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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so1wGPfzKVU
Well, I guess I started making coherent, musical sounds when I was about five years old at a restaurant in Canton, Massachusettes. There was a band playing, and Dad convinced them to let me sing Country Roads. So there began my career as a singer!
We moved to PEI then I really started raking in the dough in the kitchen where I’d get paid a quarter per song when company came over. Do know how many songs it takes to buy a guitar? Too many, so I worked at tobacco and bought my 12 string Takamine when I was 14 from money I earned pulling weeds in the tobacco fields. Whoa... I think there’s a country song in there somewhere.
I did the circuit; talent contests, benefits, weddings, concerts, festivals and funerals, and in 1983, I was invited to participate on a compilation album of PEI artists called “Our Songs”. I sang “We’ll Make Happiness”, a song I wrote when I was 14 about my very first love. I was then catapulted into stardom, appearing as a guest on “Sounds of the Island”; a weekly musical variety CBC television series which aired in the early 1980s. Then in 1984, I was invited to sing for Pope John Paul II during his visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia. That was an incredible experience; climbing all those stairs to the stage... I wonder if he liked my rendition of “Georgia”.
I grew up and moved away like so many young Islanders do. But, like so many before me, I was lured back home by the gentle whisper of the waves and my mother’s Half Hour Pudding, so in 1999, I landed back home with a ¼ ton truck and a husband.
I hadn’t done much singing, other than at church and weddings and such, then in 2006, my parish priest in Iona, Father Tingley, asked me to sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for Easter Mass. Seeing as how he’s probably got some pull with The Big Guy (and don’t we all need a little help), I said that of course I would. I googled the lyrics and saw that they weren’t quite suitable for church, so I re-wrote the words to reflect the Easter message.
I applied for the lyrical adaptation from Leonard Cohen’s publisher so I could perform and eventually record my version and was approved a year less two days later. It’s been on YouTube since June 2010 and has gotten over 383,000 hits!
My goal for the future is to sing to as many people as I can, wherever I can and to share this album and have as many people as possible hear it. I love to sing and play and I love my husband and red-haired stepdaughter. So when I’m not singing and playing, I’m watching the airplanes take off pretty much right next door to our house on our sprawling ½ acre estate in East Royalty, Prince Edward Island.
» http://www.kelleymooney.ca
» http://www.myspace.com/kelleymooney
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