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Singer is here to stay
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| BY DEBORAH SHEPHERD | Wednesday, November 27, 2002 |
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 Times-Democrat Staff Photo/Mark F. Sypher SOULFUL: When Donna Salter sings about love on her new CD, it's from the heart -- she believes the love of family, friends and God helped her beat breast cancer. |
Donna Salter's got a voice that glides across her new CD, "Love is Here," like satin across your shoulders.
Her material is the classy, jazzy stuff: Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers. She can sound as wholesome as your kid sister, yet ask for "The Nearness of You" with a seductive, beguiling air. Her signature tune, "Love is Here to Stay," is what she calls her "comfort song" -- an old friend with which her audiences at Herndon's Ice House Café are no doubt familiar. Salter, married and a mother of two, went to Nashville to record the CD. She flew on a wing and a lot of prayers -- hers, her family's, and those of folks at Unity of Fairfax Church who raised money to make this dream come true. |
Perhaps the best way to listen to the 12 tracks of "Love is Here" is through headphones. That way Salter's intimate, even teasing way with a melody cozies up to your ear and makes you believe she's singing just for you.
And she is -- but during that exhausting, exhilarating recording session in a Nashville studio, she was also singing for her husband Tom and her kids Cassandra and Nick; for her ministers, Terry and Donna Dearmore and perhaps most of all for her late brother Paul, who bought her that first microphone.
The rhythms of life
The tracks were laid down in the studio this past May. The ensemble of top-notch musicians who backed her include Terry Dearmore, who had a career in Nashville before entering the ministry. He and his wife Donna were, if you will, instrumental in bringing Salter to the studio.
She first met the couple in 1988, while she was living in Hawaii. A single mother with two children, she was making her living as a singer when she attended the Unity Church and heard Terry Dearmore play and sing "Surely the Presence" during the meditation. She went up and asked if she could sing with them, and did so for a couple of years, until she married Tom Salter, a government worker and moved to Northern Virginia.
She lost touch with the Dearmores, but when the Unity Church of Fairfax, where she is involved in the musical program, needed a new minister, the Dearmores were chosen.
The two families grew very close. On New Year's Eve, 2001, Terry Dearmore told Salter, "This is the year you're going to make your CD." He contacted Jim Hoke, an arranger and producer, and figured out that it would cost about $8,000 for the studio, the musicians and Hoke's services.
Salter recalled, "Donna (Dearmore) said, 'Let's just ask 100 people for $80.' They announced it in church and a couple of people gave $1,000 each the first Sunday. We got it all from 67 donors."
A self-confessed perfectionist, Salter sweated over each track as they recorded. She felt both intimidated and challenged by the musicians she was working with.
"These guys were so professional and I was the weakest link," she said. "Then I thought, I've got to come up to their level. And I just prayed my way through the day."
All in all it was a memorable Mother's Day weekend, especially considering the fact that about a year ago, Salter wasn't sure she would live to see it.
The road to survival
Before wheeling her into surgery, Dr. Virginia Chiantella asked her patient, "Is there anything you want me to do?"
Salter looked up and said, "Yeah. I want you to take the cancer out of me."
Breast cancer. Not in the left breast, where the tenderness was, but in the right. First came the diagnosis, in March 2001, then the mammograms and then a lumpectomy.
What followed the surgery were four rounds of chemo, then seven and a half weeks of radiation five days a week and cold valleys of fear so deep and dark that, Salter said, "I used to move over in bed and ask Jesus to lie down next to me, I was so very scared."
She lost her hair -- she sang at the Ice House wearing a wig, and missed only one performance.
She was wracked with chemo-induced nausea. One night, utterly wrung out from the grinding sickness, she sat on the edge of her bed.
"I just felt like I was inside out, like I didn't even have a body. There was nothing left. And what was so interesting was, all I could feel was pure spirit, which was pure love. It was like my spirit and God's spirit ... all one.
"It was the most amazing experience of my life, to just not feel anything but God. And I felt like, wow, it was all worth it then, for that gift."
It was proof of what her good friend Donna Dearmore had told her after the diagnosis: "You might not see it now, but the truth is, there's a gift in this, and as your journey unfolds, you will see it."
More gifts appeared: Betty Ann Trible networked a group of women to bring the Salters a home-cooked dinner every week. When Trible won a trip to Paris, she asked Salter to go along. And Kathy Wolf, whom Salter had met while working with Fauquier Community Theatre, set up drivers to take her to treatments.
"I got to see how beautiful everyone else is, people showing the best side of themselves," Salter said.
She also felt that her late brother Paul was watching over her. On her way home from the needle biopsy, she saw a license plate on the car in front of her. It read "I'm with you" and she believes it was a message from him.
Watch what happens
In June, she joined the 5K breast cancer survivor's walk in Washington D.C. As spectators applauded, she thought, "Is this my life?"
When Salter turned the corner she saw her surgeon clapping. "I gave her a high-five and said, thank you for saving my life. She buckled over, crying ... that was a great moment in my life."
As her body recovers, Salter still struggles with exhaustion. Although the listener can't discern the difference, she calls some of the tracks on the CD "chemo tracks" because "I felt fried, like chemo fries you. Chemo changes how you feel about everything."
And yet, she said, "Something remarkable came out of those chemo tracks. They ended up being very interesting and I left a lot of that."
She hopes to get back into a recording studio soon, maybe to do a CD of spiritual songs, maybe one of Christmas music. More than ever before she feels the drive to use her musical gifts.
"I love the fact that I'm still here," Salter said. "I wake up and I say to God, 'What am I supposed to do today?' Give me the strength and courage to do that."
"Love is Here" is available through Salter's Web site, http://www.donnasalter.com, where there is also information about upcoming Ice House performances.
Deborah Shepherd may be reached at dshepherd@timespapers.com.
©Arcom Publishing Inc. - Fauquier Times-Democrat 2002
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