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Arts & Entertainment

Swing Dance with Abbie Gardner and The Craziest Dream Band

Join us as we transform South Presbyterian Church’s Fellowship Hall into a swing dance ballroom, featuring  Abbie Gardner and The Craziest Dream Band! Best known as one-third of the female harmony Americana trio Red Molly, Abbie Gardner has listened to the sweet sound of high lonesome harmonies since her first bluegrass festival at three years old. Her father, Herb Gardner, who will accompany his daughter this evening, is a swing jazz and stride pianist and dixieland trombonist. He introduced Abbie to one of her favorite vocalists, Billie Holiday, and continues to be a big influence on the musician she is and strives to be.

Abbie’s first full-length recording, My Craziest Dream is an album of jazz standards featuring her father on piano. It earned her an entry in the 2009 Hal Leonard book The Jazz Singers: The Ultimate Guide and she is pleased to perform selections from that record, along with other standards, with her band.

Abbie has a strong throaty voice that’s reminiscent of Wesla Whitfield’s… she uses it to render evergreens from the 1920s and 1930s with a crew of guys who play like they were around when this music was the cat’s pajamas.  (Cadence Magazine, June 2004)

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Abbie has been recognized as an award-winning songwriter, as well, with such accolades as; 2008 Lennon Award Winner (folk) for “The Mind of a Soldier” and 2008 American Songwriter Magazine Grand Prize Lyric Winner for “I’d Rather Be”. Her song “Honey on My Grave” was also published in Sing Out! Magazine in 2008.

Abbie continues to tour with Red Molly, currently promoting their fourth full-length CD, Light the Sky.  Her latest solo CD “Hope” was released in April 2011.

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