The Bliuegrass Standard - January 2022

fest…we shared the stage…

I’m a pretty shy person; I think it took me a long time to feel comfortable around her, though. It wasn’t her fault; it was just a feeling of …maybe I don’t belong here.”

Lewis was wrong in that initial impression.

“As for Alice, I wrote to her and said, ‘I think you should do an album of original music, and I think I should produce it.’ We worked very closely on that, and after working on that together, we got close,” Lewis explained. That 2013 record was called “Bittersweet.”

More recently, Lewis has released two albums. In March 2020, was And Laurie Lewis, a collection of duets with various west coast musicians. November 2021 brought Freight ‘98, a live show recorded at Freight and Salvage back in 1998 but never released. Long lost to Lewis’s files, the recording of this gig resurfaced when the Southern Folklife Collection of the University of North Carolina in Durham approached Lewis. “They 36