Interview with Ginny Owens - Under The Radar

There aren't too many artists that carry more respect from other artists than Ginny Owens. She's graceful, eloquent, and honest through and through. Here's a conversation I had with Ginny last year in Nashville:

DT: When did you fall in love with singing and songwriting?
Ginny: I think I was singing before I could talk. I don't really ever remember not singing. I do however remember when I was a young kid being very shy about singing. Every time I got up to perform in front of people I would get terribly nervous & my voice would shake. I always had what I called the "bless my heart" syndrome. All the choir teachers at church & school probably gave me solos because they felt bad for me. I wrote my first song I think when I was 8 - or at least the first song I remember - and it went "Don't forget the water, don't forget the soap, don't forget the bathtub or you'll have to give up hope." I thought it was pretty awesome. I was thinking Amy Grant was going to record it.

DT: Last summer you released your 8th studio album. Tell us about that project.
Ginny: Well, my latest CD is called Say Amen. The title came from a track that I wrote with a young lady named Ronell Ragbir who was from Trinidad and was a patient who had cancer at St. Judes Research Hospital in Memphis. I got connected with her & wrote some songs with her & we did a concert together during the few months that she had left.  It was just a blessing to get to know her. The title track was a song that I had written a chorus for maybe about 8 or 9 years earlier and had brought it to several co-writers and no one had been able to finish it and she and I sat down & finished it. We met, and 20 minutes later we're finishing a song together! But "Say Amen" not only is sort of my life theme I suppose, but it's also a good definition or good summation of this project. It's full of old hymns and some new sort of renditions of old hymns, but also original material, and then some kind of almost black gospel type of stuff and even some old shaker melodies. So I hope it represents maybe the past 300 years of how people have praised God and what that's looked like.

DT: What kind of things do you like to do away from the stage and away from music?
Ginny: I love to stay home on Friday nights and watch TV and hang out with my puppy dog. My puppy dog is like my kid - a little toy Australian Sheppard - he's like the love of my life. And then I love to read. Oh, I love Ken Burns. I love to go to sleep watching Ken Burns documentaries. I'm obsessed with Ken Burns documentaries!

UTR Episode #64 welcomed Ginny Owens and Bart Millard as the guests on a special all-hymns edition of "Under The Radar".