The band did release on single – “Juke Box Boogie” b/w “Diesel Truck” (Smokey Soul 761001) – but there was no future in sight and Colvin was battling nodes on her vocal chords and she decided to stop singing.īattling anorexia, Colvin returned to Carbondale for both family and medical care. She spent two years with the Diesels, traveling the south and southwest, ultimately doing nothing more than eking out a living doing Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Asleep at the Wheel and other cover material. This was Colvin’s ticket out of that charmless city. The band had decided if they were going to make it, Carbondale was not the place and planned to relocate to Austin. They were short a girl singer and she jumped at the opportunity. Her next shot came with the Dixie Diesels, a Carbondale country-swing outfit. But Colvin’s personal demons coupled with drug and alcohol use curtailed the success they were having. For six months they expanded their base throughout Illinois.

“For $30 I played four 45-minute sets.” For the next year she was either playing somewhere of sitting in with someone else and started attracting a local following.īroadening her horizons, Colvin put a band together that featured Dennis Conroy (formerly with the popular Chicago band The Cryan’ Shames), Jack O’Boyle on guitar and Brian Sandstrom on bass. With a strip of bars down the main street it wasn’t difficult to find a gig. Her first official paid gig came just after she started college at S.I.U. This got her through junior high and most of high school. The first phase was learning standard and popular folk songs – Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, John Denver, Phil Ochs, James Taylor, Kingston Trio, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen and others. “The guitar had permanent residence at the foot of my bed, and when trouble came in the form of panic or pain, I reached for that guitar,” as she recalls, “I could produce something totally complete with my voice and the guitar.” With that, her consolation came when she was home alone singing. A town, “that held no charm for me.” She hated school, and tried to ditch as much as she could get away with. It was not the most appealing place, who said, “Carbondale is a funky town,” in her autobiography Diamond in the Rough. When she was 12, the family moved to the town that is the home to Southern Illinois University where her father pursued a doctorate in psychology.

While most people will think of Shawn Colvin as a one-hit wonder with her 1997 hit “Sunny Came Home”, Colvin has been nominated for nine Grammy Awards, pulling down her first in 1990 for Best Contemporary Folk Recording for her album Steady On, nominated in the same category 19 years later for her Live release.Ĭolvin was born in South Dakota in 1956, but her musical nurturing came when her family moved to Carbondale, Illinois.

Sunny came home guitar chords