- published: 16 Jun 2009
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Catherine Tift Merritt (born January 8, 1975) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and North Carolina native. With her longtime band, she has built what has been called a "unique" and critically acclaimed body of work of "sonic short stories and poignant performances." She has been compared to songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Emmylou Harris.
Merritt has released two studio albums for Lost Highway Records and two for Fantasy Records. Her live albums so far are Home Is Loud released in 2005 and Buckingham Solo released in 2009.
Merritt was born in Houston but her family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina soon after. Her father taught her guitar chords and how to play piano by ear to Percy Sledge and Bob Dylan songs, and she sang harmonies with him as a child. His eclectic record collection of soul, folk, R&B, rock, and country music records influenced her both then and later; she credits his "genreless" taste with influencing her to write and perform without regard to genre herself.
In her early twenties, though she had performed solo in public, Merritt has said she decided she was better suited for writing short stories. She enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study creative writing. There, she met Zeke Hutchins, whose band had just taken a hiatus and who had decided instead to become a school teacher. "With his encouragement and a big box of LPs from the 1970s," Merritt and Hutchins agreed to form a band. Hutchins set up his drum kit in the kitchen of the farmhouse where Merritt lived, and they practiced songs at her piano.