This Thursday at Goodwood Museum and Gardens, there's going to be a party. "There's going to be hors' devours," says Kris Kolp, owner and engineer of Log Cabin Studio. "There's going to be a listening event. There's going to be cake because we'll also be celebrating Kathryn's birthday."
Kolp is referring to Kathryn Belle Long. Long, a singer-songwriter, was a beloved member of Tallahassee's music scene known from Belle and the Band and the Adventures of Annabelle Lyn. She died three years ago from brain cancer. At the time, she had been working on her most ambitious project: Voices: A Folk Opera. Her friends and collaborators are throwing this party to celebrate its release, one day after her birthday.
"This is actually a Broadway-style folk opera," says Kolp. "Maybe the first of its kind, we're not really sure. It's actually two acts, just like an opera would be, or a Broadway show. There's Act One and Act Two. In the vinyl format, that's three sides per act."
Voices had its genesis while Belle and the Band were recording their second album, Till We Know Better. The band was entering a creatively fruitful period. One song on the album, the theme for WFSU's Local Routes program, won a Suncoast Regional Emmy. Another would win a Will McLean Award for best Florida song. The band was also starting to experiment with sound effects.
"The first time we ever used the words folk and opera, in that order, almost in jest, was ten years ago," says Mickey Abraham. Abraham co-wrote Voices and was Belle and the Band's mandolin player. "We were putting sound effects on the last Belle and the Band record, just maybe like a bird chirping or a guitar case opening or something really simple like that. I was always kind of into that kind of stuff. And then Kathryn and I [were] kind of like, 'Well, we should do like a whole concept album.'"
Abraham and Long conceived of it as a Belle and the Band project, but it was a departure from their earlier output. As Abraham explains, he and Long were suited to such an undertaking. "She did Disney and Broadway before she was an Emmy-winning songwriter. And she also was a theater teacher. So, that's her world, even before she was winning awards as a folk artist. And I was into Pink Floyd and Jesus Christ Superstar before I ever taught flat-picking guitar for a job. So, if you really know us really well, this is kind of right up our alley. Maybe even more so than playing folk festivals, but with our love of folk festivals, clearly."
The story follows a fictional character named Belle who lives under a totalitarian regime. Over the course of the story, she loses her parents, but their voices, and those of her grandparents, give her the strength to join a resistance movement and fight for what she believes in. "Katheryn's always written family songs," says Abraham. "That's been a theme of her Belle and the Band, her original songs, for as long as I've known her songwriting. That all came from her. The other side of it, the dystopian side of this, I think, came from me. "
They wrote and recorded demos for most of the opera, but by the time they had finished writing Voices, guitarist Kevin Robertson had left the band, and bassist Mike Snelling had been diagnosed with brain cancer. They no longer had a band. So Abraham and Long recruited local musicians to play and sing in it, including all three members of the New 76ers (Kelly Goddard, Danny Goddard, and Brian Durham), Grant Peebles, Avis Berry, Doc Russell, and Kayla Williams. The opera even features the longtime voice of the Seminoles, Gene Deckerhoff, as a newscaster.
In 2019, Abraham and Long organized a Kickstarter campaign to cover the cost of a sonically complex, thirty-eight-song opera. They also wanted to release it on vinyl, with deluxe packaging. The Kickstarter raised more than $40,000.
A few months into recording, though, the COVID pandemic hit. This slowed their production process. To spend as much time as possible recording and mixing, Long and Abraham formed a COVID pod with Kris Kolp at Log Cabin Studio.
In 2023, four years into the process, the Voices crew received devastating news. Kathryn Belle Long was diagnosed with brain cancer. Knowing she only had a few months to live, she dedicated herself to finishing her magnum opus.
Kris Kolp remembers those final months. "She'd come in a tough state, and she would show up at the studio, and she lay on the couch and she put those headphones on and listen deep. It was incredible to have her there to the completion of it. And in fact, she got really sick right close to the end of the project. So, I went in the studio, and I think I mixed for two weeks straight because I was going to make sure she heard this thing from front to back, top to bottom, and we got it all mixed, 38 plus tracks. And Kathryn, she was able to experience the completed project. "
Voices: A Folk Opera listening party
Thursday, June 18 at 6:30 pm/ ET
Goodwood Museum & Gardens
Information available on Eventbrite
BONUS AUDIO: Listen to the full conversation between Mickey Abraham, Kelly Goddard, and Kris Kolp. We include a couple of clips from Voices: A Folk Opera not heard in the radio story.
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