“Throughout my travels this year as I see other parts of the country, it just reminds me how much I love it here.”
Rochester resident Grace Morrison-Hartley is talking about her cross-country tours as the town’s most-accomplished singer-songwriter versus pining for the homebase she has shared with her husband Scott Hartley and three-and-half-year-old son Brayton Hartley for the past five years.
“Every time I travel, I realize I love it here more,” the Wareham native explained. She said it’s the reason one song on the album she will release early next year is titled “Massachusetts.”
“The song is just about that feeling,” she said.
But travel she has had to accept in order to grow a career that is blossoming more within the last year than in any of the 20 years before it. She said she manifested her career growth by deciding one day to do more than just teach music lessons to 65 students a week and perform in local bars. “I decided to fully go after what I wanted to do,” she said. “I decided to walk through the doors already open for me.”
Morrison-Hartley signed up for songwriting contests, acquired a booking agent and cultivated the relationships she was starting to have with fellow artists. “It’s a relationship business,” she explained.
The strategy has worked very well. In January, she went to Nashville, Tennessee, to do some songwriting and recording. In February, she was back home to perform at the Zeiterion Theatre in New Bedford. In March, she drove to New Mexico and Arizona for concerts in the southwest.
Out there, she learned she had been nominated for awards in two songwriter competitions. In May, at the first of those, the Songwriters Serenade competition, in Austin, Texas, she met Susan Gibson, who wrote the song “Wide Open Spaces” for The Chicks. Gibson was a judge in that competition.
Morrison-Hartley said she was honored when Gibson said to her, “I have no critique for you. I’m just a fan.”
“To have that said to you by someone like her was pretty validating,” Morrison-Hartley noted.
Then came regional concerts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and locally in Onset, followed by the Gatlinburg (Tennessee) Songwriters Festival in August. There, she shared the stage with singer-songwriter Dana Hunt Black, who has written two number-one hits for country star George Strait.
In September, she had her Bluebird Cafe debut in Nashville, then played the Whitefish (Montana) Songwriter Festival, closing out the month in Austin as an Official Showcase Artist at the Southwest Regional Folk Alliance Conference.
In the middle of that, Morrison-Hartley got a call from the “Blast on the Bay Songwriter Festival” in Port St. Joe, Florida, inviting her to perform on October 20th. “All thanks to songwriter Dana Hunt Black championing me,” Morrison-Hartley said. “Truly a ‘pinch me’ moment! She said she loved what I did and wanted to write with me. We’re planning to get together while I’m in Florida.”
On Thursday, November 3rd, Morrison-Hartley will perform at The Spire in Plymouth (tickets are now on sale at spirecenter.org. On Saturday, November 5th, she’ll perform with Connor Garvey at the Linden Tree Coffeehouse in Wakefield; and on Tuesday, November 15th, she will be back at The Spire to open for Chris Smither. And soon her new single, “Fumbling In” will be released.
In March 2023, Morrison-Hartley will return to Austin for a tour timed to the release of her new album, “Maybe Modern.”
Meanwhile, you’ll be able to find her in Rochester. The day she spoke to The Wanderer, she was heading to pick cranberries with her father-in-law Woody Hartley. Look for her YouTube video of her song “Daughter.” It was partly filmed at Eastover Farm in Rochester.
What are the other secrets to her success?
“The old trope about entertainers is that they are lazy and not good at business,” she said. “My way has to be good at those things.”
Morrison-Hartley said she treats her career everyday as a full-time job, with morning vocal practice and two hours of songwriting. She also points to her family support. “The support of my husband and in-laws and my mom,” she said. “I couldn’t do all this without them. They are a great gift.”
By Michael J. DeCicco