An Evening with Mean Mary

When Mary was four years old her family moved from sunny Florida to North Minnesota, near the Canadian border, to rough it in the wilds. They lived in a tent built from a roll of Visqueen, while they built a log cabin using only an axe, handsaws, and the trees around them. They cooked their food on a campfire, got their water from a deep hole they had dug, and read at night by the northern lights shining through the clear walls of their plastic tent.

Mary's oldest brother, Jim, who had just joined the Navy, sent the family a guitar and a compilation tape of songs he liked. With a battery-powered tape player, the family listened to the music of Hank Williams, Jr., and Dolly Parton. It wasn't long before Mary was singing the songs and vocalizing all the instrumentation. Seeing her talent, Mom and Dad bought guitar books, and Mom started teaching Mary and her siblings how to play the guitar. Mary and her brother Frank (the two youngest of six) were the ones who would turn music into a career.

Mary learned to read music before she could read words and was an official singer/songwriter before she had started her first day of kindergarten. With the help of her mom, she wrote her theme song “Mean Mary from Alabam’” (Mary was officially born in Geneva, Alabama). The press immediately baptized her with this handle, and she has been Mean Mary ever since.

Today she produces music, produces videos (her YouTube videos have received over 34 million views), tours extensively in the US and overseas, co-writes books with her mom, Jean James (their mystery novel, Wherefore Art Thou, Jane, won first place in the Reader’s Favorite International Book Awards), and Mary is an endorsing artist for Deering Banjos. The Deering’s named her their Goodtime Ambassador, and Janet Deering describes her banjo playing as giving her “chills.” Equally versatile on guitar, fiddle, and 8 other instruments, Mary is known as a high-energy performer with lightning-fast fingers and an unmistakable vocal sound … and as a songwriter that thrives on variety and unusual subject matters. There is not room here to tell the whole life story of Mean Mary, but if you would like to know more you can read her full bio on her website: https://meanmary.com/bio or just listen to her music—it’s all there.

Host or Publisher The Peoples Room of Mobile