Marmalade

Marmalade began in 2000 with a bunch of ladies invited by Alissa Plant to a tiny living room shaking regularly near the train tracks in Hummelstown, PA. We soon settled into a group of 6, and sang our first show, a private Christmas party, about 4 months later. We discovered some interesting nuggets of wisdom along the way, like “always preface the word jeans with blue if you don’t want anyone showing up to a gig in purple jeans,” and “all systems sung in F tend toward flatness.” Our arranging heroes are Kirby Shaw and J. David Moore, and we do some of our own arranging these days, which is a fun adventure.

For the past several years, we’ve been singing pop, jazz, holiday, women’s, folk, Broadway, and category-defying music throughout the central PA area at coffee shops, private events, art series, and basically wherever people will have us. When someone asks if we’ve settled on a style of music yet, we say, well, no. We love it all! The only rule is – all a cappella all the time.

We’ve been on hiatus lately due to babies, statistics and other events out of our Marma-jurisdiction, but Marmalade is up and running now, and we’d love to sing at your banquet, party or other event. Contact us any time at etownacappella@gmail.com or 717-367-8030.

To answer a question we hear fairly often, Marmalade is such a fun name, how did you choose it? We paged through a cookbook and said stuff out loud until one stuck. Really, that’s the whole story.

So what’s coming up next for Marmalade? Well, we’re working on our new Marma-sound, since we’ve got two new Marmaladies. As that develops, we’re hoping to purchase a sound system, allowing us even greater flexibility in venues, and we’re looking forward to working on a CD of Marma-favorites. We’ll keep you posted.

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About the Marmaladies:

Alissa Plant is the founder of the group. She has her degree in elementary education with a minor in music from a local PA liberal arts college. She loves all things orange. She works for a living, more or less, but would rather be doing, well everything else. Everything else includes conducting the Cumberland Singers, making and selling polymer clay jewelry/art/housewares/gifts, serving as vice president of an online polymer clay guild, and teaching private lessons in piano and voice. She loves chamber music, October, Dar Williams, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and watching TV series on DVD in the middle of the night.

Stay tuned. The rest of the bios are on their way…

Kim Hollich

Donna Bowers (aka Xena)

Robin Plant (aka Bird)

Ana Slotterback