Chip and Jonna Woodburn have made music together since they met in August 1985 and married in November 1986. While playing in friends’ living rooms, backyards and at festival campfires, Jonna began writing and singing her own songs. Seven of these songs are featured on their new, first CD Glass Heart, produced by Texas music legend Tommy Alverson.

The CD is about kinship with the earth and with each other: a sultry, jazzy moment for a lost love; a smile that is a part of nature, that you can lose your troubles in; a scorned woman who rejects the plastic dime-store Jesus that tries to steal her soul; and about being forever changed.

Jonna has a sincere, intriguing, deep voice on songs which sometimes surprise us with unexpected or surreal twists: an old man turning into Mexico, a woman sharing love from her pocketbook, a poet with a glass heart.

The songs grew out of Jonna’s experiences during the past eight years or so.

She wrote "Glass Heart" about a friend in Tennessee who had split up with his wife.

"It just poured itself out on paper. I had to go back and read what my hand had written, so to speak, because it was just an emotional heartache for him," she said. "I knew how much he had loved her by listening to him in Meridian the first year we went, because even though she wasn't there with him at the time, he talked for four days about how much he loved her."

She wrote "Pocketbook" when a line, "she showed me love in her pocketbook," stuck in her head.

"I fleshed out the rest of the song with an incident in Red Bird Mall parking lot, where a little old lady came up behind me and startled me, because we were the only ones around. She never showed me pictures like the song indicates, but I used that to express the stories she started telling me about her life. With the warmth and love in her conversation, she humbled me from my first impression that she was a little ‘off.’"

"Old Man Mexico" was the first song Jonna intentionally set out to "craft," to express her feelings for the people and the country.

"I got out a map to study the points from one end of the country to the other, seeing what parts of the man’s body would touch what, were a man to actually turn into the country itself. His feet would have been touching the ocean, his hair would have been in the Gulf of Mexico, his hands touching Sonora and Villa Hermosa. I partially drew on my own personal experiences and also from having read books by Carlos Castenada back in the ’70s."

Music provides emotional and spiritual expression and gratification for the Woodburns.

"I’d started writing more and more to have something new to sing at picking parties and festivals that we were going to every year," Jonna said. "At the time, I couldn't imagine that anyone was ever going to take me serious enough to ever make a record, but I enjoyed the responses we kept getting.

"I knew something serious was happening when people would come up and talk to me in tears after hearing ‘Pocketbook’ and ‘Glass Heart,’ and I wanted to leave my daughter with something she could remember me by and be proud of.

"When we had two offers in the same night to produce a CD, then it was time to take a breath and do it. And we did it then because we were both between jobs, and had time available for the studio."

Jonna was born in Bay City, Texas, and began singing publicly in a Mansfield, Texas, church, Living Word, where she led the music ministry for five years in the late 1980s and early 1990s before leaving the church. During that time she wrote several celebratory praise and contemplative worship songs that are still popular in the church today.

Her influences are "every song I ever heard."

"I can't say just folks like Guy Clark or The Beatles or anyone specific, because I grew up with everything from the classics – my mother had a degree in music – to show show tunes – my stepmom taught dance – and everything in-between," she said. "I don't intentionally fashion any of my songs after just one influence, and not being formally trained, they pretty much lead me rather than the other way around."

Chip began playing guitar in the sixth grade in Farmville, Virginia, playing songs by the Rolling Stones, the Kingsmen, the Swinging Medallions "and any other three-chord songs I could figure out."

Fifteen years later, he made his way to Dallas and began playing in local country cover bands, ending up playing guitar in The Boot Hill Gang, which was the house band at the Sons of Hermann Hall in the early ’80s.

The Woodburns have played several Texas locations, and have been featured several times on KNON radio and several songs from Glass Heart are receiving airplay in Dallas and on KPFT in Houston. They are also being heard on England’s Ragamuffin Radio, broadcast across the Internet and on a local radio station in Serbia, Yugoslavia.

The Woodburns wrote seven of the 10 songs. They covered two by Jim Bush and one by Melissa Etheridge.

Chip added acoustic guitar. Producer Tommy Alverson added acoustic, gut string, and electric guitar. Other musicians were Jeff Plankenhorn (dobro), Larry Bolz (bass), Jim Richmond (fiddle and mandolin), Curtis Tilton (bass), and David Byboth (acoustic guitar).