Earlier this year, Susan Werner was named Best Contemporary Folk Artist of 2007 at the International Folk Alliance Conference, held in Memphis, Tennessee. Her 2007 CD release “The Gospel Truth” was warmly received by fans and critics alike and was named Folk Album of the Year for 2007 on many lists including those of National Public Radio and WUMB in Bosto n. This summer, she released a CD called “Live at Passim” featuring live performances recorded at the historic folk music venue in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Werner was raised in rural Iowa but began her professional music career in Philadelphia after studying classical voice at Temple University. Inspired by a Nanci Griffith concert, Werner left behind her opera training and began performing as a singer-songwriter at coffeehouses throughout the northeast. She self-released her first album “Midwestern Saturday Night” in 1992 and then went on to put out “Live at Tin Angel” the following year. In 1995 came her breakout album, BMG/Private Music’s “Last of the Good Straight Girls,” but a corporate reshuffle left her and her folk-pop masterpiece behind. Werner went on to recording two albums that added some country and soul sounds to her signature vocal stylings.

Always ready to reinvent herself, in 2004 Susan Werner released her album of instant songbook classics “I Can’t Be New” on Koch Records. For years she incorporated cabaret-style numbers in her live performances, exchanging her guitar for a piano (when there was one to be had), and she’d been asked by her audience to put all those songs in one recording.

2007 brought the release of “The Gospel Truth,” a collection of originals she describes as “hymns for the spiritually ambivalent.”

Opening the evening will be Lindsay Mac , a 2007 Falcon Ridge Emerging Artist voted “Most Wanted” for the 2008 Falcon Ridge Song Swap. Lindsay was also born and raised in Iowa, by what she describes as “hard-working, party-hungry, bohemian parents”.

Classically trained, Mac is characterized by her combination of plucking the cello and standing while performing. She holds the cello like a guitar, strapped around her small frame, and sings original songs in the folk/jazz tradition. In her pioneering ways she succeeds in creating a sound that has been described by critics as “groundbreaking and compelling”.

Tickets for this concert are only $25 ($22 for Hurdy Gurdy members) and can be purchased online at www.hurdygurdyfolk.org . Sorry, mail order for this concert has ended and we cannot accept reservations over the phone. Online orders can be made up until the evening of the show – or until tickets are sold out. Online orders can be made with either a credit card or by Pay Pal. Remaining tickets will be sold at the box office (cash only) at the Fair Lawn Community Center on the night of the concert. The Fair Lawn Community Center is located at 10-10 20th Street in Fair Lawn, NJ. The theater holds 170 people and all seats are general admission.

Additional information can be received at the website or by calling the Hurdy Gurdy Hotline at (201) 384-1325.