Carsie Blanton

Philadelphia-based pop-folk songwriter Carsie Blanton draws her sound from Nina Simone and Cleo Brown in equal measure with Joni Mitchell and John Prine. By the time she issued her debut album as a teenager, she already carried an uncommon depth of experience. Born in 1985, the home-schooled child of songwriting latter-day hippie parents spent her early years on a former cattle farm in rural Luray, Virginia, where she ran amok while absorbing the foundational repertoire of jazz, blues, folk, and R&B. At sixteen she distilled those influences into the album Hush, the same year she departed for the West Coast and settled in Eugene, Oregon. Several years afterward she recorded her first studio album, Ain't So Green, in Virginia; it appeared in 2005. Following a short period in San Francisco she relocated to Philadelphia in 2006, where local folk elder Gene Shay mentored her and she became a regular presence on the city’s coffeehouse circuit. Since that time she has appeared alongside Amos Lee, Joan Armatrading, and Nellie McKay, and has toured nationally in support of the Wood Brothers. An enthusiast of earlier eras in both fashion and music, Blanton seldom takes the stage without a flower in her curly brown hair and also instructs students in swing and blues dancing.