5 Foot Betty, a “woman-powered sunny Americana” trio, chats with KGNU’s Dave McIntyre. With a mix of harmonies and instruments like upright bass, cajón, and ukulele, they bring a fresh take to classic songs, alongside originals. They emphasize fun and connection with their audience and mention upcoming gigs (Interview date: 8/30/2024)
Dave McIntyre: I want to let you know we have some guests in the studio this morning. 5 Foot Betty is here. Say hello, girls.
5 Foot Betty: Hello!
Dave McIntyre: There they are. Even that is in harmony. What a thing. Now these gals have, I’ll say recently, started a little trio. Not too very long yet, but they’re cemented at a number of places in the area where they play often. They’re gonna play for you this morning and they will be at Oskar Blues tonight from 7 to 10. In case you like what you hear, you can come and hear some more. Why don’t you just start playing a song, play one, and then we’ll talk a little further about the Betties and how it came about.
5 Foot Betty plays “Ashes of Love”
Dave McIntyre: Very nice. Where’d you get that song?
5 Foot Betty: We have a shared love. We call ourselves woman powered sunny Americana. “Ashes of Love” is one of those songs. Although the subject is really sad, the sound is super fun, and it fits right into that Betty lane.
Dave McIntyre: I gotta ask where the name comes from. I know there’s a story. I heard it once.
5 Foot Betty: There’s a story. 5 Foot Betty is named in part after our band’s namesake, who was a banjo player named Betty Amos. Her story is that she was part of an all woman country bluegrass band who was on their way to a USO gig in Labrador and their plane started to go down over an ice floe. Everyone threw their instruments out of the plane. Plane landed safely. They were rescued and played their gig on time with borrowed instruments. So what we’d like to say, if Betty could do that, we can do this.
And then the five foot part, you can’t see us on the radio, but our average height is, what do you say? 5 ‘2 and a half maybe? We range from 4 ’10 and a half to five, five and a half?
Dave McIntyre: So they’re almost all five foot Bettys.
5 Foot Betty: You’d be astonished by the number of people who approach us at shows and say, I have an aunt who’s five feet tall and named Betty, or my sister. I think it came up twice at our last gig, most recently up at Snowy Peaks in Estes Park. Just one of those strange coincidences. Or other people inspired by Betty Amos. Who knows?
Dave McIntyre: It was Betty Amos way back when or?
5 Foot Betty: So that happened in the 60s. She was with us until a couple years ago. She was living in Nashville and she was part of a senior women’s softball team. She just continued, for us at least, to be this incredible role model. She also wrote “Second Fiddle (to an Old Guitar)”. If you know that old country tune. She was multi-talented. I wish we had reached out to her. I had a little bit of nerves and I was like, we don’t want to bother her. Now she’s no longer with us and we wish we’d had the chance. So I think there’s a message there too, about getting music out, getting the love out to people that we really care about.
Dave McIntyre: Okay. Hence the 5 Foot Betties. What else you got for us, ladies?
5 Foot Betty: Ah, funny you should ask that, Dave. We have another song.
Dave McIntyre: That’s my job.
5 Foot Betty: And you do it so well. We also want to thank you for having us and all the other bands that you host on the show. It means the world to us. We really appreciate it.
Dave McIntyre: It’s my pleasure. We love to support community music here at KGNU, so we bring people in all the time.
5 Foot Betty: Here we have another tune. If you know this and you want to sing along at home, or Dave, if you would like to sing along in the studio, we welcome that.
Dave McIntyre: I think I’ll let you girls do it. I don’t want to get in the middle of a nice harmony.
5 Foot Betty: You would change the average height anyway, Dave. We’d have to rename the band. 5 and a Half Foot Betty Dave. We’ll think about that for our tour.
5 Foot Betty plays “Second Fiddle (to an Old Guitar)”
Dave McIntyre: All right. Nice version of that old song.
5 Foot Betty: Thank you. We like those old ones, actually. We do a number of them. We want to bring forward and make new with our type of sound, that sort of close women’s harmony, different instrumentation. I don’t know if people could hear, but that was guitar and cajon, and we have an upright bass, and then we also have a ukulele and a fiddle that Sharon and I will change in and out for periodically.
I do want to introduce the Betties. This is Pam Browning from Lyons on the upright bass and Julia Knearl from Louisville on many things and songs and vocals. And I’m Sharon Glassman from Longmont.
Dave McIntyre: So you gals have some original songs that you’ve written. Who does most of the writing?
5 Foot Betty: I would say our repertoire is probably 50 percent covers, 50 percent originals. Of the originals, Sharon and I both have some. It’s probably 60/40 Sharon, I would say.
But stay tuned, because the game isn’t over yet!
We’re starting to do more writing together, starting to do a lot more deep arranging together, really trying to take pieces in a different direction. Something that feels fun for us, and most importantly, something that we think would feel really fun to an audience, because that’s why we play.
Dave McIntyre: How did you describe it now?
5 Foot Betty: Woman powered, sunny Americana. We are the women and the power. We like to play songs that we personally find fun to hear, fun to listen to, and fun to play, and we find our audiences like that too.
Dave McIntyre: People like to be entertained, and when they see the band enjoying themselves, it’s contagious. I’ve noticed that at your live shows, people get into what you’re doing, because you’re having a lot of fun. I try to explain that to other bands and sometimes I get through, sometimes I don’t. But, I think it’s important to have people enjoy what you’re doing and for that to come from the stage.
5 Foot Betty: Recently, because of some travel that we all had, we went about a month without seeing each other and then we got back together. It was like, wait, we get to rehearse, we get to play, we’re excited, we got gigs! If we’re not doing it for that reason, why the heck fire are we doing it?
We have so much fun with our music. We always ask the question, is this Betty? So we’ll bring songs in and sometimes we’ll be like, that’s an awesomely depressing tune. We love it, it’s not Betty, and it wouldn’t serve us or our audience. So we really do have a band brand that we try to stay true to for two reasons. One for the joy that we feel with each other and then also the joy we hope to bring to other people.
Dave McIntyre: Great. So other than the gig tonight at Oskar Blues in Lyons, from 7 to 10 p.m, do you have any other up and coming shows you want to let us know about?
5 Foot Betty: Yeah, we do. We’re playing at Rosalee’s in Longmont. We’re playing Porchfest. We’ve got a couple of other irons in the fire, maybe a slow food festival coming up as well. The best place to get information about what we’re doing would be on all the media. So we’ve got 5 Foot Betty on Instagram, 5 Foot Betty on Facebook, with all the different spellings. Sometimes with numbers, and Sharon might be able to decode.
We’re artists, man. Consistency is not our thing. And then we’ve got a website too, 5footbetty.com.
Dave McIntyre: So it is usually the number five?
5 Foot Betty: Usually the number five. And then further confusing things is that the band is Five Foot Betty and people often then call us the Betties. Which is another band, probably by somebody else. But we do have these stickers, which if you come to Oskars, you’ll learn how to spell our band name. Here, Dave, have a sticker. And it is spelled correctly. When we go to print, I think we get serious.
Dave McIntyre: Any plans on making a recording?
5 Foot Betty: I think at some point. We’ve all played music for years with other folks and have recorded with other folks. We’re like 19 months in to this project or something. I’m not sure. Mostly it’s been about fun, but we’re also getting to a point where we would start considering doing a recording and exploring what that world means in this day and age, because obviously it’s changed a ton too, in terms of digital media versus what we love to remember – the old analog forms.
So yes, but there isn’t a firm plan at this point in time. We will keep people posted. And we can shout out our little microphone. This tiny microphone that we have in the back is like a little recording studio. We learned about it. So we’re big Sierra Ferrell fans. We have a band crush and a girl crush and all the things. And we saw a photo of her with Lucas Nelson and the Travelin’ McCourys standing around this tiny little microphone backstage at DelFest. And we were like, they sound great. Obviously, that’s not just the microphone, but we thought in our humble way that we could try this out, too. So until we actually go into the studio, that’s our traveling studio. Mini mic.
Dave McIntyre: So you got one more for us?
5 Foot Betty: We do. She mentioned Sierra Ferrell. She is the human of the moment right now. If anybody is watching social media or any of the other buzz at festivals all over the country, if there’s anybody out there listening to this who doesn’t know who she is, please look her up.
Her latest album is Trail of Flowers, and it’s all original music by her. There are a couple of co-writers with Melody Walker, who used to head up Front Country and is now in another band whose name escapes me. But anyway, this is one of Sierra Ferrell’s older tunes called “Silver Dollar”.
5 Foot Betty plays “Silver Dollar”
Dave McIntyre: Great. Very nice.
5 Foot Betty: Thanks, Dave.
Dave McIntyre: Thanks for coming in and joining us here at KGNU. I always love to have people in, especially ones that are doing woman powered sunny Americana.
5 Foot Betty: Oh, you put your sticker!
Dave McIntyre: It’s been on there.
5 Foot Betty: Oh, it’s been on, oh my gosh. He already had a sticker.
Dave McIntyre: Thanks so much again for coming in. We appreciate you. Go listen to them at Oskar Blues tonight.
5 Foot Betty: Great. And support KGNU. We love you. We have a national treasure in this radio station, and in this room. Thanks again.
Dave McIntyre: Thank you.
