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Meschiya Lake: An Honest-to-Goodness, Modern-Day Chanteuse

Babs Evangelista
/
Music Inside Out

Meschiya Lake & The Little Big Horns have been playing together as a band since 2009. But their repertoire suggests a much longer, deeper history, dating back to the early part of the last century, when people were buying phonographs and drinking absinthe in its original form. The group has performed across the U.S. and Europe and cut two albums, which combine jazz standards and songs that vocalist Meschiya Lake wrote. And when Lake sings … it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between the past and the present. She brings an early jazz sensibility to songcraft and presentation that places her as a top drawer cabaret singer… blues belter… and honest-to-goodness, modern-day chanteuse.

Listen as she talks with Gwen about her start at the Elk Creek Steakhouse & Lounge in Piedmont, South Dakota (where she won a $500 prize for singing at age nine) to her time in the Know Nothing Family Zirkus Zideshow.

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Gwen Thompkins is a New Orleans native, NPR veteran and host of WWNO's Music Inside Out, where she brings to bear the knowledge and experience she amassed as senior editor of Weekend Edition, an East Africa correspondent, the holder of Nieman and Watson Fellowships, and as a longtime student of music from around the world.