North Carolina, resident Donna Hughes broke onto the national bluegrass scene this year with her CD Gaining Wisdom on Rounder Records. Produced by Tony Rice, the album showcases her songwriting, singing, and in a decidedly non-bluegrass twist, her piano playing. Donna’s songwriting had previously earned recognition when Alison Krauss and Union Station recorded her song “My Poor Old Heart” on their Lonely Runs Both Ways CD. Donna, who is in her mid-thirties, lives in Trinity, NC, with her two Basset hounds, three horses, two parakeets, and three baby rabbits, on farm land that has been in her family for more than 200 years. (The hounds accompany her to most of her gigs.) Gaining Wisdom follows two independent releases and is the pinnacle, so far, of a late-blooming, though steadily growing, music career.

Donna knows that her songs do not fit the traditional bluegrass mold. “I don’t just write a three-chord song,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever written a song with just three chords. It’s like a curse. I can’t do it no matter how hard I try.” She credits her mother’s taste for classical music with expanding her harmonic sensibilities. “That helped me be more innovative and creative in the chord patterns and things,” she explains. Well aware that her wide musical pallet does not endear her to more conservative bluegrass fans, Donna embraces the fans it does bring her. “The Bill Monroe generation doesn’t like the newfangled stuff that I like to write.” With her newer releases, she says, she “lost people that I originally started with as fans, and gained more weird people that like the weird stuff. You can tell my music is getting weirder and weirder as I go along.”

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