“I grew up thinking ‘singing cowgirl’ was a legit career,” says Marydee Reynolds, a musician, vocal therapist and vintage curator who resides in a tree-lined section of the Austin neighborhood known as The Island.
And for good reason: Her great-aunt Millie Good was one half of Girls of the Golden West, a seminal country-western duo (Millie and her sister, Dolly) that lassoed in listeners on 1930s and ’40s radio programs like the WLS-AM “National Barn Dance.”
Reynolds followed in the pair’s footsteps (bootsteps?), fronting the ’90s band Chainsuck and, more recently, re-creating Girls of the Golden West with fellow musicians Amalea Tshilds and Elise Bergman.
Traces of Reynolds’ musical lineage are evident in her library, too — in books like “The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance”; “Texas Rhythm”; and issues of “Stand By,” a subscription magazine of WLS. Additional inspiration is plucked from Patti Smith’s “Babel,” Yoko Ono’s “Grapefruit” and other books by and about women who’ve forged their own creative paths.
Reynolds is currently writing her own own book, entitled “Getting Billy Gone,” about a girl who is being stalked by the ghost of a dead rockstar. Echoes of the past reverberate through all of her projects.
