Cosy Sheridan & TR Ritchie

Cosy Sheridan [web site - Amazon.com] has been called "one of the era's finest and most thoughtful singer/songwriters." A winner of the Kerrville Folk Festival NewFolk Showcase and the Telluride Troubadour Contest, she has played everywhere from Carnegie Hall and The Jerry Lewis Telethon to the Philadelphia Folk Festival. Her songs have appeared in best-selling author Robert Fulghum's book Third Wish and in the documentary "Lines Across The Sand." 

Together with her partner, fellow songwriter and bassist TR Ritchie [web site - Amazon.com], Sheridan gives one of the most entertaining and intelligent concert performances on the folk circuit. She is a storyteller as well as a songwriter; she weaves children's stories into tales of modern adulthood: The Little Engine That Could talks with Ferdinand The Bull about achievement verses contentment. Her modern renditions of mythology (we meet Hades The Biker) have won her fans and praise from the press. The Cornell Folksong Society wrote, "Sheridan is frank, feisty, sublimely and devilishly funny. She fuses myth with modern culture, Persephone with Botox." 

In her latest critically acclaimed CD, Eros, Sheridan weaves a cycle of songs about love. Sing Out! Magazine wrote, "Cosy Sheridan possesses an eccentric muse, or perhaps it possesses her. That's all for the good as this muse leads her into explorations to which other writers are oblivious." 

Sheridan's masterful guitar style is a testament to years of honing her craft (she was a student of Guy Van Duser and Eric Schoenberg), as is her voice (she studied voice at Berklee). She first appeared on the national folk scent in 1992 when she won the songwriting contests at Kerrville and The Telluride festival and released her critically acclaimed CD Quietly Led on Waterbug Records. Folk Music Quarterly wrote, "When she's accepting her Grammy, we can say we knew her when." 

Since then she's released 6 more CDs, written a one-woman show entitled "The Pomegranate Seed - An Exploration of Appetite, Body-Image and Myth in Modern Culture," and co-founded the Moab Folk Camp with Ritchie. She is a songwriting and performance teacher at adult music camps across the country, among them The Puget Sound Guitar Workshop in Washington, The Swannanoa Gathering in North Carolina and Summer Fishtrap in Oregon. 

TR Ritchie learned his musical chops as a busker at the famed Pike Street Market of Seattle during the late '70s, a solid apprenticeship that resulted in Not Just Another Pretty Songwriter, his first recording, in 1984. The collection received excellent reviews regionally and not long afterwards he was featured on a hot-selling regional anthology produced by Seattle radio station KEZX. An increasingly busy concert schedule began taking him further afield, where he quickly established a place for himself as a first-rate songwriter and performer.

Along the way songwriting awards accumulated: a two-time finalist at the Kerrville Folk Festival's New Folk contest; top honors from the Napa Valley (CA), Sisters (OR) and Jubilee (CO) Folk Festival songwriting competitions; the only double-showcase songwriter in 2001 and again in 2005 at the Walnut Valley Festival's New Artist Showcase in Kansas, and a 2005 finalist at the Mountain Stage Newsong Festival in West Virginia. More recently, in 2008 he won the Suzanne Milsap Songwriter's Showcase at the Snowbird Music Festival (UT) and was invited back as a mainstage headliner in 2009.

Four more CDs have followed: Changing Of The Guard, Homeground, My Father's Wildest Dream and his most recent, Wild Horses. After seventeen years in the Northwest Ritchie relocated to the canyon country of southeast Utah and has based his work from there for the past 15 years. In 2003 he lent advisory support to the newly established Moab Folk Festival, appeared as the first mainstage performer and served as festival emcee, a role he still enjoys. He continues to tour nationally, both as a solo and in support of long-time musical partner Sheridan, and in 2008, along with Sheridan, founded the Moab Folk Camp, a week-long series of music workshops held in conjunction with the Moab Folk Festival. 

In concert Ritchie is spontaneous, engaging and spirited. He serves up his music with technical grace and unwinds the narrative of his life and times in words and song. By turns witty, insightful and philosophical, the natural storyteller in Ritchie delivers a gem of a performance every time out. Armed with an acoustic guitar, a keen eye for observation and an ear for language, Ritchie plies his trade. No bells or whistles. What you see is what you get: first-rate songs, written with a poet's love of language and a storyteller's turn of phrase, performed with unapologetic enthusiasm by a player at the top of his game.