Award-winning Portland musician Mary Flower talks about her decades-long career performing and teaching guitar

Mary Flower finally convinced her parents to buy her an acoustic guitar when she was around the age of 12, growing up in Indiana more than six decades ago. Inspired by the folk stylings of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Flower taught herself to play and was good enough to teach the instrument while still in high school. She continued to perform and teach while in college, which she left to embark on a career as a professional guitarist and singer-songwriter based in Denver.

In 2004, Flower moved to Portland, where she continued to gain acclaim for her albums and performances, including being nominated three times for a “Blues Music Award” from the Blues Foundation and being inducted into the Cascade Blues Association’s “Muddy Award” Hall of Fame and the Colorado Music Hall of Fame.

This Saturday, Flower will receive the 2025 “Best of the West Artist Award” from Folk Alliance Region-West in recognition of her contributions to folk music in the region and her ability to “build bridges between traditional genres.”

Despite her busy performance and touring schedule, Flower continues to find time to instruct and mentor fellow guitarists. Earlier this month, she wrapped up Blues in the Gorge, a 5-day acoustic blues guitar camp for adults in the Columbia Gorge she started 12 years ago. Flower leads the workshops with the help of several other musicians she chooses each year for their ability to both perform and teach.

Flower joins us to discuss her expansive career and extensive collaborations with other artists in musical genres spanning from blues to jazz.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Mary Flower convinced her parents to buy her an acoustic guitar when she was around 12 years old. From that moment on, she never really stopped playing. She went from folk to blues and ragtime, and has taught guitar for around six decades. Flower moved to Portland about 20 years ago. She’s been nominated for three “Blues Music Awards” from the Blues Foundation and was inducted into the Cascade Blues Association’s “Muddy Award” Hall of Fame. Tomorrow she’ll receive the 2025 Best of the West Artist Award from the Folk Alliance in recognition of her career and her ability to, in their words, build bridges between traditional genres. Mary Flower joins me now. It’s great to have you on the show.

Mary Flower: So great to be here, Dave. What took you so long?

Miller: Well, I got here and now we’re together. Can we start out with a song?

Flower: Yes, absolutely.

Miller: What do you have for us?

Flower: This is a tune I wrote with the great fingerstyle guitar player Pat Donahue, who lives in Minneapolis. He was in the house band of Prairie Home Companion for many, many years. We wrote this little ragtime piece together. He called it “Mary’s Rag”, so I figured I had to learn it.

(Plays song.)

Miller: Man, what a lovely song. It actually hits so many different emotions at once. I mean, it’s sort of sad, sort of sweet, sort of funny, sort of dancy. I mean, it’s everything together,

Flower: Sort of salty?

Miller: Yeah, I missed the salty. You could eat it. Let’s go back. I mentioned you got a guitar. You asked for a guitar from your parents when you were around 12. Why?

Flower: Well, my sister… First of all, there were six kids in our family, and one of my sisters brought home a ukulele from college. And I had been a failed piano student for, I think, three teachers got rid of me because I wouldn’t learn how to read music because it was easier to use my ear and figure out the song, learn the song from the teacher, go home, play it, rearrange it, come back, and they’d say, ‘you’re not reading the music, are you?’ And I’d say, ‘uh, no.’

Miller: You had serious musical ability, but not in a sort of a classically-trainable way at the time.

Flower: Exactly. And guitar and ukulele were things I could improvise on and not have to read music. I think that was my way out of piano for life. And so anyway, yeah, I wanted something bigger and it was the – we call it the folk scare – back in the 60s was going on and all the music on the radio. And I spent probably my entire high school years dropping the needle on the record player, pulling it back, listening over and over, trying to figure out tunes. So that’s what I was doing.

Miller: That’s how you learned. I mean, there was no guitar teacher for you or friends to play guitar?

Flower: No. I was in a small town. I was the only person who played guitar, and I taught guitar when I was a senior in high school.

Miller: So you taught guitar after teaching yourself by just listening to records.

Flower: That’s mostly it. Yeah, we had no internet. We had no…

Miller: This was in Indiana,

Flower: Yes,

Miller: Okay, but going back to not being able to read music, was the rest of your family, I mean, were they…

Flower: They read music.

Miller: They read music. Did they make you feel less musically capable or did they recognize your own skills and talents?

Flower: Well, I would come home from events and play songs on the piano from ear from what I remembered, so they knew I had some kind of talent, but it wasn’t the kind of talent that piano teachers knew what to do with. So, today I think maybe there are people who can work with that. But yeah, it was a bad thing, not a good thing. So that I was able to get away from that and, much happier.

Miller: When did you start performing?

Flower: In high school. I had a five piece women’s folk group called The Hootin’ Annies. And we had striped red and white shirts and black skirts and white tennis shoes, no socks. We had a look, you know. And we actually, well, I don’t want to tell this whole story, but briefly, we won this competition at a teen place called Indiana Beach. And it was a teen hangout. We won the competition and we had to go back at the end of the summer to compete with everybody, all the winners. And we did our part, we thought we did pretty good and oh, but the main thing was I had tickets to see the Beatles for the same night and I had to sell my $3 ticket. I was just crushed that it was the same night as the competition.

Miller: You went to the competition instead of seeing the Beatles?

Flower: I did because they couldn’t go on without me.

Miller: Were you the star of the show?

Flower: Well, I wouldn’t call it the star, but I was the driving force.

Miller: Glue that held The Hootin’ Annie’s together.

Flower: Yes, yes.

Miller: So what else were you listening to at the time?

Flower: Uh, Simon and Garfunkel. I mean, all the commercial stuff because I really, at that point, did not really understand what was under…. Reverend Gary Davis was selling songs to Peter, Paul and Mary, for instance, and that the roots of the music were beyond me at that point. There wasn’t a lot of literature or ways to find out so I was listening to whatever I could get my hands on.

Miller: When did you go deeper and start to learn the roots, whether it was blues or ragtime, but earlier a lot of these sort of African American roots. When did you start to learn that?

Flower: College. Indiana University was a great ethnomusicology school which I unfortunately didn’t go to. I should have, but a lot of people were there to study in that school who were just great and so I heard a lot of people playing and I would perform at little coffee houses and stuff. Joni Mitchell was starting out then and I got into open tunings from her music, and it was a great time. That’s when I really began to realize what was going on musically, the music I was listening to.

Miller: Can we hear another song?

Flower: Sure.

Miller: What do you have for us?

Flower: Yes, I could have been tuning, but I didn’t. I’m going very quickly. This song will show you how my music is morphed. Because when I sit down and get an idea, things come up and they’re not necessarily blues or ragtime, and I don’t know how I would even qualify this next song. It’s called “Trip Around the Sun.” And I recently performed with the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble. And they had one of their arrangers arrange this tune as well as others as part of that concert. So I’m going into a G suspended tuning if anyone out there plays guitar. I thought I made this tuning up. I’m not sure.

Miller: Yeah, if you’re scoring at home, you now know how to tune this.

Flower: Close. Okay, here we go.

(plays music)

Miller: That is “Trip Around the Sun” by our guest, the guitarist and teacher Mary Flower. She is the creator of the annual Blues in the Gorge Camp, which just wrapped up its 12th year. Mary, before you played that, you said you’re not even sure how to categorize it, what genre to put it in, and not that it even matters, but how do you think about these categories? You know, I said at the beginning that you play folk and ragtime and blues. Do these categories matter to you at this point in your career?

Flower: Not really. I mean, I follow whatever my muse tells me to do when I’m sitting and finding things and discovering new tunings and deciding if I want to take it further. I don’t think, oh, I can’t play this because that’s not my genre. I just follow what I wanna do and if somebody doesn’t like it, that’s too bad because at this point in my life, the wider I can be, the better, you know, the more variety I think.

Miller: What excites you right now musically?

Flower: I have been playing… Well, I’m about to play with a great clarinet player named Leon Cotter, and Leon is in a group called the California Honeydrops, and they’re a big famous on-the-road-all-the-time-touring band. And he lives in Portland and we met on an airplane one time and I saw him recently when I was going to a lot of jazz things that were going on, and he said, ‘you wanna do some clarinet guitar stuff?’ I said, ‘yeah.’ So we have a couple of gigs on the calendar and it’s exciting to me to be able to simplify and bring it down to basics. He’s just an incredible player and I kind of can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s so good. So change is great, and to me it’s a chance for me to learn his music and vice versa and it’s stretching me and that’s a really good thing.

Miller: Huh. It’s hard for all of us to stretch the older we get, but you’re seeking this out.

Flower: I think I have to. I think if I don’t change then then I’m not gonna be very excited about anything. I need to keep morphing, my music needs to keep moving and yeah, it’s very exciting to me.

Miller: Speaking of morphing, you just put down the acoustic guitar you had been playing and now you put another one on your lap.

Flower: I did. I was so quiet.

Miller: You did, but I watched. I could see you do it. So what is this new guitar?

Flower: It’s a very old guitar actually, and it’s from the 40s. It’s a Gibson. It’s called HG-2 and that HG stands for Hawaiian guitar and it was made in the 40s, supposedly they made about 40 of them. And the difference between this and any other little Gibson guitar with a small bod, is a square neck, which means it’s played like a dobro or I call it a lap slide.

Miller: Oh, so a flat back of the neck and you’re gonna play it on your lap?

Flower: Yeah, you can’t possibly play this with your fingers because the action or the height of the strings is so high and so I use a bar, a little sliding bar to get that kind of sound. Hawaiian guitar some people might be familiar with and it’s similar to that or swing… Well, it’s used for all different kinds. And I use it for blues to sound a little bit like a bottleneck-style guitar which is played upright on a regular guitar. This is my version.

Miller: So what are we gonna hear?

Flower: We’re gonna hear a tune that was done by Memphis Minnie who is a great heroine to every woman guitar player that plays this kind of music. She was quite something in her day and this was a song called “The Black Rat Swing.” Her lover was a black rat. He did something wrong and he was being kicked out so that’s what this is all about.

(Plays song.)

Miller: I think I could hear that song all day. That is “Black Rat Swing” by my guest Mary Flower. Can you just give us a little bit of a lesson there and what you were doing at the same time as sort of a little bit of bass with the slide and the melody all the same. I mean, what are you doing?

Flower: I don’t know. I was, yes, playing the bass. I’m playing it all with a slide, right? I’m finger picking in the right hand. I’ve got finger picks on my first two fingers and a plastic thumb pick on my thumb.

Miller: So picking individually with three different fingers?

Flower: Two fingers and a thumb, yeah.

Miller: A thumb separate from a finger. Okay.

Flower: And my thumb is alternating the bass in an octave pattern. And that hopefully keeps going through most of the song, so that if I’m playing the melody, I integrated and then I played a sort of a bluesier, while I was singing. And it all comes together hopefully.

Miller: Voilà, 60 years later you can do it.

Flower: It’s been a long time.

Miller: I mean, so you’re 76 right now, is that right?

Flower: I am.

Miller: You don’t just play the blues, but that is the blues. Has playing the blues changed? Does it feel different over the course of your life?

Flower: That’s a good question. I think I’m pickier about what I play. I play things that I can arrange and make my own as opposed to playing them exactly like Muddy Waters or somebody. And that’s what’s changed is my perception, I think, and my ability to arrange things so that they’re more interesting for me.

Miller: That answer makes perfect sense and it’s about craft. I guess I was wondering if it’s more about, I mean, the blues is famously about taking a lot of pain and transforming it into something else that still includes pain, and I’m wondering if the feel of that aspect of the music has changed over the course of your life.

Flower: Wow, you’re asking some really good questions here. Um, I think it was almost a secret language back in the late 1800s that people used and it was a joyous thing and so was the spiritual music that they sang. Sometimes the two are interchangeable. Ragtime, sometimes called piedmont, and blues as we think of traditional blues. Ragtime blues and spiritual music, a lot of the old guys played all three, and they were morphing all the time.

Gary Davis said that after a certain point he wasn’t gonna sing the blues because he was a minister and he was gonna sing only spiritual music. So yeah, it’s a big mix and it was for those people. And I love the spiritual side of that music. That’s really fun to arrange. We have a thing at Blues in the Gorge that we do every time. The last day is Sunday and we’ll do the Gospel Jubilee and that’s really great and everyone’s got great songs that I’ve never heard before and that’s really fun. Of course, I’m an atheist, but…

Miller: But you can still play it. Do you mind taking us out with one more song and while you’re getting the going back to the other guitar, I’m just going to remind folks again and thank you. This is Mary Flower. It has been such a pleasure being in your presence as you’re making music. Thank you very much.

Flower: It’s so great hearing your voice, because I hear it every day and there it is right in front of me and it’s so… You can’t mistake your voice. So it’s been an honor to sit here and spend a little time with you. Thank you, Dave. All right. A song of mine called “The Crooked Rag.”

(Plays song)

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