In Conversation With Colin: Mary Lee Kortes

From her home in New York City, singer/songwriter Mary Lee Kortes chatted to Newport City Radio’s Colin Palmer for ‘The Rock Vault’.

Mary Lee Kortes says the songs on her album Will Anybody Know That I Was Here? The Songs Of Beulah Rowley are not autobiographical, and yet she confesses to putting much of herself into them. Identifying with the fictitious character of Beulah Rowley permitted her to write from a frame of reference she otherwise might not have experienced.

“The very first Beulah Rowley song that came into existence was ‘Born A Happy Girl”, Mary Lee tells me. “I was actually on tour and I was in London staying overnight with a friend sleeping on her sofa bed and I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my next record. I didn’t want to put together just another collection of songs, I wanted to do something that incorporates other writing but I didn’t know what that would look like. I went to sleep and I woke up the next morning with this person in my head named Beulah Rowley, a regionally famous Depression era singer and songwriter from the mid-west. The song ‘Born A Happy Girl’ popped into my head and I started writing that song. So I got home after the tour and I wrote her biography and more songs.”

According to Mary Lee the concept album benefitted greatly from legendary producer Hal Willner who worked with amongst many others Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull, he died of complications from coronavirus in 2020. “My album was his last single artist album, which I call my Halbum,” she jokes. “When I got to Hal’s studio I just had all these home demos at that point, quite rudimentary and he had the Beulah Rowley story and we were listening to some of it and he turned around and looked at me and said ‘I’ve never heard anything like this’. I thought to myself this is Hal Willner who has seen and heard a lot of stuff, and I was just so floored and felt very complimented and it reinforced and validated my own feelings about the project.”

The recording sessions had an amazing array of musicians alongside Mary Lee’s core band, with Joe Jackson guesting on several tracks. “We stayed in touch after a tour when I opened for him and I let him know about this new project I was working on The Songs Of Beulah Rowley and he loved it, he chose two songs that he wanted to play on and these were still demos at this stage – so I had Joe Jackson playing on my demos, imagine that. When it came to making the real record he played on that once again and on a couple of other songs and sang.”

Another UK tour together with Joe followed in October last year, and Mary Lee has just returned home from yet another sojourn around England and Scotland, “I don’t like to generalize, but I have to say – the whole British reserve thing, there’s some truth to that. Here’s an example, I sing ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ a lot live, and at the end there’s a harmonica solo and I whip out my D harmonica and I rip into the solo. Whenever I do that here in the States without fail people get crazy, that didn’t happen once over there, but they laugh at my jokes, they get my humour.”

Mary Lee has regular gigs of her own in New York too, “there’s a really sweet little place called Pete’s Candy Store that I love to play, and they are really kind to me and it’s a wonderful place to try out new things. But I play City Winery too and I used to play a whole lot when I first got started at Mercury Lounge.” Hopefully we can expect another trip to the UK soon.

Excerpts of this interview were broadcast on The Rock Vault June 17^th 2025. 

Colin Palmer