Winsome Philadelphia-based pop-folk songwriter Carsie Blanton, who takes her musical cues from Nina Simone and Cleo Brown as much as Joni Mitchell or John Prine, already had an unusual amount of living under her belt by the time she released her first album while still a teenager. Born in 1985, the home-schooled daughter of songwriting latter-day hippie parents grew up on a former cattle farm in rural Luray, VA, "running amok" and soaking up the classics of jazz, blues, folk, and R&B. She filtered those sounds together to create the album Hush when she was all of 16, the same year she left home for the West Coast, settling in Eugene, OR. Ain't So Green, her first studio album, recorded back home in Virginia, followed several years later in 2005. After a brief stint in San Francisco, she found her way to Philadelphia in 2006, where veteran local folk figurehead Gene Shay took her under his wing, and she became a fixture on the area coffeehouse scene. Since then, she's shared stages with the likes of Amos Lee, Joan Armatrading, and Nellie McKay, and supported the Wood Brothers on a national tour. An aficionado of vintage styles -- both sartorial and musical -- who rarely performs without a flower adorning her curly brown hair, Blanton is also a teacher of swing and blues dancing. ~ K. Ross Hoffman