Click Image to Download!

“As a writer, you get in a zone. You get possessed by something. If you're lucky,” says Mary Lee Kortes. 

Kortes has found herself possessed by many different forces over the arc of her 25 year career, be it as the lauded front-woman of Mary Lee’s Corvette, a solo artist, author, or social worker. Sometimes the possession comes in the form of Bob Dylan, whose 1975 classic Blood on the Tracks she covered as a live album in 2002, and later revisited in her 2018 non-fiction collection, Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob. Sometimes, as a short story writer and novelist, it’s by the way fiction roots itself in emotional truths. Other times it’s by music's ability to be used as a tool in an expressive arts therapy program she created. All of the acclaimed songwriter and performer’s endeavors find themselves connected by the same thread: a deeply empathetic understanding of, and belief in, the power of stories to bring people together. 

Will Anybody Know That I Was Here: The Songs of Beulah Rowley, Kortes’s new stunning and immersive album, was born from one of those all-encompassing possessions, from a feeling she couldn’t shake, one she had to write through to fully understand. The singer-songwriter was on tour in England, promoting her 2006 album Love Loss & Lunacy, and already thinking about what her next album would be. She knew she wanted to expand upon a typical album format, wanted it to be less a batch of loosely connected songs and more a cohesive work with a sense of character and purpose to it that could incorporate her love for writing fiction. “I went to sleep with all of this on my mind,” she says, “and I woke up in the morning with this woman in my head named Beulah Rowley, a depression-era singer-songwriter, from the Midwest like me, and I immediately started writing the song ‘Born a Happy Girl.’” There was something interesting there, she thought, a spark in this dream of a woman she felt compelled to explore and understand on a deeper level. She finished her tour and came home to write the biography of Beulah Rowley—and her complete songbook.

The story Kortes wrote is one of tragic brevity: Beulah Rowley found regional fame throughout the 1930s playing at county fairs and her father’s Michigan movie theater, performing original songs she wrote and stored locked inside a custom-made, wrought-iron piano bench. At just twenty-one years old, she died in a house fire with her husband and infant daughter—but the piano bench, and her songs, survived, and would be passed down over generations and through flea markets before ending up with Mary Lee Kortes. On her tenth birthday, Kortes asked her father to open the bench, and came upon all of Beulah’s handwritten melodies and lyrics, alongside her personal diaries. It was then she decided to one day bring her story and songs back to the world where they belonged.

The resulting record, Will Anybody Know That I Was Here: The Songs of Beulah Rowley, released on vinyl for the first time on April 15 in conjunction with Record Store Day, tells her story in all its joy and sorrow. Marrying haunting compositions true to the style of early twentieth century folk music with lyrics both timely and timeless, Will Anybody Know That I Was Here meets listeners in a present era of tumult and uncertainty, one not at all dissimilar from that of its protagonist. Within its lost album concept, it reminds listeners of whose voices in particular are more often lost than others, while landing on an optimistic note in spite of all the heartbreak it doles out: Some voices may be harder to find, but they don’t always stay lost forever. The way Kortes sees it, “your voice may be heard, even if you don’t know it. Everybody wants to feel heard, whether they know it or not, and Beulah didn't get heard because she died. But because I discovered her music, she's being heard now. Yes, I know, I talk about her like she’s real, but she is real, very real, to me.”

Just as the discovery of Beulah Rowley’s long-lost music would take time, so too would the passion project of delivering her stories to the world. Over the years, Beulah Rowley’s songs evolved from a story residing in Kortes’s head to home studio demos to live performance piece, with Kortes interspersing readings from her biography of Beulah Rowley between songs. In 2009, Kortes met with legendary producer Hal Willner, who admired her demos: “I don’t know how you did this,” he told her. “I've never seen anything like this.” After a successful crowdfunding campaign, Kortes and Willner convened in the studio in 2015 to record a full-length album. “It was so touching and moving to work with him,” she says of the legendary Wilner, and what would become his penultimate album—and last single-artist album—before his death in 2020. “He came up with great ideas for restructuring some of the songs. He was hearing the whole album, and instrumentation that I wasn’t hearing yet, a process I wasn’t hearing yet. When we finally did get into the studio to do the basic tracks, it felt like a religious experience.” 

Over her prolific 25-year career, Kortes has been hailed as “a masterful songwriter” (The Village Voice), whose songs have been praised as “so meticulously crafted they sound completely natural” (The New York Times). Her four original albums as the frontwoman of Mary Lee’s Corvette garnered Kortes widespread acclaim for her “keen observations of people and life” (New York Post), “catchy pop melodies and such honest looks at modern romance” (The Washington Post), and “delicately rich voice” (Entertainment Weekly).

In 2002, Mary Lee’s Corvette released a song-for-song cover album of Bob Dylan’s 1975 classic Blood on the Tracks, recorded live at Arlene’s Grocery in New York City. The bold reimagining was applauded for its “quaintly direct magnificence” and “the bright bite in Mary Lee Kortes’s voice—the high-mountain sunshine of Dolly Parton, with a sweet iron undercoat of Chrissie Hynde” (Rolling Stone).

Kortes’s work expands beyond the confines of songwriting and performance, both as a creator of a “song therapy” program she has taken to schools and hospitals, as well as Iraq and Northern Ireland to work with those affected by trauma, and as a published author and editor. In 2018, BMG Books released her debut book, Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob, a “visually stunning and dreamy collection” (No Depression) of dreams about the songwriter from an array of sources, from Patti Smith and Kevin Odegard to plumbers, painters, and pastors, dentists, attorneys, and psychotherapists.  

On WILL ANYBODY KNOW THAT I WAS HERE, Kortes crafts an arresting and uncanny work that couples her gift for sharply-written, observational storytelling with her talent for interpreting the works of others. Though the album may be an interpretation of a fictional voice of her own creation, its themes—trauma and grief, dreams of life beyond small Midwestern hometowns, mortality and legacy—and the emotions at its heart are deeply personal. Kortes says it best: “Just because I made it all up doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”