Common Ground Coffeehouse @ The First Unitarian Society presents Nerissa and Katryna Nields. Nerissa and Katryna are sisters, just two years apart, born at the tail end of the sixties in Manhattan. Nerissa and Katryna Nields have been the darlings of the coffeehouse/festival scene since 1991, with tunes ranging from off-the-hook idiosyncratic to kicking to heartbreaking. They first sang together in the back of their parent’s ’67 Barracuda convertible, and the rest is history. “Our parents were total folkies,” says Nerissa. “Their first date was a Pete Seeger concert and their second was a Harry Bellefonte concert. We used to go to a family camp in the Adirondacks every summer where people sat around a fire. That’s where I learned how to finger pick. The music teacher at our school, Jack Langstaff, was more of the English tradition of folk music than the American, and his legacy was really strong. We grew up on simple folk songs.”They have been performing for twenty years with their band The Nields and also as a duo, with 15 CDs, three books and seven songbooks to their credit. They have performed with James Taylor, The Band, Dar Williams, Ani DiFranco, Dan Zanes, 10,000 Maniacs and most recently with their four kids and a townful of toddlers in their HooteNanny classes in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. They love nothing more than a room full of moms, dads, grannies and grandaddies singing together at the top of their lungs.
