Iowa City singer/songwriter Pieta Brown is joining forces with Carrie Rodriguez and Kelly Joe Phelps for An Acoustic Cafe Evening on Jan. 31, 2012, at CSPS in Cedar Rapids. (Pieta Brown photo)

By Diana Nollen/ SourceMedia Group

Pieta Brown has a name that instantly makes you sit up and take notice. And no, she isn’t named after the famous Michelangelo sculpture at the Vatican, in which Mary holds the body of her crucified son, Jesus.

She owes her name and her musical heritage to her father, folk icon Greg Brown.

“My dad read the name in a poem, and before I was born, he named the dog Pieta. So I’m named after a dog named after a poem named after a statue,” says Brown, 38, of Iowa City, who pronounces her name p-etta.

By any other name, the singing/songwriting poet would sound as sweet. Critics love her, colleagues love her and fans love her, flocking to her shows whenever she plays in the Corridor.

She’ll be bringing her music to CSPS in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday (1/31/12), to launch An Acoustic Evening tour with Austin-based singer/songwriter Carrie Rodriguez and Vancouver, Wash.- based bluesman Kelly Joe Phelps.

“I’m a fan of both of them,” Brown says. “I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. They’re both complete maniacs. We’ll each do a set, then combine talents. We might break all the rules, though, you never know.”

Brown has been immersed in Americana music her whole vagabond life, moving at least 17 times from Iowa to Alabama and eventually back to Iowa City.

She remembers family jam sessions in her early childhood and she’s been married for five years to musician Bo Ramsey, her frequent collaborator and producer. 

She’s performed with a who’s who of folk, rock and indie icons, including John Prine, Ani DiFranco and Mark Knopfler, co-founder of Dire Straits.

“Music is just awesome,” she says. “No matter who it is for me. It was really fun to sing a duet with John Prine, and to open for Mark was really something special for me.”

Austin-based singer/songwriter Carrie Rodriguez (Sarah Wilson photo)

Don Was, who has produced recordings for the Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt, heard Brown, fell in love with her sound and produced her 2009 “Shimmer” CD. He even played bass on the disc.

She savors the support from such stellar colleagues.

“It gives you something to go on,” she says. “With the critics, it’s nice critically to hear so-and-so gets it, but coming from an artist you respect, it’s going to give you something to go on. The music business is not an easy one.”

Brown’s latest recording is “Mercury,” and CSPS audiences will get to hear some of the music she wrote for this collection, recorded over just three days at a one-room studio in rural Tennessee. It was all like a dream, borne of a dream in which she reconnected with her Alabama upbringing by recording in a barn.

Lamplight studio, located between Nashville and Memphis, looked so much like the barn in her dream, that it all seemed preordained.

While she really doesn’t have a favorite song on the collection, she says the process yielded “a couple of really magic moments.”

“The song ‘How Much of My Love’ was just a cool moment, how that happened,” she says. “The last song (“No Words Now”) I wrote for Mark Knopfler; we recorded it in one take. The recording of it was one of those magic moments in the studio. I’m really proud of the title track, too. I really like how that one came out.”

She never knows how a lyric or melody will come to her, but is always ready when inspiration strikes, as with the song written for Knopfler.

“I opened on a tour for him,” she says. “Just being out there — the magnitude of his artistry and musicianship — one night I sat over on the side of the stage and wrote that song.”

“There’s sun in the country/There’s blood on the cement/I can sing my songs/But I can’t pay my rent/But on a night like this/Time holding still/I can still close my eyes/& listen to those hills. … You serenaded my mind/& I never was the easy kind.”

She says her music is “strongly influenced by blues, rock ’n’ roll, folk music and pop — some crazy blend of all those things. It definitely falls somewhere in those big umbrellas of Americana and folk. I just write songs and draw musically on a lot of different styles that have spoken to me.”

The poetry of her lyrics was forged in her solitary youth, moving with her mother to Alabama at age 7, and spending a lot of time alone while her mother worked.

“I’m sure it’s where I grew as a writer and a musician,” she says. “I had all this time alone and (writing) became a way to connect to things. It was kind of a lifeline for me.”

:Vancouver, Wash.-based guitarist, singer and songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps, known as “The Phantom Monk of Folk-Blues,” will add his artistry to the CSPS Acoustic Evening lineup. (Kelly Joe Phelps photo)

She and her mother eventually returned to Iowa City, and Brown graduated from City High. But so much of her childhood continues to influence her songwriting.

“For me, all of it really developed when I was so young, as a way to deal with the world, rather than trying to come up with a song,” she says. “It’s more of a reaction to the world as I go, rather than being inspired by any one thing. I’m definitely a very visual person, and at the same time, you just never know. I don’t really have a method. It’s mostly just reactions.

“I keep it all going in my head about 24 hours a day. (An idea) moves around up there and tumbles out into various forms. I definitely often have an instrument in my hand when a song lands. I tend to have a piano or guitar or lately, a banjo in hand when the songs are landing and becoming songs.”

Music also has been a way to reconnect with her father and her roots.

Memories of the family jam sessions have given her “a close, deep understanding and connection to the music that felt very familiar.”

She also vividly recalls growing up in a house near Cosgrove, west of Iowa City, that didn’t have running water and was heated by a wood stove.

“Dad was a struggling artist at the time and my mom was working odd jobs. She hadn’t finished undergraduate school at that time and we didn’t have any money. I have a lot of good memories, a lot of gardens. Still, when I get out in the country, that’s often where I feel the most at home. There must be something to that early childhood thing. I can remember taking a bath in a little tin tub where Mom would heat the water up on the stove.”

However romantic that all sounds, she says her youth “wasn’t a happy, frolicky folk-music scene.”

“It’s complicated,” she says, especially of rebuilding a relationship with her famous father. “Most people’s lives are.

“The music has been a great connection for us. As an artist, aside from the bloodlines, I admire him. I really admire him staying true to his path and his muse in ways that have affected people. That gives me a lot of strength to try to do that in my own artistic life also.”

FAST TAKE

What: An Acoustic Cafe Evening

Who: Pieta Brown, Carrie Rodriguez and Kelly Joe Phelps

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday, 1/31, 2012

Where: CSPS, 1103 Third St SE, Cedar Rapids

Tickets: $17 advance, $21 door, (319) 364-1580 or legionarts.org 

Information: legionarts.org/events/an-acoustic-cafe-evening