Kate Woods

Kate Woods started playing violin when she was 10 years old, in 1967, and soon received a six-year scholarship for weekly private classical lessons through the generosity of Elizabeth Morhman of Monte Sereno, Calif., a professional symphonic violinist who considered Kate her best student. During the lower grades, Kate played in school string orchestras and performed solo for her teacher’s twice-annual recitals. She also was a key player in many high school musicals.

When she was 15, Kate’s family ran a boarding house in an old Victorian on Vine Street in downtown San José. In 1974 she was accepted into the San Jose Youth Symphony and toured with the group throughout Taiwan during that summer. When she returned, two Anglo residents of the area, Jon Clark (guitarrón) and John Rialson (trumpet), approached her to join in their endeavors to study Mariachi music. She was recruited into the half-Anglo/half-Mexican mariachi called Mariachi Atzlán.

While attending San José State University, Kate performed with the SJSU Symphony, but she was increasingly becoming “hooked” into the fascinating world of Mexican folkloric music.

On vacation in 1977 to Puerto Vallarta, Woods discovered a 12-piece first-rate mariachi called Los Pepitas, which performed nightly in the Las Margaritas restaurant. What intrigued her were the group’s faithful renditions of the arrangements of Mariachi Nuevo Tecatitlán of Guadalajara. She introduced herself, showed them her Atzlán business card from San José and convinced the skeptical musicians to give her a try-out. She got the job and performed with the group for the rest of the summer. The only problem was, Kate did not have a working visa – she was essentially a “wetback” getting paid under the table. But the experience and skills the group imparted to her were invaluable.

Back in San José she worked nights with Mariachi Atzlán, later called Nuevo Atzlán, while completing her degree in Liberal Arts. She became the lead musician for all regional dance genres performed by the legendary Los Lupeños Ballet Folklórico, created by Stanford Professor Dr. Susan Cashion and Ramon Morones. Woods was responsible for leading the musical sections of Norteño (polka), Huasteca, Sinaloa, Veracruzano, Jalisco, and a special historic section called “Los Moros.” From 1977 through 1979, Kate toured with Mariachi Atzlán and Los Lupeños every spring to the exhilarating Carnival (Mardi Gras) in Veracruz, Mexico, where she performed on stages, at the Queen’s Ball and atop many parade floats for six hours at a time, awash in a blizzard of festive confetti to an audience awestruck upon seeing an American mariachi female violinist for the first time.

Kate was asked by the innovative directors of Los Lupeños to create music never before written for the long-neglected region of Nayarit, which used simple musical structures without trumpets during the pre-Spanish era. A few last remaining elderly musicians of their village were, literally, the last living vestiges of this musical knowledge, and they had played three songs she transcribed from a tape recording captured in a cave in the Estado de Nayarit. The music, she realized, had to be saved for posterity. Kate’s work in re-recording and writing the score to preserve this nearly lost art form went on to become learned and copied by many mariachis throughout the state and then worldwide, including top mariachis in Guadalajara and Mexico City. In 1980, Kate was featured as the lead musician presenting these varied folkloric genuses in a tour with her mariachi and the Los Lupeños, which had recreated the exciting dance movements for the Nayarit block, throughout the American Southwest, in Los Angeles, and then on to Guadalajara and Mexico City where the theatrical/musical performance was well received.

For the next 11 years, Kate went on to perform with many different mariachi bands throughout the greater Bay Area -- in San Francisco, San José, Oakland and Santa Cruz. At times she was performing with three different bands – Mariachi Azteca, Mariachi Los Caltecas and Mariachi Los Monarcos -- during the same period, often traveling between three Bay Area cities in one night. She became known as the first Anglo female mariachi to earn a steady living by playing six days a week, not just at various “plantas” (regular restaurant and supper club gigs), “chambas” (contracted special events), but also, she was particularly renown for weathering the weekday and weekend “al talón” circuit in many shadowy, hard-core but popular Mexican nightclubs.

“Al talón” duties required Kate to perform with her mariachi compañeros for clients who paid by the song, in addition to performing live hour-long radio shows on stage in which she sang various solo ballads on occasion. By now she was proficient is Spanish, and at one point started forgetting simple words in English.

In October of 1991, Kate’s mariachi career came to an abrupt end due to a near-fatal accident that rendered her left arm useless. In an instant, she was faced with an end to a life she loved and cherished. But she was grateful to be alive and indebted to the surgeons who opted not to amputate her arm. She rebounded within a few years and ventured on a new journey, falling back on her college studies as a writer.

She became the senior staff writer/reporter as well as a political satire columnist in her nine-year tenure at the Pinnacle newspaper based in Hollister, Calif. She has won seven awards from the California Newspaper Publishing Association – the “Academy Awards” of the journalism world -- in the categories of Public Service, Environmental Reporting, Investigative Reporting, and Best Commentary.

Woods is currently living on the outskirts of a remote, abandoned mercury-mining ghost town known as New Idria, Calif., in San Benito County, where she is striving to complete a novel tentatively titled “Quicksilver Chronicles.”