News - Local/State - Andrew Dys

Saturday, Nov. 15, 2008

Rock hill teen to share stage with folk legend progeny today in Chester County

Kayla Small, 14 and in the ninth grade at Northwestern High School, should be a nervous wreck today. She will take a stage in front of hundreds by herself, armed with only a guitar and her voice. A few minutes later on the same stage will be folk/country singer Sarah Lee Guthrie -- the daughter of folk legend Arlo Guthrie, granddaughter of even bigger folk legend Woody Guthrie.

Not Kayla. No nerves for her.

"No big deal," she said. "I haven't ever had stage fright."

I guess when you start strumming a guitar at 3 and play your first nightclub gig at 8, playing with legends is just another show.

When Kayla was younger, she played at McHale's and the Garden Cafe in York. Before that, at 8, she started playing at Harry & Jeans in Rock Hill, alongside her guitar teacher, Lisa Carmen.

"It was a little strange to have your little girl playing in a bar at that age, but she loved it, and we thought it turned out great," said Kayla's mother, Sheila.

Kayla's world is music, her parents say. She sings at Northwestern, and she really started singing as soon as she learned to talk. She took her first cues from her father, Keith, a guitar guy who never made a living in music but has carried a six-string somewhere most of his life.

"I was always a fan of classic '70s rock 'n' roll, we always had it playing in the house, and she just took to it," Keith Small said.

Kayla recently recorded several of her own compositions, but she still has an ear for that classic rock.

"All that '70s stuff, I love it, but I have an infatuation with the Beatles," she said. "I'm obsessed with them. I know all their songs."

Tonight, Kayla will sing five of her original songs, plus one cover. She's the opening act for Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion at the Rodman-Oakgrove Community Center in Chester County.

To get ready, her father has played for Kayla some of the old folk favorites of the Guthries -- especially Arlo's signature hit, "Alice's Restaurant."

Anybody of a certain age -- what a teenager would call old -- can remember the lyrics: "You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant ..."

"I'm old enough to remember Arlo's songs on the radio, even some of Woody's songs," Keith Small said.

Kayla said she has taken a shine to Arlo's songs, but she has had to learn about Woody Guthrie. Woody was the real minstrel of the displaced Dust Bowl people during the Great Depression, and for decades, he sang to and about all those people who were broke and broken.

He rode boxcars around the country, hitchhiked from coast to coast a bunch of times carrying nothing but his guitar. He recorded and wrote songs that never die. Remember "This Land is Your Land?" That one with "From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters?" And thousands of others.

That's Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie fought for the little guy all his life.

It sure seems right that this little concert tonight by Woody's granddaughter will be at a community center where the directions say, "Turn right at the livestock barn."

And a couple of minutes after 7 p.m., 14-year-old Kayla will take the stage and maybe remind a new audience that guts, a guitar and a voice is all you need sometimes.