E-mail was not behaving well, but I did find some music links...
It's March, so it's the right season for this song.
Something special about the band. Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir, and Ed Trickett were best known as soloists, first. Then they became friends, sent cassette tapes through the mail, and started writing their own arrangements of songs for three voices with strong, simple harmonies. I enjoy harmony so, in the 1980s, I had to have all of their records. Nobody would ever mistake my voice alone for Muir's but people have been known to mistake my harmonizing for hers. I learned a lot from her records.
Muir is from Maryland, but not the part where I lived. Afaik I've never met her. But it's still "is"--she describes herself as an 87-year-old musician still learning to play the many instruments she has, keeping busy instead of growing old. If you visit her web site there's a repeating sound track of her new original songs you can play. It's worth playing, once, to hear how her voice has held up.
Bok, the bass, is also still active in Maine:
Trickett contributed his TBM songs from West Virginia; he was originally from DC and lived in a few other places, and his retirement and death ended the three soloists' series of annual "trio" albums. (They didn't usually tour and perform together, though they did some live shows together.)
They remind me of another harmony trio I used to like, also broken up when the tenor died. In both groups I thought the tenor had the weakest voice, yet the group somehow depended on him...
Soprano Heather Wood lived longest, but died last summer, age 79.
Bass Royston Wood went on recording and composing for a while, too, though he's no longer alive and didn't have a web site. Fans have put some of his music on YouTube. The Woods released one album together, called "No Relation" because that was what they constantly told fans they were. Both of them also performed and recorded as soloists, but somehow, after Pete Bellamy's lower-status taste and buzzy voice were gone, it just wasn't the same...anyway they had grown-up lives of their own by that time.
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