A few years before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Galesburg community was reading poems by Emily Dickinson through the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read program and the Galesburg Public Library.
Galesburg singer-songwriter Sunshine Regiacorte was sitting on the couch with her guitar and glanced at a “pocket poem” on the coffee table -- a piece of Dickinson's verse that local librarians had printed on business cards.
The poem was “Hope is the Thing with Feathers.”
“I just looked at it and suddenly it was a song. Like it just came. And it was simple and easy and fun,” Regiacorte said.
Regiacorte grew up singing. She remembers hitting every note of Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” in her grandma’s basement.
When she was 19 and living in a dorm at a conservative school in a rural area, she borrowed a friend’s guitar.
“I slowly taught myself to play and eventually knew a few chords and later started playing along to records I loved. Since there was no YouTube then, I watched people play at church all the time to see what they were doing and I would go home and try it out,” she said.
Regiacorte sang in church, too. She played with the local folk duo Mourning Star and she sang with the Galesburg Community Chorus.
“Then COVID came and I just stopped singing. It didn’t even occur to me to sing. I’m sure part of that was psychological but the other part was, the opportunity wasn’t right in front of me,” she said.
Then, when things were starting opening up again, Regiacorte was excited to sing in choirs again. But without the regular practice, she could no longer sing.
"It was terrible and I hated it. So I started taking voice lessons and I just made sure I was singing every single day,” she said.
The lessons brought Regiacorte’s voice back and to new places.
When a dear friend died, she was asked to sing her Emily Dickinson song at the celebration of life. But “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” didn’t seem quite right.
So Regiacorte sat down with the dictionary-thick book of Dickinson’s poems, searching for lines about grief and healing. She found one, and wrote a song.
And it didn’t stop there. Regiacorte now has a collection of about a dozen songs based on Emily Dickinson poems.
She said she picked poems that resonated with her personally.
“Like I had to be able to connect with the song on that level to really make the music come out,” she said.
Regiacorte said she didn’t really know Dickinson’s poetry before the Big Read. But she knew Dickinson was introverted and spent most of her time at home, and that always appealed to her.
The first ten songs took her about a year to write, squeezing in ten or fifteen minutes a day for her music.
“Usually when I’m at home, I’ve got one kid playing the piano. I’ve got another kid in another room with a trumpet. So my happy place is to go sit on the front steps and I’ll take my guitar out there,” she said.
Late last year, Regiacorte performed the songs for the first time at the Galesburg Community Arts Center.
The community will have another chance to hear them this weekend.
Regiacorte will perform at 2 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 11, at the Carl Sandburg State Historic Site in Galesburg, 313 E. Third St., as part of the Songbag Concert Series.
She’ll be playing with singer-songwriter, producer, and touring sideman Casey Foubert.
There’s a suggested donation of $5.
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