WICHITA, Kan. (AP) - Abby the Spoon Lady is an enigma.
These days, Abby Roach is at the top of her game street performing in front of crowds, talking on her radio show in Asheville, North Carolina, and becoming an internet sensation with videos.
She defies expectation - shyly admitting some have told her she looks like she crawled out from a holler in Appalachia. Truth is she is a 36-year-old artisan with an achy back caused from carrying backpacks too long but pure poetry in motion when it comes to the art.
The Wichita Eagle reports that the sound of the spoons is a percussion symphony punctuated by an occasional bell. Roach sits while she plays. Her motions are part ballet, artistic and gymnastic.
Playing spoons is her gift. It has allowed her to become a YouTube sensation along with her partner in music, Chris Rodrigues. And, it has led her to her own radio show, the Busker Broadcast.
Despite her style of music, she’s no Appalachian girl. She grew up in Wichita and went to the Independent School and private boarding schools in Georgia and Massachusetts.
By age 20, she was in an abusive marriage back in Wichita - with children - and looking for a way out.
That’s when, she says, she mailed herself to Denver, leaving her children behind.
“I have two kids - Alex and Charlotte - and I love them very much. I was in a bad relationship. I felt I had nowhere to go except gone. Real dramatic things happened to me at the time. I felt like my life was over. I realize now, my life is actually just beginning.
“So, I just mailed myself to Denver. I had a friend who worked with the U.S. Mail and I transferred onto his load.”
That was nearly 15 years ago.
Then, she started riding freight trains from city to city.
“I ran into folks who were riding freights and it was a little liberating to hear them talk. I advise folks not to do it. It is illegal, a felony, and you shouldn’t be doing it. There are still hundreds of train travelers in the country, but the culture is dying.”
Going from riding the rails to performing before crowds as the Spoon Lady didn’t happen overnight.
“There wasn’t a moment,” she says. “But there was this weird organic thing where suddenly it went from people giving me a few bucks because they felt sorry for me to a feeling where they’d give me a few bucks because they thought it was cool and there was a crowd around me.”
She marketed herself against the odds.
In Nashville, she went up to the people doing walking tours, those running horse buggies, doing trolley tours and ghost tours, and asked permission to perform.
It worked.
She became part of the art scene. That’s pretty much how she’s done it from city to city.
“From the kind of performance that Abby does - the busker experience in Asheville - one of the defining characteristics of the visitor experience is that it enlivens the streetscape to hear amazing musicians from one block to the next,” said Stephanie Brown, president and CEO of Asheville Visitors & Convention Bureau. “It is a unique and important experience and Abby and Chris are the best crowd-pleasers. People have seen her through my Facebook feed and come to Asheville wanting to know ’Where can I find Abby, the Spoon Lady?’ She has been a great tourism partner.”
Abby has memories of Wichita. The 81 Speedway, attending the River Festival, going places with her parents and siblings.
“I would have thought it would have been crazy if someone would have told me that I would grow up to be a Spoon Lady. Who thinks they are going to be a professional Spoon Lady? I’m humored by it. I make a lot of puns and jokes about it now. I call my office the Spooniverse and my show, Spooniversal Studios.”
Look at her videos and her eyes are joyful.
“I have come to be comfortable with who I am and where I am at,” she said. “It has been a hard life. A lot of it in hindsight was self-inflicted. Sometimes we put ourselves through a lot of hardship that is not necessary but makes you who you are.”
Folks, she said, will sometimes make up stories about her - guess or make comments, based on her appearance.
“They always have this slight confusion when I tell them I was born and raised in Kansas. It really is funny. I wait for it. I wait for the look of ’Huh!’”
She was born in Wichita on Oct. 29, 1981. She was adopted at birth. Her birth mother lives near the border of Kansas and Missouri.
Her adopted parents are Dale and Cindy Roach. They raised her children, who come to visit her occasionally now in Asheville.
“She’s had a long road to go down but she is now on the straight and narrow,” Dale Roach said. “I would have never in a million years thought she would become this incredible spoon player and radio personality. You listen to her on the radio and you’d think she’d been doing this all her life.”
Roach said his daughter had a hard life growing up and faced challenges when he and his wife adopted her.
“She conquered all those hard challenges, and she is a different person now,” he said.
None of the family talks publicly about the challenges she faced.
But it blew his mind, Roach said, when he learned his daughter at one time regularly rode trains to travel the country.
“She had been in Washington and then was in Florida and we’d ask, ’How’d you get there?’ She’d say the train. We’d ask, ’How’d you get the money?’ She said she didn’t pay, she just hopped a freight train.”
Now, almost everywhere he goes, people know him as “Abby’s daddy.”
“Everybody knows her. People all over the country know her,” he said.
Case in point: His wife’s aunt was at an RV park in Kansas City when someone called her over to watch a video. It was Abby playing the spoons. In Florida on a beach, people were talking about a video of a woman playing spoons. It was Abby.
“Her mother and I are very proud of her.”
The feeling is reciprocated.
“My parents were great to me,” Abby says. “My dad - I never heard him raise his voice or use a curse word. I had a great childhood.”
She’s eager to come back to Kansas for a visit. She will return May 25-27 to play at the Westport Roots Festival in Kansas City.
Playing spoons is not easy.
She learned the art while standing in work lines. She’d look for any kind of day work she could find - running fork lifts, sewing tents together, working at banquets. She’d even get a bucket and collect pecans and sell them by the pound. While waiting for work, she’d play the spoons. The spoons were lightweight and easy to tuck into her backpack.
“I got tired of sitting around and waiting in line at the labor pools,” she said. “I’d see other people playing music. I was awful when I started. But I’d be hitchhiking and do cadences while I was walking down the highway.”
Playing spoons is an old art form, transcending cultures. It’s about rhythm and sound, fluidity of motion.
“There is not a right or a wrong way to play the spoons - and it is different in other cultures,” Abby said. “In Canada, they play with wooden spoons. In Russia, they play with three or four pairs at once. It is very different to go from culture to culture.”
“I don’t have to think about it when I play with her, she doesn’t either - we just do it so well and smooth,” Rodrigues said. “If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t have street performing in Asheville. She has done so much for preserving street performing. It’s her determination to survive.
“The thing about her is that she is very kind. Her heart is kind. She is always doing things for people. And, it shows in the way she plays music. People might not know why they are drawn to her. But when you are playing, your energy - what’s inside of you comes out.”
Someday, Abby said, she would like to perform in Wichita.
Her radio show is devoted to street performers, the politics of it and discussions of public-space laws and championing the rights of performers through City Hall.
Ideally, she would like to perform at the Walnut Valley Bluegrass Festival in Winfield.
“When I lived in Wichita, I used to go to it, but I’ve never performed there as an artist.”
In recent years, her life has become an inspiration to people who have faced hardships. She gets requests from TV stations who want her to do performances. Some of her videos have garnered three million or more views. She has her own You Tube channel with about three dozen videos, but there are hundreds of other videos on the internet taken by people in the crowds watching her perform.
“I’m OK with being well known,” she says. “But I am not looking at being famous. But when I read some of the emails I get - I get a lot from women - they say if you can do this with a pair of spoons that means I can do this with what I got. I get a lot of folks testifying to us. It feels good.
“Some of the stories are really intense and it puts things in perspective. The things you have gone through in life make you feel like you are not alone. You are not the only one who has had a hard time.”
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Information from: The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, http://www.kansas.com
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