Cordy Lavery - Singer, songwriter, guitarist

Austin, TX-based singer, songwriter and guitarist Cordy Lavery has been performing music almost all her life, and that depth of artistic and personal experience can be heard on her long-awaited debut solo album Cordless. A winner of the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Competition – an honor she shares with such esteemed songwriters as Robert Earl Keen, Jr., Tish Hinojosa (alongside Cordy in 1979), James McMurtry, Darden Smith, John Gorka and Tom Russell, among others – she has also played in rock bands since her teens, most recently in the Austin outfits His Boy Elroy, The Fontanelles, The Keytones and currently Utley3.

An East Coast native who grew up on the Jersey shore and in rural Connecticut, Cordy taught herself guitar at age 10 and has since become accomplished on acoustic and electric six- and 12-string. She began playing in bands at 13 and in her teens Cordy opened for Vassar Clements, Earl Scruggs, NRBQ and Ricky Scaggs. Infamously suspended from high school for singing Ray Wylie Hubbard's "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother" in the high school talent show, she moved to Texas the day after she graduated.

As the Austin Chronicle noted, "Singer and guitarist Cordy Lavery shows off a rich, bruised, all-in vibrato and some solid spank-and-twang axe work." Her singer songwriter gifts showcased on Cordless as noted in the most recent review from the Austin Chronicle, “Catch-in-throat Appalachian opener "You Won't Be Coming Back" and midset folk fist "Go" work out serious romantic angst. Along the way, her fingerpicked guitar and vulnerable alto are accompanied by Brennen Leigh on mandolin ("In the Arms"), Katy Rose Cox on fiddle ("Love Will Find You"), and culminate with the downright desolate "What's Wrong With Us." Betty Elders' "Long Bed From Kenya" receives an authoritative reading, and "Eartha Kitty" provides light at the end of the tunnel. Aching and beautiful, Cordless cuts deep.”