Few folk singers have worked in as many different partnerships as Anne Hills. Throughout her distinguished career, Hills has worked with a who's who of folk performers, including Bob Gibson, Tom Paxton, Michael Smith, Cindy Mangsen, Steve Gillette, and Priscilla Herdman. Hills started her career as a folk musician in the late 70s, working with guitarist and instrument maker Jan Burda, with whom she also founded the now-venerable Hogeye Music in Evanston.

"I first performed in Chicago at a Woody Guthrie tribute at Somebody Else's Troubles. Jan Burda and I were doing the open mike circuit. We did a couple of songs at the open mike at Somebody Else's Troubles and somebody — maybe it was Ed Holstein — said, 'You guys are great. Would you like to play at the Woody Guthrie Tribute?'"

Soon Hills started working with seminal Chicago folkies Bob Gibson and Tom Paxton. "One time Jan and I opened for Bob Gibson at the Earl of Old Town. He asked me if I wanted to sing harmony with him, because he liked my voice and was impressed with my singing. I ended up doing some work with Bob and still doing the duo work with Jan. I don't know if it was Bob who encouraged me to do more solo work. Bob was producing Tom Paxton's Up and Up for Mountain Railroad Records, and Bob had Cindy Mangsen, Claudia Schmidt and I do harmony on the record."

Shortly thereafter, Hills joined Paxton and Gibson in a trio, Best of Friends, which indirectly got her started on her solo career. "Craig Hankenson, who was Tom's agent, thought it would be nice to have a trio. Since they had me do solo work and my songs in the trio, I started doing more solo work.

"If you were to look at my musical career, that's what you would see. You'd see me working with those duos, liking to perform with other people, liking to step in and do harmonies for other performers. I would say that when I started doing solo work I really enjoyed doing harmony more than anything. It was a wonderful way to get on stage and move the emotion by the way you construct the harmony. You can add a tonality like an open fifth that can make it really dramatic in a way a single voice can't."

Another partnership Hills established at that time was with Cindy Mangsen, who also lived in Chicago in the 80s. "I remember the first song I heard her do was a Gordon Bok song called 'River.' I heard it on WFMT and said, 'I have to meet this person.' She's got such an incredible voice. Eventually we started singing together. We had done all the backup stuff, and Cindy and I did a lot of stuff together back in Chicago. We tended to rip a lot of our stuff off of the Silly Sisters records and the music that Cindy knew well. We also did a lot of traditional American music that I knew from Jan Burda. She'd crash my shows, I'd crash hers. That's why it was so devastating when she moved back east from Chicago. It was a real loss."

Hills worked with many other Chicago area folksingers, singing in a trio with Jim Post and Jan Marra, and working with Post in his theatrical piece, The Heart of Christmas.

One of her more lasting partnerships, with the remarkable Chicago-based singer/songwriter Michael Smith, also can be traced back to the early days of her career. "Michael played bass behind Best of Friends. When I first learned 'When I Lived in My Grandmother's House,' I learned it in the basement of a club called Hobson's Choice, and Michael showed me exactly how the chords went when he wrote the song. I got to know Michael slowly, and our alliance grew through a manager named Rich Deeder, who we worked with who was also involved in Hobson's Choice. Then we just continued. Even though we both left Rich's management, we worked together.

"For the last five or six years we've performed together, and that's because Joann Murdock started booking both of us, and she could book Michael and me together. I'm really grateful because Michael's been a great teacher to me. It's like being able to travel with a master writer and also an incredible guitarist. He is really happy with this latest project, Bittersweet Street, because he got to be just a guitarist. He played lead and got to focus on just doing guitar work.

"When we perform together, he really gets a chance to stretch. One of the reasons he's such an incredible guitar player for somebody like me, who's working with songs that are communicating really intense messages, is that he knows the voicings and because he's a writer himself, he's listening to the songs and he has a sense of song structure and song melody as he's working. He's not just a guitarist who knows melody really well. He's also a lyricist, so he knows which words to hold back on and which ones on which he can move the emotion forward again."

Hills has also produced Smith's last three solo records. She described how this came about. "Michael was gun shy about doing another record. He had made a couple of records he was unhappy with, that he didn't feel comfortable with. I wanted him to have a record out, where people would hear his songs. So I said that I would borrow the money and produce the record. I borrowed the money on my credit card, we recorded it, and I took it to Flying Fish, and Bruce Kaplan put it out.

"Over time, Michael paid me back the money that it cost to make the record. Fish fronted the money for the second record. Now he's working on a solo record on which he's going to be the producer, so I think it's going to be very different. He got more and more confident in the studio. Now I'm not involved at all in his record, and he's very involved in mine, doing guitar all over it."

Theater work has also long been a part of Hills' artistic repertoire. "I did theater before I started doing folk music. I went to Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, and I actually started as a Theater Major. I found I was not comfortable in the Theater Department, so I started pursuing other things. I took creative writing and wound up singing jazz with a big band (a group which also included jazz drummer Peter Erskine, who went on to join Weather Report and later produced Hills' October Child). In the summers I did summer stock theater. I did theater from when I was 12.

"Now that I'm really busy touring full time, directors I might have worked with before will call me, but it's hard to schedule the time. I don't do it as much. When I do my writing, I think you can see that the folk artists I've chosen to interpret, whether it's Tom Paxton or Michael Smith, or Tim Henderson out of Texas — they are all writers who like to put on the cloaks of characters. They like to do point-of-view songs. Those are the writers I'm drawn to, and I think you can see it in my own writing that that's the way I wanted to write, too. My daughter Tamlyn, who is eight, and I have been renting films like Fiddler on the Roof and The King and I and listening to a lot of the musical writers. I can now really appreciate how meticulous and clever and different their writing is."

In the late 80s, Hills relocated to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and started yet another collaboration, this time with Mangsen and Priscilla Herdman. "The trio came about because Priscilla knew me. She recorded 'Shadow Crossing the Land,' the song I wrote about migrant workers. She called Cindy Mangsen about singing harmony on Darkness Into Light and asked her who she might also bring in as another singer. Cindy mentioned that I had moved back east, and that's how that came about. I went into the studio, and I think we first did that James Taylor tune, 'Walk Down That Lonesome Road.' We would do it occasionally, and we did old songs. Al Power heard us and asked us if we could do the Golden Lake festival up in Rochester as a trio. We debuted there as a trio, and that led to the Voices record, which I did when I was eight months pregnant with Tamlyn. I had just gotten out of the hospital with pulmonary embolism. It was pretty intense."

After touring steadily for a couple of years, the group decided to cut back, and now they do one seasonal tour each winter. "If we were going to tour, we wanted to do it during a certain time of year and be very specific about the project. When we are rehearsing, it makes the song choices easier because our tastes are pretty broad. Cindy's tastes are mostly traditional, Priscilla is a very eclectic interpreter of other writers, and I do both traditional music and am a writer myself, so we have pretty limitless choices. Then we have to bring something we're all happy with. When we do a very specific time of the year theme, we chose winter because it's harder to tour alone in the winter — with driving and all, it's nice to have travel mates. Also, the winter is a special time of the year, and people go to special events. That's all we do during that time, so it makes booking easier."

Hills and Mangsen have also developed a duo act, which largely sprung from a recording project, Never Grow Old, that the duo did in collaboration with a variety of other folk performers.

"I would say that Never Grow Old, when it came out, was one of the first of that genre of bringing on guests, and I'd have to give credit to Mark (Moss, Sing Out! editor and Hills' husband) for that. We were talking about what Cindy and I wanted to do, and Priscilla was too busy with her projects, so we had some songs that Priscilla was on, but there were other ones we wanted to do. So it was Mark who said, 'Well, why don't you ask your friends and do an album of traditional songs with a lot of guests?' "

Musically satisfying, the collaborative project was nonetheless a logistical challenge. "We vowed after doing Never Grow Old we'd never do it again, because it is so hard to coordinate all the different studios, all the different artists. I loved it, but I think it was really stressful. Cindy's very organized, so she would have all these tapes and would know what was where, which tape held which cut and so on."

In 1998, the duo released a second disc, Never Grow Up, with a similar focus. "Never Grow Up is coming at a different time, and it's a different record. Although it features children and family songs, they are songs that talk about staying out late, chewing tobacco, people dying, and so forth. Our society has become so careful about what we let our children hear that we can't really advertise it as a children's record."

For a couple of years, Hills toured with harpist Jay Ansill, and also appeared prominently on his solo recording, A Lost World. "For me, it felt like the time we had together was good, but traveling with another person has to justify itself, which is one of the reasons the trio didn't stay together. If you can't make as much money touring with other people as you can separately, it doesn't make sense. Unfortunately, in any of the arts, we live in the margins, so that anything can swing it one way or the other."

In 1993, Hills was instrumental in putting together a benefit album, That Kind of Grace, for the Carole Robertson Center for Learning on the west side of Chicago. The center, which is named after one of four young girls killed in a 1963 church bombing in Alabama, serves needy children and families. In 1997, Hills spearheaded a second benefit recording, Part of the Village, for the Center. "I was brought up in a family in which I was taught at an early age that what our involvement at church was was about social work. My family was always volunteering, helping. So when I had the opportunity to work with the tape and CD for the Carole Robertson center, it was great to be able to give back. I've done many benefits, of course, but this seemed more tangible somehow. It's been important in this last year, as the center opened two more child care centers for younger children."

That year, the center awarded Hills, who has been the center's biggest fundraiser, with their award for outstanding service and loyalty. Although Hills received another major award in 1997, the Kerrville Music Foundation's Outstanding Female Vocalist medal, she treasures the Robertson award. "I'd say that (the Robertson) award means more to me than any award I've gotten. As much as I love the Kerrville award, this one means more to me because it has to do with the soul. It has to do with my good works. I went to the awards dinner this year and sat with Mrs. Robertson, her daughter, and the teachers. I walked out of there feeling like a really worthwhile person, and I know that's how they make every kid feel."

Hills just released her latest solo album, Bittersweet Street, which, like 1995's Angle of the Light, focuses mostly on Hills' own songs. It took Hills awhile to gain confidence in her own material. "I was always writing. I studied creative writing, short stories and poetry, at Interlochen and the City College of San Francisco, and I've always worked on poetry, short stories, or plays.

"Early on, Tom and Bob would include one or two of my songs in the Best of Friends shows. Michael has encouraged me as a writer, and Priscilla has been my muse in many ways. She is an interpreter and a brilliant one. One of my favorite songs on the new album (Exile) came about because she came and asked me to write a song for her album, and I liked it so much that I asked if it was okay that I record it for my album.

"Several of the songs on the new album came at the last minute, and I think it was because I had been working so hard on poetry that when it came to writing under a deadline situation, the stuff just flowed from my heart to my mind in a way that it hadn't ever before.

"I love to write. I don't even feel like it's ever a chore for me. I think it's become more of a love for me the more I do it. I've always loved it, but in the last year, give me an hour in front of my computer or with my notebook, and I'm so happy to just have that time to chisel away like a sculptor at an idea. And even if it falls flat, I've enjoyed the process."

Hills was also particularly pleased with the instrumentation on the new album, which featured Michael Smith's lead guitar and co-producer Scott Petito on bass. "The percussionist, Dean Sharp, who works with Jane Sibbery, is just wonderful. He doesn't really play a drum set, he has these wonderful wooden drums, he bows the cymbals and so on. I may be wrong, but I think this will be my best work, at least as far as interpretive writing. It's the most me of anything I've done. The way I'm using voice and coloring and the writing are more me. I recorded "Close the Door" by Eric Anderson, which I used to do when I was 18 years old and used to sing with a 12-string guitarist in St. Joe, Michigan."

The album also features a song written by Michael Smith incorporating the unique poetry of Opal Whitley. "Opal Whitely wrote a nature journal when she was six or seven years old. Years later it was published by The Atlantic on a monthly basis, and it became an overnight sensation when it was published in 1921. Then she was kind of debunked by one particular journalist who didn't believe she wrote it when she was six or seven. Benjaman Hoff republished Opal's work, did a lot of research, and wrote about why he thought she did write it at six or seven. Then he wrote an epilogue about how he went and tried to find Opal and discovered that she was in a mental hospital in England and died in her 90s. It's kind of antiquated language in a way, and I think it's a combination of writing at such a young age, and the fact that she spoke French. I think she was schizophrenic, and many highly gifted people have additional brain malfunctions or shifts.

"I was going to write a one-woman theater piece, and I started writing pieces with my friend Georgette Harper, who writes the 'Lesbomania' column for the Windy City Times, a longtime friend of mine and a wonderful writer. She got too busy, so I started writing them on my own, then I got too busy and Michael started writing a bunch of songs, and that's how 'Brown Leaves' got onto Angle of the Light and now there's a new one, 'Cloudships,' on the new one. I thought, this would really bring a shining light to the record because it was written by a child. It's not just that she was a child, but she was a child at the turn of the century and may have been schizophrenic. She saw the deep importance of nature, and the beauty of it. She kept animals in her pockets, and had names for all her pets. She was an amazing, intelligent, highly gifted child."

Smith and Hills are currently working on an entire CD of Whitley's material, as well as putting together a duet recording of their own songs. As if all her musical careers, her writing, and her family weren't enough challenges, Hills has recently become a non-traditional student as well. "I'm going back to get my undergrad degree in psychology and my master's in social work."

Hills takes these challenges in stride. "It's like juggling. If you choose to make a living in the arts, artists in this society are very marginalized. The waiter who is serving you your food might have a tremendous voice or be a gifted poet, but he's gotta eat."

Musing on this topic brought Hills to yet another career possibility. In the unlikely event that her numerous creative activities dry up, "I can always wait tables. I'm a great waitress; I did it for years. And I loved waiting tables. It's not all that different than performing. People come in in a certain mood, and it's your job to kind of cajole them into having a good time, yet not be too in their face."