On a misty afternoon, the vista beyond her windows — the peaceful West River, lashed to life by a brisk and sudden rain — might as well be the Galway Bay of song or a fog-shrouded inlet of the Irish Sea.
Such Celtic scenes lie 3,000 miles to the east, but to Maggie Sansone, they feel no further away than a tune she can't shake from her mind.
"Sometimes I look out there and think, 'Those are the same waters that reach out and touch Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man," says Sansone, a Shady Side resident who happens to be one of America's top performers on the hammered dulcimer, an instrument that dates back 2,000 years and can — in the right hands — make sounds as primeval as haze on a lonely moor.
For the first time in years, Sansone, 60, has a new record out, the 51st to be produced on Maggie's Music, her independent label that has sold more than a million CDs. She's working on her ninth book of music for Mel Bay Publications. And she's preparing, as usual this time of year, for a concert to mark the St. Patrick's Day season, a gig in Rockville next Saturday that will showcase some of the region's best instrumental talent and show off two of its top Irish dancers.
As she shows a guest around her studio, Sansone, a multiple Wammie winner for instrumental excellence on the D.C. scene, pauses to pluck a guitar, thump an Irish drum and coax wails from a small bagpipe — instruments she has mastered, to one degree or another, and worked into the smooth and textured arrangements her label has been creating since the 1980s.
"I hope you don't think I'm hyperactive," she says with a laugh. "Collecting these things makes life fun."
But the center of the space is her dulcimer, a trapezoidal sounding board that sits atop a stand, crisscrossed by 75 strings. Sansone pulls up a chair, chooses a pair of mallets, closes her eyes for a moment, and starts hammering a complicated air.
Flashpoints
She was born in Miami to a cartoonist father and a mother who wrote ad copy for a department store.
Sansone recalls no Celtic influence in the family. Her dad, Leonard Sansone, was of Italian ancestry; her mother, Emily Stone, descended from Eastern European Jews.
"The Celts did invade Italy at some point in history, didn't they?" she says. "Maybe that explains my [artistic] DNA."
But there was always music, and plenty of it.
When Maggie was 8, Leonard, a pianist, let her sit next to him and pick out the bass parts as he played boogie-woogie. Parties at home included sing-alongs. By the time she was in her teens, Maggie was learning the recorder and classical guitar, and during high school, she taught herself so much bassoon in a year that she made second chair in the orchestra.
"A lot of musicians say they never want to stop learning, but she's one of the few who really pull that off," says Ken Kolodner, a Baltimore-based fiddler and dulcimer player who has known Sansone for more than 30 years.
None of that translated into a career plan — not yet. In 1966, when she headed to college at Kent State University, it was to study art. She kept a guitar close at hand, though, and took music classes on the side.
One day four years later, during the height of the antiwar movement, she was on her way to ethnomusicology class when she passed a mob of students on a hillside, many of them shouting at a battery of National Guardsmen.
She heard shots ring out — the same ones, she later learned, that killed four schoolmates and galvanized protesters nationwide.
To Sansone, then 19, the shootings of May 4, 1970, felt less like a flashpoint in a cultural war than, quite simply, the disillusioning end to a mostly fruitless four years.
"I don't do depression well, but yes, I started asking all those existential questions," she says. A time of soul-searching began.
Crafts and crystals
It's hard to envision from the serenely landscaped, solar-heated home she shares with her husband, environmental architect Richard Crenshaw, but in those days, Sansone seemed little different from legions of other young drifters.
She hitchhiked across Europe (she came home, eventually, after getting sick in Turkey), took a succession of unrelated jobs, and asked herself, again and again, who she was.
None of it mattered, it turned out, as much as music.
In the late 1970s, when she moved from Miami to Baltimore to live with her brother, Peter, Sansone took her guitar, mandolin and banjo along. She lived in one commune near Memorial Stadium, then another in Charles Village. She plastered notices everywhere, teaching guitar in community centers, music stores and her own digs.
Between bouts of pondering life's meaning, Sansone embraced what made her happy.
"Of all the people I knew in those days, Maggie struck me as someone who played music purely for the fun of it," says Kolodner, who met her during one of the casual jams that happened most nights at the time.
A regular in bluegrass sessions, Sansone found herself even more powerfully drawn to the sounds of a genre just taking hold in Charm City: traditional Irish music, with its jigs, reels and laments.
"I can't explain the appeal, exactly," Sansone says. "There was this joy to it, and with its modal [minor] scales, a melancholy strain that sounded vaguely mysterious. And everyone was welcome to join in."
A love affair with all things Celtic was under way.
It grew when Crenshaw took a job in California. Sansone accompanied him to Berkeley, a town then teeming with high-quality folk musicians, building her confidence as a performer by playing in the streets. She mustered the courage (and the $400) to make her first recording: a cassette album of traditional music.
When Richard took a different gig back East in Annapolis in 1984, she decided to drive cross-country in his wake. Along the way, she stopped in at "craft-and-crystal" stores in every town she could, chatting up the owners, playing out front and swapping her tapes for publicity.
"It was networking before Facebook," she says.
By the time Sansone reached Maryland, hundreds of people were on her mailing list and knew who she was. She, too, was starting to figure that out.
A Celtic invasion
Never seen Sansone in concert, at London Town and Gardens, the Rams Head Tavern or the Kennedy Center? You still might know her. For years, she has been the lady in medieval costume near the entrance to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, hammering out tunes as the crowds come in.
The time she has spent in the casual, almost conversational setting has canceled out her stage fright.
"It's nerve-wracking to feel I'm being scrutinized when I perform," Sansone says. "Once I get to know the people I'm playing for, it's like being with friends."
As she sought to expand, that might have been her mission statement.
Friends knew she had formed an operation with connections to music stores, radio stations and other outlets, and a fellow Renaissance Festival player, Celtic harper Sue Richards, asked if she could sign on with Maggie's Music. Richards appeared on a 1989 Christmas CD, and then on her own first solo offering in 1991.
Connie McKenna, a Celtic vocalist with the band Ceoltoiri and a former arts writer for National Public Radio, was one who watched in amazement as Sansone "naturally rode the wave of Celtic music into commercial success" throughout the 1990s. "[Maggie] saw how popular it was and also felt the direction it was going in."
Sansone gathered up the many talented Celtic players in the area — versatile flatpick-style guitarist Robin Bullock, Scottish fiddle champion Bonnie Rideout, husband-and-wife instrumentalists Al Petteway and Amy White — and by sanding off what might have been the sharp edges of old-world Gaelic tunes, positioned their recordings in the fast-growing new age and international markets.
"The Celtic invasion is here," a Billboard critic wrote in 1999. "Maggie's Music is a label that has pushed the definitions of traditional Irish music with new-age flavored recordings."
The musicians jammed together often and played on each other's records, developing a collective style critics would call "chamber folk" — ensemble-style music that preserved respect for traditional lines while allowing space for experimentation — and bagging dozens of Wammie awards.
"It was all like being part of a family," says McKenna, who adds that the CEO's natural directness with people, organziational skills and passion for the product made for business magic.
"She loves being a player, in both senses of the word, and she's great at it," McKenna says.
Maggie's Music sold a modest 25,000 CDs between 1984 and 1989. It topped that total in 1990 with one album alone, Sounds of the Season II. In 1996, its peak year, the label — which 9 million viewers saw mentioned on an episode of CBS' "Sunday Morning" — sold 99,000 CDs and grossed $1 million.
Mists and mountains
Things have fallen off since then, as they have in all areas of the record business with the rise of digital downloading since the late 1990s.
"We're lucky to sell 10,000 CDs today," says Crenshaw, who has long helped with the business end. And several members of the Maggie's Music stable have moved on.
But Sansone is nothing if not resourceful. She has kept at her favorite instrument, putting out albums that encompass distant branches of the Celtic tree: Breton, Scots, even Persian. The label is making gains in iTunes downloads, and Sansone has taken up Twitter and MySpace to promote events and share artist videos. She continues to teach in the area.
Her newest CD, "Wind Drift" — her 16th solo effort — delivers "swiftly, elegantly, soulfully," according to Mike Joyce of The Washington Post.
Audiences will get a taste of that fare next weekend, when Maggie Sansone and Friends, including Bullock, Irish bodhran virtuoso Matt Bell, and dancers Shannon Dunne and Regan Riley, get out front of St. Patrick's Day with a concert at the Saint Mark Presbyterian Church in Rockville.
It's a 50th anniversary celebration for the church, whose pastor, Roy Howard, is a longtime Sansone fan. "I've never seen a warmer person on stage," he says.
For now, the artist smiles and leans over the dulcimer in her studio, hammers in hand. She teases out a snippet of Bach, then a mournful Gaelic piece, "The Mist-Covered Mountains of Home." From the sound of it, the place doesn't seem far away.
If you go
Maggie's Music Celtic Concert: A Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Saint Mark Presbyterian Church
WHERE: Saint Mark Presbyterian Church, 10701 Old Georgetown Road, Rockville
WHEN: 7:30 p.m., Saturday, March 12
ADMISSION: $20
INFORMATION: 301-530-2613, saintmarkpresby.org or maggiesmusic.com