Reading Alice Gerrard’s inviting and candid Custom Made Woman: A Life in Traditional Music (North Carolina, December 2, 2025) is much like sitting down with her in her front room or on her porch and listening to her regale us with tales of her relationships ( the musicians she’s known and with whom she’s played), and her journeys through the world of traditional music. An accomplished photographer, Gerrard illustrates the colorful stories of her life with photographs of her childhood, of her interactions with other musicians and friends, of moments from bluegrass festivals, and of candid shots of artists such as the Byrds and guitarist the Reverend Pearly Brown.
Gerrard recalls growing up in a house where music and singing filled the air. “A get-together wasn’t about cocktails and chit-chat; it was about sharing music,” she writes. Gerrard declares her identity early in the book: “I’m a musician, songwriter, twice a wife, four times a mother, a sister, once widowed and once divorced. I grew up on the West Coast in a musical family. . . . The girls were all singers and players of classical music and toured for a brief while as the Symphony Sisters Quartette.”
