Curtis & Loretta

MUSICIAN'S CORNER CONCERT  January, 2020 

What an incredible evening of music! As one of our audience members put it, "Wow, I can’t thank you enough for last evening." Curtis & Loretta are not only talented, but they literally tell stories with their music. Beyond enjoyable, it was truly moving and inspirational. Their connection with the audience was beyond anything we could have hoped for. If you get a chance to book Curtis & Loretta, DO!" - D. Matthews

ILLINOIS TIMES   December 13, 2018

Known simply as Curtis and Loretta to most folks, the husband and wife duo of Curtis Teague and Loretta Simonet has been making vital and lovely music together for some three decades. From carefully chosen traditional songs to brilliant, self-penned odes, these two take music and give it space to hang out for you to enjoy.  Accompanied by an array of instruments including but not limited to Celtic harp, mandocello, mandolin, guitars, clawhammer banjo and National steel ukulele, plus a touch of kazoo, harmonica and shakers, they blend humor and realism in a poignant performance of super-duper stuff. - Tom Irwin

FIRST SETTLEMENT CONCERT  August, 2018

The sublime sound of harp, mandocello, and sweet vocal harmonies in our parlors was intoxicating. Curtis and Loretta charmed our audience with their stories and songs as well as their superb musicianship. Loretta’s lovely soprano voice and Curtis’ baritone harmonies were tight and spot on. They engaged the audience through laughter and tears. We can’t wait for a return visit from these two wonderful people!       .....S. Mills

CITY PAGES   March 21, 2007

Curtis and Loretta are in many ways the quintessential folk duo: finely honed vocal harmonies of multidimensional intrigue, abundant talent on an array of stringed instruments, deep traditional roots, great originals, and equally strong strains of gravity and playful irreverence. Expect Irish drinking songs, tunes about bugs and lutefisk, a little Stephen Foster, a Yiddish folk tune or two, and an array of Loretta's remarkable originals. The latter are often certifiable tearjerkers, tackling, for instance, the ravages of Alzheimer's and the story of a concentration camp heroine. Loretta pulls it off by sidestepping melodrama in favor of eloquent writing and clear-eyed journalistic detail. It's both musically riveting and spiritually invigorating. ...Rick Mason

MINNESOTA  BLUEGRASS MAGAZINE  December, 2015  

Check your pulse. Got one? Okay. Then you’re not going to get through Curtis and Loretta’s new album, When There’s Good to Be Done, without shedding some tears. And not because this is a crappy album, but rather because it’s the best, most poignant, most powerful album of the nine this duo has recorded over the last quarter century.    

I slipped the CD into my car’s player on a return trip from a gig I had played, and had to pull over or risk driving through tears before the first selection—the title cut—was half over. The song was about a Florida woman who read about a Minnesota child who needed a kidney and decided to give her one of her own. This was not going to be your typical folk album; this was going to be more “Jimmy Crack Corn and I Do Care.”  

These are amazing stories—of a survivor of the 35W bridge collapse, of Native children raised and abused in state schools, of the parents of severely autistic children—and each song is more powerful than the  last. Some of them are sad, some of them make you angry and some are sweet-but-not-saccharin.  

Loretta’s song- writing has improved steadily over the years and now, a hundred songs later, it sparkles. 

Never timid vocalizers, Curtis and Loretta sing with the confidence of  
a team who knows that they’ve got good material and good stuff. C &  
L’s promo sheet references Curtis’s tight harmony singing, a charac- terization with which I disagree. Tight harmony would have Curtis right next to Loretta, tonally, like the Navy’s Blue Angels flying in wingtip-to-wingtip formation, but Curtis is everywhere, in a good way. One of the benefits of a two-voice configuration (as opposed to three  or four voices singing in harmony)  is that the second voice has lots of leeway—tonal options. It can sing a third harmony, or a fifth, or a seventh, or an octave, or an accidental, or in unison, and Curtis does all of these. So rather than the Blue Angels, the aeronautical image is more of a Simonet Regional Airlines plane flying straight and true and a Teague Gyrocopter circling, dipping and diving, but never colliding. This is one of my favorite things about C & L: one never knows exactly where Curtis is going to line up vocally against any given note in Loretta’s melodies but—and this is critical— he always lands on a right note. His choices delight; he is the consummate Happy Wanderer.  

Instrumentally, the pair are a folkie power duo. Capable of double-digitry, they limit themselves to a half dozen instruments on When There’s Good to Be Done. Loretta is a fine guitar player who understands the value of the bass note and the strum as separate entities and handles them deftly. And her folk harp playing just gets better and better. Curtis plays mandocello, banjo  and guitar, managing, as he always does, an alchemical combination of sangfroid and devil-may-care in his playing.  When There’s Good to Be Done is a gem! ... Adam Granger