Abbye West Pates hails from the Deep South: Memphis, Tennessee, her homeplace of almost 20 years, and before that, south Mississippi, the state that raised her. She’s been shaped by changes over and over again as you can hear throughout her songs like Long Year, where she recognizes the changing shape of a marriage and Ain’t Done Livin, written during the early days after loss where she is learning the difference in the changes forced upon you and the changes you must choose for yourself.
Throughout her life, Abbye has written dozens of songs and poems and many more words to which only her journal will bear witness. Through her melodies and questions, she asks us to stop, slow down, look around, be present in the place that we ar in - no easy choice in a time and culture that asks us produce and influence and distract ourselves to death. Over the past few years, she’s been guided by one of her favorite unanswerable questions in the form of a tiny poem: if you knew it was true/you would learn to bloom/in the soil of such sorrow/would you plant yourself in that garden/over and over again?
