The Daily Times

It may not seem like much to the uninitiated �" one guy, one guitar, two girls.

No drums. No keyboards; not anymore, anyway. No Marshall amplifiers, no big ol’ bass guitar, stand-up or otherwise.

Before Freequency is dismissed as a lightweight acoustic outfit, however, do yourself a favor: Stick around and listen to a couple of songs. Because once the girls open their mouths and those golden voices come pouring forth, you’ll be amazed at just how big they sound and how little the lack of additional instruments seems to matter.

“We just have one acoustic guitar and three voices, and we pull off a lot of stuff with those three instruments,” singer Meredith Whitehead told The Daily Times this week. “I shake a mean tambourine, and Michele (Williams) sings like a bird.”

The end result is a cover band that’s quickly becoming a fixture at area venues; next Thursday’s performance at Maryville’s new Smoky Mountain Brewery will be the trio’s third visit, and the reception has been a positive one, she said. Of course, it helps that her husband, guitar player/singer Kirk Whitehead, is a Blount County boy �" he graduated from Maryville High in 1977 and was in Charade, a band years ago that might ring a bell with long-time local music fans.

Meredith Whitehead hails from Athens, Tenn., where she grew up singing in church and with her father. When a local show band called Party of Five needed a replacement singer, a friend recommended her; around the same time, her future husband was playing guitar for Larry Blair, a local musician familiar to some East Tennesseans from his work with the Blair Brothers and later with his own band, LB1.

That band recruited both Meredith Whitehead and Williams to sing backup. As their personal relationships progressed, so did their musical ones, Meredith Whitehead said.

“When we would practice, if it was over and it was just the three of us working together, Kirk would play guitar and Michele would start singing Bonnie Raitt and I would start harmonizing,” Whitehead said. “It just came so naturally. Michele calls it toning, and it just came so naturally for us to find our parts. She’s got a voice that’s clear as a bell and right on pitch, and if I’m singing lead, she finds the part right under me.

“The hard part is choosing which songs to do, because we get so excited about all kinds of music. It’s fun, taking songs and turning them into acoustic versions. Because we’re just a three-piece with one guitar, it forces us to rearrange songs that people have heard and love and do them in a different way. We have to leave out the huge guitar solo, or if it’s a song like (Van Morrison’s) ‘Into the Mystic,’ we don’t have a saxophone so we have to sing that part.”

Eventually, Meredith and Kirk married; the two of them, along with Williams, peeled away from LB1 and decided to go their own way. At first, they started out as a four-piece with long-time friend Andy Deal on keyboards; the band eventually settled into its current lineup, and it’s made booking gigs and playing shows more manageable, Whitehead said.

“We knew that with it just being the three of us, we were going to do this and make it happen, because we have too much fun and we love it too much,” she said. “It’s in our soul, I think. We wouldn’t know what to do if we weren’t writing and singing and performing.”

They started out performing a regular Friday night gig at the now-closed Beef O’Brady’s in Turkey Creek; the standing engagement gave them the opportunity to work up a variety of cover songs �" everything from “Shine” by Collective Soul to Fleetwood Mac classics like “Gold Dust Woman” and “Landslide” to James Taylor’s “Carolina” to “Listen to the Music” by the Doobie Brothers.

“If the crowd is ready, we can do dance music too,” she said. “We knew we had a niche, because there aren’t too many groups with two female singers and one guitar. Plus, we make friends with people who come out to hear us. They see we’re just making a living like everyone else, and they see we really love to do it. It’s a fun night �" not just sitting back listening to music.”

Eventually, the threesome recorded a rough demo on a home computer and started shopping it around to other live music venues. That led to engagements at Irish Times Pub in Turkey Creek, as well as at the various Smoky Mountain Brewery locations in East Tennessee. They got a helping hand from other local musicians like Jason Ellis and Taylor Corum, and now they’ve found themselves with their own loyal following.

“That’s kind of the best part,” she said. “We’ve met so many new friends who come around and see us. And now there’s a little group of folks that continue to hire us for private parties at their homes or their boats or wherever.”

The band is currently in the studio, working on some original material that the members hope to work into their sets eventually. It’s a nerve-wracking process, because they have high standards for the covers they select, and even greater ones for original songs.

“We’ve been a little shy about playing them out, because people don’t know them and they don’t get the crowd reaction we’re used to,” she said. “We want them to be just right. When we select covers, we want to pick ones that could be heard on the radio next week �" something we can really make ours and put out there as a totally different version.”