Keri Edwards

Keri Edwards is an Americana songwriter from Lancaster, Pennsylvania who left Nashville in her twenties and came back with more to say.

SALTYmf first heard Edwards through Isaiah Grass, whose TV show spotlights new musicians, and liked her enough to make her the Band Groupeez Local Legend of the Month. Brad Banyas called her a worker and exactly his kind of artist. When she joined the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast he skipped the warm up and went straight to Wait for Grace, the song that had stayed with him.

She wrote it for a friend from high school, through a long run of prayers and miracles, a place on the transplant list and the transplant itself. Then came transplant cancer, which Edwards had not known existed. She played the song live on her friend's Facebook page when word came that she had died. About a year later her friend's sister asked whether it was recorded anywhere, because she had to scroll further down the page every time she needed a good cry. Edwards decided it deserved to be done properly. It came out as the world was shutting down, and strangers wrote to tell her what it meant to them. In her words, it did not get millions of streams, but it reached the people it was meant to reach.

In her late teens and early twenties her father, a local singer whose band toured the country when she was a kid, was taking her to Nashville. She was writing with prominent songwriters, had single song contracts, publisher meetings and a production deal on a minor label. Then doctors found a hip condition that would one day mean a replacement, in two years or in ten. Carrying a baby would hurt far less sooner than later, so she and her husband, her high school sweetheart, started their family. You cannot jet off to Nashville with a husband in the Air Force and a baby in the crib. She sings about it now in Road Back to Me, and says she would make the same choice a thousand times over.

Two kids and twenty six years of marriage later, with her husband retired from the Air Force, she is recording an album in Nashville and says she was not done cooking. She writes in a yellow room she never repainted because she loves the shade, in her grandfather's old recliner, with a seventy pound boxer mix squeezing onto her lap. Live, it is her and an acoustic guitar, whether the song is her own or Nirvana. She believes making it takes talent, luck and work, and you only control the work. The newsletter on her website unlocks a library of her work tapes, and one couple danced to a demo at their wedding.