Three women who know their reason for being

In our third decade together, lots of circumstances affected our repertoire and configurations.  One very fruitful circumstance was our partnering with Falcon Theatre of Newport, KY and the Campbell County Public Library on a new series entitled Signature Series.  The…

History Homework 

From the very beginning, our trio has been challenged to learn historical sets and to perform at historical venues.  We started out with Simon Kenton Days at Historic Washington, KY, moved on to perform Shaker and pioneer tunes…

Between 2008-2010, Raison D’Etre would continue playing at many venues around home like Edensong, Summerfair, The Coffee Cup Concert Series, and even the Appalachian Festival at Coney Island.  But starting in 2008, we ventured out of our regional territory to…

Once we were juried into the Kentucky Performing Arts Directory, we traveled to many music venues in Kentucky.  But we also began to write more of our own songs thanks to a grant from Kentucky Foundation for Women that afforded…

1999 was a turning point for the trio.  We finally finished our first studio album, Better Medicine, which our engineer, Bruce Ellis, assured us was a “documentation” of all the styles of music we’d performed since 1990: singer songwriter tunes,…

One of the perks of attempting to document a thirty-year history for this folk trio is finding unexpected artifacts in the “archives.”  While I won’t share any photos of the haphazard files that contain scraps of Raison D’Etre history, I…

For the first couple of years, we built up our set list with originals and any singer songwriter covers that allowed us to expand our three-part harmonies.  So, where does a folk trio play with that brand of repertoire?  The…

All three members of Raison D’Etre are Morehead State University grads.  That’s not where Violet Rae and Roberta met, of course.  When asked the question, “how long have you been playing with your sister?” Violet’s standard answer is “all my…

After stepping off BB Riverboat’s Hoedown Cruise for the final summer, Violet Rae, Vickie and I had decided to keep playing together as a trio.  We knew that would mean becoming less commercial in our song choices, more acoustic in…

It all began after two summer seasons playing on BB Riverboats' "Hoe Down Cruise."  We were the front women for a band named-- just for the occasion of party-barging up the Mighty Ohio River--Runaway Stage. We played a mostly country…