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Locally Grown Music:
Anita O’Connor ‘Feeling Lucky
Today’
October 3-9, 2002
by April Falcon Doss
It’s Friday
night, and Chesapeake Music Hall has been transformed. Theatrical sets have been
stowed away, and a four-piece band commands the stage. Local singer Anita
O’Connor is belting out the words to Mary Chapin-Carpenter’s “I Feel
Lucky” in a jubilant alto voice and pounding out the song’s infectious
rhythm — as well as a mean piano solo — with an energy that would make Jerry
Lee Lewis proud. At a table in front, a woman who looks every bit of 80 sways,
bobbing her head, clapping her hands and bopping along to the exuberant beat.
Farther back, O’Connor’s five-year-old daughter, in ponytail and flowered
dress, watches from the audience. Would this be a cool mom to have, or what?
Mixing family and music seem natural for O’Connor, who pairs her sequined top
with sensible shoes, conservative black pumps with a one-inch heel. She laughs
as she confesses her greatest fear: that her daughter will tell her kindergarten
teacher that she sings in a bar on Friday nights with her mother.
Anita O’Connor has sung professionally for 20 years, since she first crooned
“If You Believe,” from the The Wiz, while representing Pennsylvania on the
Miss America stage. Appearing on that stage gave a girl, who had by her own
account been overweight growing up, the courage to do what she had always
wanted. Singing has been her yellow brick road ever since, leading her from
bands to teaching voice and piano and appearing in the occasional musical.
It’s led to her current Friday-night piano-bar gig at the Annapolis Radisson Hotel
(where daughter Sarah sometimes joins her) and to her three-year tenure as
musical director for Chesapeake Music Hall. And it’s led to this concert
celebrating the release of her second CD, entitled If You Believe.
It’s an apt title, for cutting a CD was another dream realized. With her
husband’s encouragement and the help of bassist Dave Hughes, friend and
longtime bandmate, O’Connor released her first CD, dedicated to her daughter
Sarah, in 1998.
“Since we’d done one CD dedicated to Sarah,” O’Connor explains with a
smile, “we had to do another one for our second daughter, Hayley,” now two.
It’s fitting, then, that the ties between parent and child, and friends and
lovers, are central to the songs O’Connor performed during her two live sets
and to the tracks on the CD.
“I’m a lyrics girl,” O’Connor explains, and it shows in the precise
delivery of her singing (listening to her, I finally understood lyrics to songs
I’d heard countless times before) and in her choice of songs (from Tricia
Yearwood to James Taylor, from recent country hits “I Hope You Dance” to
“Love Me"). She sings ballads with the smooth strength of Anne Murray and
belts out rock-n-roll tunes with the steady power of Linda Ronstadt.
The house was packed for this CD party. The surprisingly gray-haired crowd
cheered and whistled and danced in their seats, singing along with the upbeat
songs and closing their eyes with a tear or a smile during the slow ones.
O’Connor shines in this intimate setting, keeping up conversational banter
between each tune, encouraging her audience to sing along and inviting everyone
to an impromptu piano bar after the show.
Sitting in Chesapeake Music Hall with a cup of coffee at my elbow, a basket of
snacks alongside and my husband across the table, feeling Dave Hughes’ bass
pulse through the floor boards and Anita O’Connor’s warm alto voice moving
through the air — I find it hard not to believe that all is right with the
world. For O’Connor fans, this CD recalls the warmth that infuses her live
performances, that transforms standard pop and country songs into something more
like time spent with a friend who believes the words of the Martina McBride song
she says describes her life: “I have been blessed.”
Catch up with O’Connor at anitasings@yahoo.com.
Used with
permission from Bay Weekly, October 3-9, 2002
Copyright
2002
Bay Weekly
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