September 04, 1994|By Vicky Edwards Gehrt. Special to the Tribune.
She practices guitar with Chet Atkins. Astronauts listened to one of her tapes in space. She learned to play "Stairway to Heaven" from Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page. And when she drops in at Nashville's famous Bluebird Cafe, the emcee squeezes her onto the bill because he knows that when Elmhurst's Muriel Anderson is in town, Nashville listens.
Anderson, who grew up in Downers Grove, is a 34-year-old songwriter, a producer who is currently producing a tape for Glenn Yarbrough (best known for his hit "Baby, the Rain Must Fall"), a guitar instructor at Wheaton College and Elmhurst College, and a performer who has played internationally and won the National Fingerpicking Guitar Championship five years ago in Winfield, Kan.
She is also a straight-forward, single-minded person who knows what she loves to do, dedicates herself to it totally and is able to support herself doing it.
"I decided I wanted to do this even if I starved," Anderson said. "I learned from my mother how to live on a limited budget. In college (on academic scholarship at DePaul), I used the $20 to $40 a week that I was making from playing in a bluegrass band for groceries. When I first started supporting myself, I was really proud. I was one of those few people who could do what she loved and make a living at it."
It was at DePaul that Anderson met her husband of 10 years, Michael Kurtz. "I had actually graduated and came back to sit in on a guitar ensemble class," Kurtz recalled. "Muriel was in her first year. It was a musical relationship long before it was an emotional relationship."
They formed The Chicago Guitar Duo, performing regularly at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Chicago. A few years later, they married and moved to Elmhurst. The Hyatt gig lasted 10 years, until Kurtz was forced to give up his career in 1991 when diagnosed with focal dystonia, a condition that causes involuntary contraction of his right hand. Kurtz and Anderson adjusted their lives to cope with the resulting professional and emotional difficulties.
"I try to put it out of my mind," Kurtz said. "I support Muriel as much as I can. I do a lot of work for her so she can concentrate on writing and performing. I take care of the business end, the paper work, purchases, expenses, filling the mail orders, things like that."
Anderson went on with her solo career, playing a wide range of song styles from classical to country, and nearly everything in between. While her diversity is one of her strengths, it also causes her difficulties when it comes to marketing.
"I've been looking for a category," she said. "When record stores ask what bin to put CDs in, I have a hard time answering that question. My roots are in folk music, but I'm a classically trained artist. What I like to do is play classical music that a folk audience would enjoy and folk pieces that a classical audience would enjoy."
She has released three solo guitar albums in the last five years: "Heartstrings," "Arioso from Paris" and "Hometown Live," which was taped at a concert at Elmhurst College. It was "Heartstrings" that astronaut Susan Helms took into space.
"She said it would be good music to watch the Earth by," said Anderson, who met the Space Shuttle astronauts at a pre-flight dinner before their 1991 mission. "They returned the tape with a certificate saying it had been in space. It traveled 2.5 million miles. That's the most mileage I've ever gotten out of a tape, I guess."
While her tape, and her dreams, have been sky-high, Anderson has more earth-bound beginnings. The second of four children born to Ted and Andrea Anderson, Muriel's background was one of music appreciation. Her maternal grandfather, Andy Jacobson, played saxophone in John Philip Sousa's band. (Anderson pays homage to him by frequently performing her guitar rendition of Sousa's "The Liberty Bell.")
She traces her song-writing passion back to her piano-lesson days at age 9. Her first effort was "Ding Dong (That's How the Doorbell Rings)." She has since written about 100 songs.
It was a year after her "Ding-Dong" days, though, that the event happened that determined her future. A friend of her mother was throwing a guitar away and asked Anderson if she would like it.
"I started figuring melodies out in the car on the way home," Anderson recalled, "so I took to it right away."
According to her first guitar teacher, that's a drastic understatement. Anne Jones of Lombard, who still teaches guitar, recalls a girl with long blond pigtails who soaked up lessons like a sponge and was almost immediately moved from a young children's group to a teenage group that was closer to her ability.
"Her feet didn't touch the floor," Jones said. "At first the teenagers were a little scornful because she was so young. Then they were terrified: She outplayed all of them. Ultimately, they were impressed and respectful. By the time she was a young teenager, she knew everything I could teach her."
