Tracy Nelson Relights Her Fire In 'Victim of the Blues'

by Craig Havighurst
Through a 40-year career that's reached from the Fillmore scene of late 1960s San Francisco to Nashville's top studios, Tracy Nelson has earned a reputation as a powerful singer with a stunning voice. Recently, Nelson's work on a new album was interrupted by a fire that badly damaged her home and her studio. But the music, like the artist herself, proved to be a survivor.

It should come as no surprise for a woman whose most famous band was called Mother Earth, but Tracy Nelson lives in the country. Forty minutes from downtown Nashville, 10 miles off the freeway at a bend in the road, stands the farmhouse she has shared for a decade with her companion, recording engineer Mike Dysinger.

It should be a bucolic sight, but the 100-year-old structure is scorched inside, and the front porch is jammed with blackened furniture and personal belongings. Nelson is in the front yard, rescuing an old watercolor whose frame has shattered.

She says the fire started about 10 o'clock on a Saturday night and spread quickly. "I smelled smoke upstairs and Mike was yelling and the smoke alarm was kind of going eeh eeh — being wimpy. By the time I came out the bedroom door, the smoke was so thick. We just didn't have much time except to get out and get as many animals out as we could and open the doors and hope the rest of them would figure it out and most of them did."

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