“I bought your first record when I was about nineteen,” the letter begins. “I looked for myself in the chords and liner notes and found everything I needed there. Women Be Wise was in every early set I played in every bar and everything I aspired to be.”
Tift Merritt sat down and wrote these words to Bonnie Raitt earlier this year, reflecting on the ways that the blueswoman has served as a musical lodestar over the years.
“When I was starting out,” Merritt told the INDY, “I thought my heroes were something that I would sort of need to get me out the door. It turns out that you don’t outgrow needing your heroes.”
This ethos—a throughline that runs through much of the Raleigh musician’s present-day career, as a practitioner-in-residence at Duke University—underscores the programming she is curating for Duke Arts’ upcoming four-part music series at American Tobacco Campus (ATC). Themed around exploring the influence of women singer-songwriters, the free outdoor concerts will take place on Wednesdays in September beneath ATC’s Lucky Strike Water Tower.
Now in its sixth year, this program is the summer sequel to Duke Arts’ beloved May-June concert series (formerly at Duke Gardens, now on the East Campus), and features programming themed around, or curated, by various community partners, such as the Hayti Heritage Center and Music Makers Foundation.
The series kicks off on September 9 with a performance by Patty Griffin, who, like Raitt, is a beloved redheaded (a bit more strawberry blonde these days but red was long her signature) singer-songwriter who looms large for anyone who loves country, folk, and roots music. Shows from musicians Madison Cunningham, Kaia Kater, and Ken Pomeroy will follow, with performances at 6:30 on September 16, 23, and 30.
“These are women that I just want to be in conversation with—that I just want to hang out with, and talk to them about their process and what inspires them and where they are and be at the same table and be in community,” said Merritt, of the performers. “We don’t often get a chance to do that because we’re all running around on the damn road.”
As part of the program, Merritt said she invited each of the artists to write their own letters to women who, per the program announcement, “influenced their own creative lives and showed them how to carve space for their own work in music.” There will also be letter-writing stations at the shows so that attendees, too, can pen their own respective thank yous.
Saying thank you—and I see you, and you’ve made a difference—is the opposite of rendering labor invisible.”
Tift Merritt
Merritt’s latest release, Sugar—her first studio album in nearly a decade—arrived just last month, with a reflection on domestic labor, love, mothers and daughters, and finding roots as an artist while staying open to kismet and connection.
It ties quite directly into this particular program’s themes, too, with “Everyday Singing,” Sugar’s second track, based on a correspondence between Rosetta Reitz, a feminist jazz historian whose archive is based at Duke University and the anarchist poet Dachine Rainer.
The song was recorded last December at The Gables—Merritt’s new 18-room boutique retreat in Raleigh’s Mordecai neighborhood, which will open for reservations in September—and featured a group of women as the backing chorus iterating the title’s “everyday singing.”
“We’re living in this moment where creative work, especially women’s creative work, is being made invisible,” said Merritt, whose public policy and activism work has focused on creating better safeguards against AI software that trains and scrapes from musicians.
“When I think about how to interrupt that pattern,” she continued, “I think about these women who did not take shortcuts, and I think about how saying thank you—and I see you, and you’ve made a difference—is the opposite of rendering labor invisible.”
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