Biography
Singer/songwriter Jackie Tice traced her personal identity to an early immersion in folk music alongside Native American spiritual traditions. Ironically, her track “The Marijo Tonight,” which chronicled evenings at an Irish pub in Pennsylvania, first brought her recognition when it earned the New Folk Award at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas in 1996.
Tice had not initially aimed for a career as a celebrated folk performer. Classical piano lessons began at age twelve in Swedeland, PA; she later turned to the organ, performing Bach chorales in church until she reached fourteen, while also participating in church choirs. At thirteen she picked up guitar at school, and at seventeen a friend’s loaned acoustic instrument prompted her first original composition, “Finding Myself,” an early sign of her focus on questions of self-identity. Her debut professional appearance occurred at nineteen, when she played covers at the Fruitville Hotel in Pottstown, PA. She soon joined open-mic nights across Pennsylvania alongside singer/songwriter John Gorka, whom she met in Bethlehem, PA, at Godfrey Daniels.
In 1982 Tice relocated to Washington, D.C., where she encountered Mary Chapin Carpenter at Food for Thought; Carpenter introduced her to the city’s club scene, allowing Tice to perform her own material beyond Pennsylvania for the first time. She returned to Pennsylvania in 1986 and enrolled in social-work courses at community colleges while counseling battered women. Following the birth of her first child in 1989, she resumed performing original songs at venues in State College, PA.
Between 1992 and 1993 she received a folk award from the Folk Factory in Philadelphia and appeared on the 1993 compilation Philly Fast Folk, issued by Fast Folk/Smithsonian Folkways. Her debut album, Grateful Heart, produced by Bill Collar and credited under her maiden name Jackie Koresko, came out the same year. The follow-up, Blue Coyote, released by Saja Music in 1997 and titled after Christopher Moore’s novel Coyote Blue, drew inspiration from Joni Mitchell’s Hejira; the record included the 1995 award-winning song “The Marijo Tonight” and arrived after Tice captured the New Folk Award for Emerging Songwriters at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas in 1996, where the judges were Tim Bays, Sara Hickman, and Lucinda Williams. The same track later surfaced on Christine Lavin’s 1999 compilation The Stealth Project: Music Under the Radar and on the 1999 anthology The Godfrey Daniels Open Mike Collection.
Tice’s writing emphasized detailed character development and a strong attachment to particular locales drawn from lived experience; the narratives of small-town Pennsylvania bar life, she observed, captured both the dread of leaving and the inertia of remaining, along with the quiet determination to stay put. Additional songs on Blue Coyote, produced by John Pearse—partner in Breezy Ridge Instruments and John Pearse Strings in Bethlehem, PA—stemmed from her engagement with Native American spirituality.
She tracked her third album, Second Skin, in Nashville in 2001. That year she also composed the score for the documentary Dirty Linen, prompted by Joni Mitchell’s song “The Magdalene Laundries” and based on Greg Clayton’s screenplay concerning orphaned children and unwed mothers mistreated at laundries operated by the Irish Sisters of Our Lady of Charity. Much of the album’s imagery arose from Tice’s painting practice; around 1998 she began sketching bones as a means of exploring the foundations of her identity. Second Skin examined the equilibrium between shelter and outward growth, both internally and in relation to the wider world, conveying a state of being grounded yet willing to take risks. Through her work Tice conveyed that her multifaceted personality found unity across creative, intellectual, physical, and spiritual pursuits.
Tice had not initially aimed for a career as a celebrated folk performer. Classical piano lessons began at age twelve in Swedeland, PA; she later turned to the organ, performing Bach chorales in church until she reached fourteen, while also participating in church choirs. At thirteen she picked up guitar at school, and at seventeen a friend’s loaned acoustic instrument prompted her first original composition, “Finding Myself,” an early sign of her focus on questions of self-identity. Her debut professional appearance occurred at nineteen, when she played covers at the Fruitville Hotel in Pottstown, PA. She soon joined open-mic nights across Pennsylvania alongside singer/songwriter John Gorka, whom she met in Bethlehem, PA, at Godfrey Daniels.
In 1982 Tice relocated to Washington, D.C., where she encountered Mary Chapin Carpenter at Food for Thought; Carpenter introduced her to the city’s club scene, allowing Tice to perform her own material beyond Pennsylvania for the first time. She returned to Pennsylvania in 1986 and enrolled in social-work courses at community colleges while counseling battered women. Following the birth of her first child in 1989, she resumed performing original songs at venues in State College, PA.
Between 1992 and 1993 she received a folk award from the Folk Factory in Philadelphia and appeared on the 1993 compilation Philly Fast Folk, issued by Fast Folk/Smithsonian Folkways. Her debut album, Grateful Heart, produced by Bill Collar and credited under her maiden name Jackie Koresko, came out the same year. The follow-up, Blue Coyote, released by Saja Music in 1997 and titled after Christopher Moore’s novel Coyote Blue, drew inspiration from Joni Mitchell’s Hejira; the record included the 1995 award-winning song “The Marijo Tonight” and arrived after Tice captured the New Folk Award for Emerging Songwriters at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas in 1996, where the judges were Tim Bays, Sara Hickman, and Lucinda Williams. The same track later surfaced on Christine Lavin’s 1999 compilation The Stealth Project: Music Under the Radar and on the 1999 anthology The Godfrey Daniels Open Mike Collection.
Tice’s writing emphasized detailed character development and a strong attachment to particular locales drawn from lived experience; the narratives of small-town Pennsylvania bar life, she observed, captured both the dread of leaving and the inertia of remaining, along with the quiet determination to stay put. Additional songs on Blue Coyote, produced by John Pearse—partner in Breezy Ridge Instruments and John Pearse Strings in Bethlehem, PA—stemmed from her engagement with Native American spirituality.
She tracked her third album, Second Skin, in Nashville in 2001. That year she also composed the score for the documentary Dirty Linen, prompted by Joni Mitchell’s song “The Magdalene Laundries” and based on Greg Clayton’s screenplay concerning orphaned children and unwed mothers mistreated at laundries operated by the Irish Sisters of Our Lady of Charity. Much of the album’s imagery arose from Tice’s painting practice; around 1998 she began sketching bones as a means of exploring the foundations of her identity. Second Skin examined the equilibrium between shelter and outward growth, both internally and in relation to the wider world, conveying a state of being grounded yet willing to take risks. Through her work Tice conveyed that her multifaceted personality found unity across creative, intellectual, physical, and spiritual pursuits.
Albums
