Bio

Linda writes image driven songs of grief, courage, passion, and humor, delivered with a folk acoustic feel with dashes of blues, country, pop, Celtic and world music which inform and inspire her compositions and songs.

Her music has been described as having a Celtic sensibility to it, as in her song Sentinel, told from the perspective of someone who stays behind when the rest of their family comes to America during the time of the Irish famine. The ocean, the seagulls, and the spare and mournful whistle transports you there entirely in the moment.

At the same time her years of international folk dancing have given her a taste for the haunting melodies of the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Middle East with their complex rhythms and harmonic scales.

At her core, Linda is storyteller. “Often I’ll write a back story on a character, and in that way they will come to life for me” Linda says. “In a certain sense, I try to get out of the way and let the characters write their own songs.”

Linda plays her songs in alternate tunings on her guitar because she finds that opens the door to new possibilities, new ways of looking at the instrument that has been such constant companion for so many years.

You can hear audio clips from Linda’s first solo album of original songs, titled In My Own Way, in The CD section here. LISTEN NOW

Early Musical background
Originally a native of Bayside, New York, Linda’s first instrument was a violin and at age 7 she played in her grade school orchestra. By high school she’d picked up the guitar and she played and sang at coffeehouses during her college years in Buffalo, NY where she also sang in the University of Buffalo choir. Later in grad school in Architecture at Virginia Tech, she took up the hammer dulcimer, and she had a small business building hammer dulcimers there in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Celtic Harp
In the summer of 1989 Linda was living in northern Virginia where she had a chance to play a Celtic harp for the first time. She promptly fell in love with the sound of it, and the feel of playing it. By that fall she and her husband, Roger Cornell, had built their first harp from a kit. Linda has delighted audiences with her harp playing and stories of harp lore ever since. She has taught harp workshops on a variety of topics and also teaches private harp lessons. And in 2004 she had the good fortune to play harp on her songwriting teacher, Beth Nielsen Chapman’s album hymns on Beth’s song hymn to mary.