Spotlight on Mom - Lori Greene

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Photo credit: Sonja Luecke

By Sonja Luecke

Midsouthmoms.com “Spotlight on Mom” – Lori Greene


Lori Greene is a singer, songwriter, musician, mother, organic farmer, wife, home-school teacher and animal lover. Better known as Lorette Velvette, she formed the band Hellcats after graduating high school. A few years later, she started a solo career, signing with a German label and touring Northern Europe and parts of the United States.

Since marrying Alex, a fellow musician in her band, the Memphis-based couple bought a second home in the country outside of Savannah, Tenn., which they transformed into an organic vegetable farm.

Today, the parents of Henry, 8, and Hattie, 6, divide their lives between their country home, Downing Hollow Farm, where they grow seasonal, organic crops, and their city home near the University of Memphis, to take their harvest to market or sell it to local restaurants.

Greene and her husband, who home-school their children and practice buying and eating locally grown food, continue to stay involved in the music scene. Greene is the lead singer and her husband a percussionist of the Kropotkins, a musically innovative New York-based band that combines Mississippi fife-and-drum-style music with contemporary rhythms, ranging from techno to punk. The band members are all long-time musicians, including Maureen Tucker of The Velvet Underground. Greene recently answered questions from Midsouthmoms.com”

What is something people would be surprised to learn about you? People don’t realize I have a musical background. When I am my farmer self that I am now, I don’t tell people right away I’m a musician. I let that come out later. They always look shocked when they tell me they saw my video on Youtube.

Which local band or musician do you enjoy listening to? Harlan T. Bobo. I used to get out to see more music, but I don’t get out that much lately. Still, I always try to go see his shows.

If you had more time (hours in the day) how would you spend it? I would try to plant more vegetables and spend more time with my kids.

When the farmer’s market closes for the winter, do you still sell vegetables? Right now, we supply some of the local restaurants with organically grown vegetables.

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Walk to the end of our long driveway with the dogs and cats, and turn around and take a big look at our house sitting next to the creek and garden. I see my family safe and happy, running around in the house, laughing with windows all aglow with warm light. This always puts things in perspective.

What’s your favorite indulgence? Carbohydrates – I just love Italian pasta dishes.

What’s your favorite thing to do with your kids? Here are some of my favorite things to do with the kids: Get in bed with a new pile of library books and read to them, build fairy houses in the woods and take them to new restaurants.

What advice would you give other working moms trying to balance job and family? Since we are farmers and we home-school our kids, we are with them a whole lot. I try to bring them into what we are doing with our business whether it is asking them what we should grow this year, paying them to work in the garden, ( yes we do pay them!) encouraging them to grow their own to sell at market. So making that connection between the food we eat to nourish ourselves and seeing it grown and harvested right out of their own garden is one of the greatest gifts you can give your children everyday.

What's your favorite pastime? I really love going to new restaurants, try new foods. I have been all over the world and the United States playing music and I wish I could just go on a food tour now. At the time when I was touring, I was a starving artist and neither had the time nor the money to go to restaurants.

What inspires you? People who are passionate about making changes happen or who want to get together and make something happen. I also like to put people into contact with each other. I can also be inspired by nature and the way the light falls on the hill or the quality of the light when you’re out gardening – or just to see the weather change, hear the creek flow, hear the kids laugh and listen to music.

Have you had any regrets about your life so far? (something you would do over again, wish you hadn’t done, etc) I really regret I didn’t take care of myself better when I was younger. I smoked cigarettes for a long time. I was never able to quit and told myself I would quit once I got pregnant. I did quit when I was pregnant, but I realized then that I should have done it a long time before.

What’s the one thing you promised yourself you’d never do when you had kids that you find yourself doing? When they run up and show you something or tell you something and they are all excited, and you just kind of acknowledge that with a standard answer but you don’t really listen to it. It is not really giving them the attention they need. But to be sincere and engaged at all times is very hard.

With spring around the corner, are there any spring activities or traditions you and your kids look forward to? Being outdoors more of course. But also, my kids are taking hip hop dance classes, and they have their dance recital in May. It will either the most embarrassing moment of my life or most inspiring. It makes me totally nervous.

What is the best advice you have ever received about how to be a good mom and/or balancing work and family? The best advice that I have ever gotten is to listen to what my children are saying and to acknowledge their feelings.

Did your mom work while you were growing up? What did she do? She did a bit, working part-time. She worked in a flower shop and delivered flowers, and she later dabbled in real estate. Afetr we were grown and moved to Memphis, she moved to Memphis as well and started working at The University of Memphis as a secretary in theatre and communications.

How often do you sit down for meals with your kids? Dinner time is our most-together time of the day. We often can sit down for lunch together too. Breakfast is more of them eating and me getting my house working for me -- starting laundry, loading the dishwasher, etc …

What was the last good book you read? I read a lot of books about farming and so, actually, the last good book I read was “The Winter Harvest Handbook” by Eliot Coleman. His books are the organic gardener’s Bible.

What’s your most extravagant purchase ever? I think it was in 2001 when I basically convinced Alex that we needed to buy a 1986 RV. We bought it, and it was pretty extravagant considering we never camped in it. I ended up using it to drive the vegetables to Memphis.

If you could meet one celebrity, any celebrity, who would it be? Why? I wouldn’t mind meeting a food activist like Alice Waters. She is very involved with the Slow Food USA movement and was one of the people who pioneered the edible schoolyard. I also would have loved to have met Julia Childs. I think that would have been fun. There are musicians too who come to mind.

Biggest pet peeve: Some things parents do to their kids, but what really bugs me lately is the way people treat their animals. Every time I look around, I have a new dog. People abandon them in the country since here is no animal control around here. Since they don’t get them fixed, there are tons of puppies. It seems like people think because you live in the country, they can just drop the dogs off and we will take care of them – which we basically do. We now have five dogs and a puppy. She came to us just before the cold spell and gave birth to 11 puppies. The mother was in terrible shape, and all the puppies died but one. We are now trying to find a home for the mother dog and her surviving puppy.

How did you get into farming? I grew up in Savannah, Tenn., and our family always had a very big garden. When I was little, I enjoyed playing in the mud. When I moved to Memphis after high school, I always tried to grow something in my yard, but I wasn’t that successful at it. I really always wanted a house outside of the city in the country. When we got married and had kids, we decided we wanted to move out in the country. The first year we were out here, we wanted to grow our own food. I started out sowing too many seeds, so I decided it was too much for a family and thought I could sell some of the vegetables. The Memphis Farmer’s Market started that year, so I started taking vegetables to Memphis. We just finished our third season of growing.

What kinds of vegetables do you grow? That depends on the season. We plant pretty much everything, and I always plant at least six varieties of every vegetable I plant. We usually have six different tomatoes, lots of different lettuce types, corns, and we have white, yellow and green cucumbers and much more.

What importance does music play in your home? We play a lot of music – we have my grandmother’s piano here in the living room, and it is open for the kids to get on it and bang it out. Alex plays once a day on the piano, and sometimes, we play the guitar, get together and sing. A lot of times when it is just us here, the kids dance when we play. They just love to dance.

What do you hope to inspire in your children? I just hope that when they grow up, they will be able to remember growing up around food and strive to be self-sufficient and live lightly on the land and be aware of where the food is coming from. It inspires health. We really make a point to not hide what goes on with factory farming, so they can make informed choices about what they eat and, hopefully, that will translate to lots of areas of their lives. You don’t want the knowledge of how to grow vegetables to stop with you. It is a really good skill to have, and it is important that this type of knowledge gets passed on to your children.

Are you currently in a band? Yes. We have a band called the Kropotkins.

Do you ever play in Memphis? We typically play in New York. The New York shows come through because most of the band members live in New York. It’s just me and Alex who don’t. We get together once a year, just for fun. But we always love it when we get together and play, and we always say we should do this more. We have our next show coming up in Brooklyn in a week and a half.

How do you describe the music you play? It’s got a lot of Mississippi fife and drum to it, as well as a lot of other influenced. Our band is just a base drum and a snare. Alex plays the base drum, and another fellow plays a stand-up snare. A lot of the beats are in the fife-and-drum-music tradition. The most famous of those types of musicians was Othar Turner. We also have a banjo and a fiddle and guitar and base and sometimes, a harmonica.

Do you compose your own songs? We all compose songs -- whoever wants to throw a song in there.

TOP PICKS:

Favorite music: North Mississippi slide guitar blues

Favorite beauty product: I usually forget to put on makeup, but I use Burt’s Bees lip balm.

Favorite de-stress technique: Take a walk and have a Mexican beer.

Favorite money-saving tip: Stay out of grocery stores, try to grow your food and freeze it or preserve it in some way. It is healthier and saves you a lot of money. Make stock with the bones.

Favorite book: “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan

Favorite movie: “Sunset Boulevard”

Favorite recreational activity: Eating

Favorite children’s book: Books by Jan Brett

Product you couldn’t live without: Butter and the bread that my husband makes: ciabatta, bagels and no-knead bread.

Favorite Memphis locale: Otherland’s

Favorite TV show: “Madmen” and “Deadwood”

Favorite timesaving tip: Get your house working for you

Favorite recipe: (please include full recipe instructions if you have one) I couldn’t live without Mark Bittman’s ”How to Cook Everything” and “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.”



Listen to 98.9 Kim-FM every Thursday at 7:30 a.m. for an interview with the subject of “Spotlight on Mom” on the Morning View with Tom Prestigiacomo and Dr. Susan Murrmann