Dave Marsh | 1950-2026

Dave Marsh was a legend.

There’s really no reason in the world that I should have known him. He was a music critic and radio talk show host. He was an early editor of Creem magazine. He wrote for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone. He published biographies on rock musicians that are seminal. Dave Marsh wasn’t trolling the folk scene to find me.

But life is funny that way. My friend and great supporter, Barbara Manners, happened to be friends with Dave. Barbara and I met many years ago when she booked me for The Connecticut Folk Festival. I brought my band The Tearjerks and played. But I remember that show, I decided to do something different on that set. I had the band leave the stage and I played a few songs solo. Barbara talked to me later and said it was the first time she’d really heard me. She loved me solo. The band was great, but they overpowered my voice and, at the core, the thing was my voice and my songs. Barbara went on over the years to book me at many of her concerts in Ridgefield, CT and we have become close like family.

I must have been playing her series one summer and I stayed with her. The next day, she invited me to lunch with Dave Marsh to meet him. I was nervous. He was a legend. Around legends, I remember to just ask them about themselves and their interests and sideswipe the whole music shop talk. I’m not sure how, but we got to talking about Shakespeare. We both were obsessed and very well read and could quote passages. I told him about my years in NYC, studying acting at The National Shakespeare Conservatory, about working with Expanded Arts in the Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot series for a few years. He knew about my music – Barbara had shared it with him – and he was, can I say it?, a fan? That’s impossible to me. That Dave Marsh was a fan of what I do, but he was. He loved it. We connected so much that afternoon. He told me he thought I had a musical in me. He said I should write an album of songs inspired by Shakespeare. He dared me to do it.

I’m not sure how much time passed. It may have been a few years. But I was at a Vipassana Meditation 10 Day Course in Jessup, Georgia in a silent retreat to learn the meditation technique taught by the Buddha. It was an intense and emotional roller coaster. Absolute silence for 10 days. No looking at anyone, gesturing. No reading or writing. I went as deep inside as I’d ever been. I was in a very troubling relationship at the time – one that was deeply confusing, intoxicating, radically unhealthy and very much a product of choices I was making while spiraling through untreated trauma and alcoholism. I spent that week in an emotional, yet silent, tailspin. Birds followed me. My voice split in two after a three hour sit and God spoke to me. But while I was walking one day, a melody came to me and I knew in my heart it was Titania’s from Midsummer Night’s Dream. I also had nothing to write it down with, no paper, no pen, no cell phone. I just had to repeat it over and over in my head and hope to remember it. It was there in those walks that the idea came to me to write the album How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat. I’d write songs that were responses to characters in Shakespeare’s plays, direct responses to certain monologues, imagery, sonnets.

When I got home after that painful retreat, I started to work on “Lullabye Under The Willow,” my Titania song. From there, I wrote “The Fortunate Ones” (King Henry V), “The Sea and the Shore” (part Brutus, part Prospero). The album flowed out of me. When it was done, the first person I shared it with was Dave Marsh. He loved it. I shyly asked him if he’d write the liner notes and he immediately said yes. I wish the liner notes were on a vinyl record. As of now, that record is almost out of print, and it only came out on CD, so the print is tiny.

Album available to buy digitally

Dave Marsh lost his daughter to cancer at the age of 21. He wrote a letter to her every year for her birthday and somehow I became part of a list of people he would send the email letter to. He inspired me to write a letter to my own dead father every Father’s Day (I keep them in a drawer). His words always moved me and I always wrote him back.

He invited me to swing by the studio to be on his radio show that was a Bruce Springsteen show. My band was freaking out. I still couldn’t believe I was on this man’s radar. We just talked like friends though.

I don’t remember the last time we spoke. I wrote him an email a year ago and asked Barbara how he was doing and she told me not well. I would have loved to have shared with him my cover of Bruce’s “My Father’s House” that’s on my record Tucson or my version of “Nebraska” I do in live concerts.

Dave died on August 14. He was 76. I wish I could have told him how much it meant to me to just sit and talk with him about Shakespeare That he included me in his email chain about his daughter. That he was always available to me if I called or emailed.

Really, this is all because of Barbara Manners, who believed in me before I had a real career. Who is a blunt truth teller but was right that I should step out solo. You never know when you’re going to meet a champion who will change your life. Rest in Peace, my friend.

NPR Story about the record on All Things Considered

Video for “The Sea and the Shore”

Video by Korby Lenker.

Video for How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat.

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield.

The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.