Cassell Webb

Cassell Webb
Cassell Webb 2011
Background information
Born	San Antonio, Texas
Genres	Folk, Popular
Occupation(s)	Singer, Songwriter, Producer
Years active	1965–present
Labels	Virgin, Ode, International Artists, China, Atlas

Cassell Webb is a British-American musician.

Texas-born Cassell Webb has enjoyed a career that carried her from late 1960s psychedelia to country music and latter-day folk-rock to modern folk songwriting, classical music production and moved her across an ocean in the process. Her voice can sound ethereal or mournful and crosses genres as easily as Webb's career has over more than 30 years.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, in the late 1940s, Webb began playing guitar at 14 and later gravitated to the psychedelic scenes in San Antonio and Houston. She became a member of the Children, a psychedelic outfit that was part of Lelan Rodgers' stable of artists, appearing on their 1968 Rebirth album and several singles. She later joined Saddlesore, a Texas combo whose core members, Mayo Thompson and Rick Barthelme, were survivors from the Red Krayola (another Rodgers-managed act). They stayed together long enough to record one single ("Old Tom Clark") on the Texas Revolution label before disappearing in the early 1970s.

Webb spent time in California and New York working as a session singer and acquiring some knowledge of production as well and then returned to Texas, where she spent the next few years working with such country artists as Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, Guy Clark, and B.W. Stevenson. It was around the time she began writing songs that she also began her long association with songwriter/producer Craig Leon. Webb went to Europe in the early '80s, first to Holland and then to England, where she remained permanently and began her solo recording career. Initially signed to the Virgin owned independent label Statik Records, for which she recorded her debut album, Llano, she later joined the roster of Venture Records, an avant grade offshoot of Richard Branson's Virgin Records label, through which she recorded Thief of Sadness in 1987. Webb's most representative and popular album was her third, Songs of a Stranger, which was derived from her concert repertory of other writers' music, including Jimmy Webb ("P.F. Sloan"), Nick Drake ("Time Has Told Me"), Townes Van Zandt ("If I Needed You"), and Phil Ochs ("Jim Dean of Indiana").