Two women's music legends coming to The Ark April 20

Fans of women's music will get two shows for the price of one as icons of the genre Tret Fure and Ferron play a double headlining show April 20 at The Ark in Ann Arbor.
Both women are returning to the road after taking a break, and both have new albums. Ferron's "Turning Into Beautiful" and Tret Fure's "Anytime Anywhere" are both slated for release in May.
Songwriter, producer, engineer, vocalist, instrumentalist and Michigan native (she ran away from Marquette at age 19) Tret Fure released her first album in 1973 on MCA records. She soon left the world of major labels and has released three albums on her own Tomboy Girl Records.
Fure has also launched her own clothing line, which she named after her song, "Tomboy Girl." If you're ever in Madison, Wisconsin be sure to stop by her retail store that she runs with her partner Jane Weldon.
As if music and clothing weren't enough to keep a woman busy, Fure can cook, too. Her book, "Tret's Kitchen," features original Tret recipes.
It is, of course, music that Fure is most well known for, and she's been making it most of her life. "I started when I was 11," she told Dirty Linen Magazine in 2002. "My brother came home with a guitar, and he was gonna learn to play, and I just grabbed it from him and started picking out melodies, 'cause I was really good at that. I'd done that with piano when I was five. And then I played violin. But once I found the guitar, I just forgot everything but. There weren't songbooks in those days, so I learned by listening carefully to albums, just putting my ear up to the speaker. I learned to fingerpick listening to Judy Collins, the way she played."
Canadian singer/songwriter Ferron has also been making music and writing songs since childhood. Like Fure, Ferron left home at a young age, fleeing Vancouver, British Columbia at age 15. She has supported herself by driving a cab, waitressing, bartending, shoveling gravel, and working in a fish cannery. She released her first two albums in 1977 and 1978. Both are rare and out of print.
Ferron released "Shadows On A Dime" in 1984. The album, now considered a classic, cemented Ferron's dedicated fan following.
Ferron also had a run with the major labels that didn't pan out in the 1990s. The experience left Ferron disenchanted. "I was brokenhearted because it failed," Ferron told Canadian folk and roots music magazine Penguin Eggs late last year. "I felt very ashamed of falling for the lure. I was a fiercely independent person going out with a corporation. It's not a good idea. They wooed my independence. I fell for it."
Ferron now releases all of her records on her own Fair and Loving Music label, including her latest, "Turning into Beautiful," an album that has been hailed as intensely autobiographical and a return to her acoustic roots.
"I feel this responsibility to say something and have it be true for me," Ferron told the Seattle Weekly March 17, 2005. "The fit to me is finding that my work somehow resonates on a deep level with other people and they find that it is also true for them."
Ferron came out as a lesbian early in her career, urged by her mentor and manager Gayle Scott. "Gayle said to me … 'If you can't tell the truth when you have nothing to lose, what do you think is going to happen when you have everything to lose?' That just seemed totally right on," Ferron told Penguin Eggs magazine. "I haven't had anything to lose all along. I feel it was my job as a gay person to give people an opportunity to be better, to be greater than they thought they were."
The April 20 show at The Ark will showcase these two creatively vital artists who helped create a whole new genre, setting the stage for artists like Ani Difranco and Catie Curtis. To watch these two women perform live decades into their careers is to witness herstory in the making.