My musical heritage is entirely borrowed. What I mean is, although there has always been a good deal of love of, and talent for, music in my family, what truly moves me is mostly from the Appalachians and the South, and my family doesn't have history in either place.

Otherwise, I'm a mutt. I don't think of myself as an anything-American.

Mom--English/Welsh/Irish/either German or Jewish (one pair of her great-grandparents never married and the whole thing was hushed-up). Everyone thinks she's Native American until they see she has blue eyes; she has dark skin, very straight black hair, and a round face. The Welsh settled in Pennylvania in the 1680's and a lot of the English and Irish were Quakers who came over to escape religious persecution (including a family that came with William Penn).

Dad--mostly dark Germans (my grandfather's father was from Germany, his mother was Amish), Swiss-Moravian/English/tiny bit of French.

My brother is 6 foot 3, blonde, and blue-eyed and passed very nicely for Norwegian when we were in Stavanger in 1992; his Swedish/Norwegian girlfriend looks more like him than I do.