nefolk2

Larkin Grimm was born 27 years ago in Memphis TN to hippie devotees of the religious cult The Holy Order Of MANS - her parents were runaway kids that met in San Francisco in the late 60’s and eventually found their way into the cult, which later moved to Memphis. Larkin spent her early years in this communal environment, raised by several parents at once. When the cult disbanded Larkin was 6, and her nuclear family moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia and quickly grew to include 5 siblings. Larkin says she ran wild in the mountains and was “raised by the family dog.” Larkin got the taste of music in her from her fiddler and singer father and her folksinger mother. She dropped out of school at 10 and didn’t return until 12. At 13 she was sent to boarding school (courtesy of Georgia’s Coca Cola, which funds the school with the intent of helping gifted Appalachian children). Larkin excelled, (though her erupting hormones and wild imagination were already roaring) and she won a full scholarship to Yale to study art. She spent a while there then freaked out at the elitism of the place. She left and returned several times, somehow along the way managing to find herself in Thailand, where she studied Thai healing massage and “befriended strippers and watched them being humiliated and abused by sex tourists”, bummed around Guatemala, and also hitchhiked around southern Alaska by herself, until she found a place “so beautiful I couldn’t leave, camped out there in my tent for about 2 months with the plan to starve to death, get eaten, or get enlightened.” Larkin says a Cherokee shaman named Jezebel Crow found her on the mountaintop and lured her to her truck with the promise of maple syrup and sausages. She became her “first great teacher, initiating me into the shamanic practice of using natural hallucinogens to gain spiritual wisdom. On one such trip, I got my first jolt of golden light to the brain and was possessed by a forest spirit who taught me to sing.” Jezebel drove her down to her commune in Olympia, Washington, where she would live off and on for a few years, soon hanging out with “eco-warriors, vagabonds, sexual deviants and various other miscreants.” But Jezebel encouraged Larkin to go back to Yale and when she returned Larkin started incorporating singing into her art practice, which led her finally to decide to become “a real musician”.

http://larkingrimm.net