a creek in Colorado. She came up with the lyrics and music on the spot. A few hours later, Jason called. Their newly renovated house had been flooded for the fifth time.

Abigail once again felt the wrath of water. Yet, on a boulder in St. Vrain Creek, she felt the spiritual cleansing of water, too. Days later when she came home, she played back what she had recorded and found a song.

“Oh my God,” she told herself. “It’s all done.”

I’ve got stories in my bones want to be told

Lay my burden down and let ‘em go

River wash me whole

Heaven ain’t up

Hell ain’t below

She called the song “River” with the instrumental introduction she calls “St. Vrain.”

“It felt like church to me, sitting on that rock,” she says. “It woke up the faith in me.”

Beyond Fear

Abigail recorded “Beautiful Day” during a five-day period in late February 2020 in Fidelitorium, the acclaimed recording studio in Kernersville, North Carolina.

Run by Mitch Easter, the indie music legend who co-produced REM’s “Murmur” and fronted the North Carolina band, Let’s Active, Fidelitorium has been the go-to place for years for artists such as Wilco, Suzanne Vega and the Drive-By Truckers.

It now became the go-to place for Abigail.

Behind the board was Jason Richmond, the Grammy-nominated producer who had worked with everyone from The Avett Brothers to Branford Marsalis.

Abigail had just released her second album when she connected with Richmond. The two connected over coffee to talk about working together on her next project. That next project was “Beautiful Day.”

Richmond brought in a stable of session musicians –– Joe MacPhail on keyboards, Austin McCall on percussion, Alex McKinney on dobro and pedal steel guitar and Scott Sawyer on electric guitar.

Jason, Abigail’s husband, was there, too. He played bass.

Wherever Abigail has played over the years, Jason has often accompanied her. But he is more than just a sideman. Abigail will tell anyone that.

When she tells the story of how they met, Abigail starts with a headache and a funeral.

Death, I guess, can do that to any of us.

A Chance Meeting

Abigail swore she’d never move back to North Carolina.

She was working full-time for a sustainability consulting firm in Portland, Maine, and spending every available minute writing songs, working on her music and thinking about playing out in public. She never did.

She did love Maine. She had moved there after coming back from Italy to figure out the rest of her life. She wanted to be close to her dad’s grave and start her life anew.

Yet, when she heard about the death of one of her little brother’s best friends, she decided to fly home to North Carolina and be with her brother, Jake.

She ended up in an airport terminal in Atlanta, waiting for her flight and battling a headache when she caught this guy looking at her.

“Oh, he’s cute,” she told herself.

When she got on the plane, their assigned seats happened to be right next to one another. They talked about everything, and her headache disappeared.

She asked him about his life in North Carolina.

He asked her about her life in Maine.

He also asked her why she moved there in the first place, so far from her home in North Carolina.

“Well, my dad died when I was 12,” Abigail told him. “He’s buried in Maine, and I needed to get as far away as I could from where I grew up because I needed to grieve.”

She had never told anyone that. But she told him.

What gives, right?

Abigail discovered music early, thanks to her dad, Jeffrey Nichols.

Anyway, when Abigail landed in Greensboro, she couldn’t get over her deep conversation with a stranger. She met her mom at the gate, and as they walked to her mom’s car, Abigail heard what she calls a “little voice” in her head.

“You’re going to marry him. But if are, you’d better get his name.”

That’s what the “little voice” told Abigail. And what did she do? She dropped her suitcase and took off running.

She took off running to find this guy, her seat mate on the plane. She ran nearly the length of a football field across a big parking lot and found him walking to his car. She stopped him and asked him his name.

That was Jason.

After returning to Maine, she broke up with her boyfriend. Nearly three months later, she moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, Jason’s hometown, to be closer to him.

In May 2018, they got married in Rome at the Piazza del Campidoglio, a city square designed by Michelangelo.

Jason wore a grey European-cut suit. Abigail wore a white wedding dress and heirlooms from the people she loves –– her mom’s pearls, her mom’s bridal veil and her stepmother’s bracelet holding a pearl that was a gift from her dad.

With 13 family members present, Abigail and Jason said ‘I do’ right before sunset. Abigail was 37, the same age her dad was when he died.

C’mon, now. those things don’t just happen, right?

Now, back to our story.

Magic does exist in Rome for Abigail and Jason.

Jason works as for an insurance company. But he’s been playing in bands since college. Jason gave Abigail tips on what equipment she needed to play in and around Greensboro.

In doing so, he built up her confidence and helped Abigail believe that pursuing music fulltime was possible.

Abigail felt her fear begin to subside. She finally took the advice of what she had heard since she was a little girl and confirmed by her roommate and her friends in Florence, Italy. She knew how to get her music career started, thanks to Jason.

She began booking gigs in 2014. A year later, she left her job as executive director of the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, a 26-acre estate, park and nature preserve estate in Southern Pines, and pursued music full-time.

Before “Beautiful Day,” she has released two albums –– “Don’t Wake Me” in January 2017 and “Not What I Seem” in April 2019. She also has played all over North Carolina, up and down the East Coast and as far west as Colorado.

Jason is often beside her. He became her constant musical partner, playing bass and percussion, telling her through his support, “You can do this.”

“Before, I was terrified to do something like this because I didn’t know how to do it,” she tells me. “But when I met Jason, something just clicked. The fear I had just went away, and it was kind of like, ‘I get it.’ Whatever ‘it’ is, it’s bigger than us.

“There is someone looking out for us, and looking out for me, and it’s OK to trust it.”

The Clarity of Creativity

Abigail’s trust in her faith and talent has helped her go after what she’s wanted to do since she was 9. Now, at 40, she feels fearless and confident about her future.

She’s a songwriter –– oh yeah, sorry, “song catcher.” She sees her iPhone and her guitar as the tools she needs to capture the songs she sees and hears in her mind about hope, resilience and faith.

That’s evident on her third album, “Beautiful Day.”

“I wrote these songs fearlessly when I went through a period of not knowing where I would live,” she says. “All that reaffirmed my faith. It’s that idea that even when we go through the darkest places, we can be transformed. Then, those places become magical.

“And these songs that dropped in, they remind me of those magical places. I wanted to share that.”

When she thinks about how six floods corkscrewed her life and clouded her future, she thinks of a verse from “Beautiful Day.” She captured it sitting on her friends’ front porch.

Do you ever get lonely

And wonder how much farther you can go

Do you think you’re the only one who knows

Friend I know

Years ago, those lines would’ve made her cry. Not anymore. She knows she’s not as alone as she always thought she was. She’s surrounded by people who love her and care for her.

There was a time in her life she couldn’t see that. Now, she can.

With her guitar in hand.

Abigail’s story tells us much about the wisdom of listening to that “little voice” inside us. And of course, we all know creativity can do some amazing things. But do we pay attention?

Abigail did –– finally. And look what happened.

Abigail with her husband, Jason Duff, performing in The Crown in downtown GSO.

Abigail sang in a talent show, accompanied by her mom, Wanda. She’s below.