ROSALEE PEPPARD: Nova Scotian Singer-Songwriter of Canadian Heritage
Biographies:

    

Nova Scotian, Rosalee Peppard, is a passionate musical storyteller whose songs honour the female perspective of Maritime/Canadian Heritage. A very witty, yet classically trained lyric soprano, a graduate of Mount Allison University, Banff School of Fine Arts, as well as Lois Marshall's and Bill Vincent's vocal programs, Rosalee brings her folk-genre music to a wide audience, blending "fine art" with "down home". From her cd: No Place Like Home, two songs were short-listed in the OCFF's Songs From The Heart Contest, one of which, "Greta's Hands" was added to the March Of Dimes 50th Anniversary Commemorative Archives. In both 2002 and 2004 she received a Helen Creighton Folklore Research Award and she is now a featured composer with Oceanna Music Publishing, which distributes her songs in choral arrangements for use in schools and community choirs all over North America. In June 2004, Rosalee released her new cd: Legacy, to begin her 3 month summer tour with a command performance by Nova Scotia's Lieutenant Governor at her annual Garden Party at Government House in Halifax.

Rosalee's beautiful songs, based on her research in her folklore-rich Maritime heritage, steeped in the Irish and Scottish oral and musical traditions in the heartland of Glooscap and l'Acadie, whether Evangeline's story of the Acadian people in 1755; the tale of New Brunswick's tall ship Marco Polo in 1851; or the story of her mother's courageous battle with Polio in Canada's 1951 epidemic, weave a poetic female perspective of Canadian history, transporting listeners by poignantly connecting the present with the past. Audiences are moved by Rosalee's equal celebration of both heroines like "Anna Swan" (Nova Scotia's own Victorian Giantess) & Fanny Wentworth in "Graveyard of the Atlantic", and next door neighbours: Maria Gates from Lunenburg County and Harriet Amelia Harlow from North Queens County. To add to her passionate, dramatic performances, she often wears period-style Canadian couturier costumes created by Lark Hewer, and always plays her Canadian-made classical guitar.

Besides performing in concert halls, for the past 3 summers Rosalee has worked in conjunction with the Public Education Office of the Nova Scotia Museum System, presenting "Maritime HERitage In Song" at historic sites province wide. Rosalee is also available for concerts and workshops in high schools' history/choral music/women's studies classes and for community groups and historical societies. Her music is available in CD & lead-sheet format and in choral sheet music arrangements ("Evangeline" in English and French) at www.oceannamusic.com. For more information: or call (902) 668-2192