The nurse and the fiddle
Pulse editor
Sunday, December 14, 2008
By day, Merideth H. Northcutt is the director of recruitment at Gwinnett Hospital System in Lawrenceville. By night and on weekends, she just fiddles around.
Northcutt is the fiddler and a singer in Keltic Kudzu, a band that plays “contemporary Celtic music with a Southern accent” at international festivals, pubs and private parties.
Photos by BARRY WILLIAMS / Special
Besides playing the fiddle with Keltic Kudzu, Merideth H. Northcutt is a member of the Divas, an all-female a cappella group.
Merideth H. Northcutt, director of recruitment at Gwinnett Hospital System in Lawrenceville, is also an accomplished fiddler and a member of Keltic Kudzu. Band members (left to right in photo below) Tom Crawford, Tim Porterfield, Northcutt and Maggie Anderson practice in Northcutt’s Atlanta home.
Until about two years ago, Northcutt kept her music separate from her workplace. But when she gave a CD by the Divas — an all-female a cappella singing group that she performs with — to a colleague, word got around. Her boss asked Keltic Kudzu to play for the hospital’s awards banquet.
“We performed for about 200 people, and have been asked back for this year, so I guess now the cat’s out of the bag,” she said.
Music and health care have been strong influences on Northcutt’s life.
“Dad was a doctor, so we grew up hearing blood-and-guts conversation at the dinner table. It never bothered me, but my friends would turn green when they came over,” she said.
Northcutt remembers her father taking her to then-Georgia Baptist Hospital in Atlanta when he went on rounds and letting her hang out at the nurses’ station. Sometimes the whole family went on house calls.
“I guess I knew I’d probably go to nursing school at some point in my life, but music came first with me,” Northcutt said.
She started playing the piano when she was 6, and in the fifth grade she discovered the violin, which was much easier to haul around, she joked.
In high school, Northcutt became assistant concert mistress for the Atlanta Youth Symphony and earned a scholarship to the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver.
She planned to be a concert violinist, but that changed when she began listening to bluegrass bands jamming in Denver.
“It was wonderful music. I’d never heard fiddle players before and didn’t know that the violin could be played more than one way,” she said.
Learning to play bluegrass
Northcutt began buying bluegrass records and teaching herself to play in a different style.
“I could sight read, had good bowing skills and a great ear, which made it easy to switch to a new genre,” Northcutt said. “People say that I’m lucky to be able to sight read and pick things up easily, but I give my mother credit for honing my skills.
“Believe me, I paid my dues. I spent half my high school years grounded, because I couldn’t go out until I had practiced. My mom recognized that I had been given a gift and she made sure I developed it.”
Northcutt dropped her music scholarship, but stayed at the University of Denver and earned a degree in psycho-logy with a minor in music. She played with various bluegrass bands.
After she graduated, a job in a doctor’s office renewed Northcutt’s interest in health care, so in 1976, she moved back to Atlanta and enrolled in Georgia Baptist’s nursing school.
“My mom heard about a band that was looking for a fiddle player, and I auditioned and got the job,” she said. “That’s where I met my first husband [Dewey Northcutt]. He was the guitar and mandolin player.”
After she graduated from nursing school in 1979, the couple married and helped to form Cedar Hill, a well-known Atlanta bluegrass band.
“I was a nurse by day and a fiddle player by night,” Northcutt said.
She worked in the recovery room and in the emergency room at Georgia Baptist Hospital. When he was a baby, their son, Drew, would sit in the middle of practice sessions, Northcutt said.
Professional advancement
When her husband died in 1987, Northcutt took some time off from music and became the director of nursing quality assurance at Northlake Regional Hospital. In 1992 she became the employment manager of Shepherd Center; then the employment manager of Scottish Rite Hospital in 1996.
She helped merge Scottish Rite with Egleston Hospital in 1998 and served as employment manager at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta until 2003, when she took her current job.
While Northcutt’s nursing career took her to increasingly higher levels of responsibility, she was also adding to her musical chops. Northcutt learned to play Irish/New England Contra dance music, Celtic music and attended a voice camp in Tuscany, Italy. She began singing with the Divas four years ago.
She also met and married Don Blackman, a musician and epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Music has always been an important part of my life,” she said. “It’s the part where I can relax and be creative, and is a wonderful balance to my role in health care.”
After busy St. Patrick’s Day weekends each year, when Keltic Kudzu travels to play four or five gigs and hauls and sets up its own instruments, Northcutt remembers why she doesn’t play for a living. When it gets busy, it’s a lot of work.
“I’ve never thought of giving up nursing. I have a great job where I get to use my clinical and health care knowledge every day,” she said. “But music informs my whole approach to the world and to relationships. There’s a special bond when people share a love of music.
“I’m a high extrovert and get my energy from people anyway, so I need both in my life.”