INSTRUMENTS: VIOLIN, GUITAR, VOIC
GENRES: CELTIC, AMERICANA, EUROPEAN FOLK
Lee Corbie-Wells has been playing violin since the age of 6. Her father, a music teacher in San Francisco (Lee’s hometown) and her mother, a music teacher in the Oakland Public School District, taught her Scottish, Irish, English and American tunes by ear, fostering her love of folk music. At the age of 11, she began formal training. In addition to her instrumental studies, Lee sang first soprano in the San Francisco Girls Chorus for five years. She started performing solo at Brava Theatre at the age of 14, but soon got heavily into Celtic roots music. At age 18, Lee toured Southern Ireland with her first band, Drowsy Maggie, along with one of her former violin teachers, Alison Streich.
Since then, she has played in numerous Celtic and Americana bands and has also performed at military functions such as house-concerts at Airforce bases in Travis, CA and in Kuwait. Although she primarily pays Celtic and American fiddle music, Lee has taken her years of experience in Blues and folk improvisation and branched out into explorations of Jazz, Swing, Ragtime, and Latin genres.
As a performing musician, Lee co-fronts the Celtic/Eastern European/Ameriana band Moonshine Jelly and the Scandinavian-Bluegrass-Contradance band Kaptain Bottletop, and plays violin and sings harmony with singer-songwriter Mark Nelsen.
Lee has a very direct approach to instruction and an enormous repertoire to teach from, including traditional music from all over the world. Her main countries of musical influence and study are Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, France, Bulgaria, Cornwall, Wales, and other British Isles. She sings in the languages of all countries listed above, and spends her free time studying Gaelic and French among other European languages to deepen her understanding of the lyrical stories in the songs that she performs.
