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Kathy Kallick

Recording Artist · Active 1991–present · Chicago · Also a musician
Contemporary Bluegrass

Kathy Kallick has spent fifty years at the center of California bluegrass — first as a co-founder of the Good Ol’ Persons, one of the earliest all-women bands in the music, and since the mid-1990s as the leader of a band that carries her name and her songs. She is a singer before she is anything else: a big, plain, unornamented voice that goes at a lyric head-on, and a songwriter whose originals sit in a set beside Monroe and the Carter Family without announcing themselves as new.

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  • Born September 19, 1952, in Chicago and raised in suburban Evanston, she grew up inside the city’s folk revival: her mother, Dodi Kallick, was a leading figure in that scene and helped establish the Old Town School of Folk Music.
  • She began performing as a child singing harmony with her mother; her father, Bruce Kallick, handed her a Doc Watson LP and her first guitar.
  • John Prine and Steve Goodman, working the same Chicago rooms, pushed her toward writing her own material; accompanying the fiddler Michael Drayton moved her from fingerpicking to flatpicking.
  • She moved to the Bay Area in 1973, found bluegrass while enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, and took a BFA there in 1977.
  • In 1975 she co-founded the Good Ol’ Persons with Laurie Lewis, Barbara Mendelsohn, Dorothy Baxter and Sue Shelasky — one of the first all-women bluegrass bands, and a working one, twice booked into Bill Monroe’s Bean Blossom festival and touring Canada and Europe.
  • The band lasted two decades and five albums, from Good Ol’ Persons (Bay Records, 1977) through I Can’t Stand to Ramble (1983), Part of a Story (1986), Anywhere the Wind Blows (1989) and Good N’ Live (1995); its later lineups drew in John Reischman and Sally Van Meter. Kallick played bass in the early years before settling on guitar.
  • She also sang and recorded with the Frank Wakefield Band during the Good Ol’ Persons era.
  • Her own records begin with What Do You Dream About? (1990) and Matters of the Heart (1993) and run through Call Me a Taxi (1996), Walkin’ in My Shoes (1999), Reason & Rhyme (2004), A Warmer Kind of Blue (2005), the gospel set Count Your Blessings (2011) and Cut to the Chase (2014).
  • Two of her children’s albums, among them Use a Napkin (Not Your Mom) (1995), took Parents’ Choice awards.
  • My Mother’s Voice (Copper Creek, 2001) is the record that fixed her reputation: seventeen old songs learned from Dodi Kallick, sung without arrangement tricks.
  • She formed the Kathy Kallick Band in 1996 and has kept a remarkably stable lineup — Annie Staninec on fiddle, Tom Bekeny on mandolin, Greg Booth on reso-guitar and banjo, Cary Black on bass — across Between the Hollow and the High-Rise (2010), Time (2012), Foxhounds (2015), Horrible World (2018) and The Loneliness Chronicles (2023).
  • Her duo work with Laurie Lewis produced Together (1991) and Laurie & Kathy Sing the Songs of Vern & Ray (2014), a debt paid to Vern Williams and Ray Park, the Arkansas-born pair who taught California what hard bluegrass singing sounded like.
  • She contributed to True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe, which won a Grammy and two IBMA awards, and she holds the Northern California Bluegrass Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award and a California Bluegrass Association Lifetime Membership.
  • She returned to her mother’s music with What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?, built around rediscovered 1966 recordings of Dodi Kallick singing on Chicago’s WFMT.
  • Her twenty-fourth album, released in 2026, is credited to Kathy Kallick & the Windfalls and brings in her two adult children, Juniper Waller and Riley Thompson, on a set that runs from classic country to rockabilly.
  • She teaches regularly at music camps in North America and Europe, including the California Bluegrass Association Music Camp and the Augusta Heritage Center.

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