Mossy Davidson -

Mossy Davidson (aka Mairiis Kilcher) is an American singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Homer, Alaska, who released the 1977 double-album NorthWind Calling on the self-operated North Woods label.

Background

Mairiis Kilcher was born in Alaska in 1942 to Swiss immigrants Ruth and Yule Kilcher. She grew up as the eldest of eight children on the family homestead outside Homer. Ruth was an opera singer, while both parents taught their children Swiss folk songs and played Mozart and international folk records on a hand-cranked record player.

From age fourteen, Kilcher spent two years in Switzerland with her family. An Andrés Segovia concert prompted her to take classical-guitar lessons. She also took up songwriting and taught younger brother Atz Kilcher guitar. In 1958, Kilcher returned to Alaska, where she dropped out of high school but later completed a GED. She moved to Anchorage for waitressing work, then took seasonal jobs at canneries along the Alaskan coast.

At age twenty, Kilcher applied to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, after a stranger recommended the school. Reed contacted her at a Kodiak cannery in 1962 and requested an entrance essay, which she wrote at a local high school. Kilcher gained admission and enrolled later that year with savings from cannery work. English and art professor Lloyd Reynolds became a principal mentor. She left Reed at the end of her first year in 1963 and returned to Alaska.

Kilcher resumed cannery work and made hitchhiking trips along the West Coast. She pursued environmental activism in Alaska, where she stockpiled songs and recorded bird sounds. At age thirty-five, Kilcher entered an Anchorage studio under her married name, Mossy Davidson, to record the material for Northwind Calling. Davidson worked with guitarist Bill Bassett and banjoist Scott Gavin. Violinist/pianist Wayne Shields joined the recordings, while sister Fay Kilcher Smith sang on “Sea Man” and “Cloudy Day.” Davidson prepared the twenty-song double album for release on North Woods Records in 1977.

Discography: