Anne Hills Concert at Front Porch Music

As a singer, actress, writer, and musician Anne Hills has continuously built a reputation of merit. During her career, she has received numerous honors and awards including, most recently, the 2019 Woodstock Folk Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2012 Posi Music Award in Social Justice (for the song That Kind Of Grace – co-writer David Roth), the 2009 Pennsylvania Partner’s in the Arts Project Stream grant award (she received the same grant for her 2005 premiere of The Heartsongs of Opal Whiteley and in 2007 for An Evening of James Whitcomb Riley) and the 2009 – Bound for Glory live radio show favorite – Ithaca, NY. She was the recipient of the WFMA 2002 Kate Wolf Memorial Award, and The Kerrville Music Foundation’s Outstanding Female Vocalist of the Year Award (1997). Her duet children’s recording, Never Grow Up, released in 1998 with Cindy Mangsen on Flying Fish Records, was chosen for the coveted Parents’ Choice Award. Her poetic work won her Second Place in the Atlanta Review’s 1999 International Poetry Contest and her work as lyricist with jazz-artist Peter Erskine was featured in a performance by choirs from around the world at a Hilliard Ensemble workshop in Germany. In 2001 she reunited with long-time friend Tom Paxton to release a long-awaited duet recording Under American Skies for Appleseed Recordings, which won a WAMMIE (Washington Area Music Award) for “best traditional folk recording” that year. This was soon followed by another collaborative debut, Fourtold (with Michael Smith, Steve Gillette and Cindy Mangsen) in the spring of 2003. That same summer she participated in the final Pete Seeger compilation Seeds, and her lyrical work expanded into the UK folk scene, co-writing two tunes (including the title cut) with Bill Jones for her Two Year Winter (on Compass Records). Then, in January of 2004 Appleseed Recordings delighted fans with the release of an historic Chicago concert recording (engineered in 1985 by WFMT’s Rich Warren) of the group Best of Friends (Paxton, Gibson & Hills). Her 2006 recording, Beauty Attends: The Heartsongs of Opal Whiteley, was released by Collective Works, followed in summer of 2007 by Ef You Don’t Watch Out!: Anne Hills Sings the Poems of James Whitcomb Riley. In February 2010 her song “Pennsylvania” from Points of View (Appleseed 2009) enjoyed being top play on XM Radio’s folk station. In 2011 she released a duet recording with long-time friend David Roth, Rhubarb Trees (Wind River Records), and 2012 saw the release of a project honoring Tom Paxton The Things I Notice Now (Appleseed). She has performed with the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra in their 2002-3 and their 2008-9 seasons, doing arrangements of her own songs. In May 2014 Anne and The Mock Turtle Marionette Theatre premiered The Morningtime of Now based on the writings of Opal Whiteley, included in Touchstone Theatre’s 2015-16 season and chosen for The New York International Fringe Festival 2015. She debuted Jay Ansill’s new settings of Robert Graves’ poems for string quartet and voice in Mallorca, Spain for the 2014 Robert Graves Conference. A collection of Jay’s and Anne’s collaborative compositions and arrangements, Fragile Gifts followed. That same year, they returned to the 2016 Robert Graves Conference, highlighting Graves’ collected ballads and folksongs, joined by Graves’ son Tomás, granddaughter, Natalia Farran Graves and Jay’s wife, Claude Balant. Recently, when the world was grounded by the Covid epidemic, she worked with longtime friend Al Power (musician, geriatrician and dementia specialist) to co-write the 2021 release Accidental August (2021 Hand & Heart Music).