Environmental activist, educator, poet, playwright, and musician, Lainie Marsh grew up in West Virginia, studied music at Boston's Berklee College and subsequently plied the singing and songwriting trades in Los Angeles before settling in Nashville. Her influences include Jean Ritchie, Astrud Gilberto, Sarah Vaughn, Edith Piaf, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Robbie Robertson, and Tom Waits. She has performed on The Mountain Stage and as a featured artist at Tin Pan South, the Cinema Verde Environmental Film Festival, Boston Greenfest, and at Women’s Work, an annual festival of the Tennessee Women’s Theater Project. Her songs have been recorded by Emmylou Harris and Cerys Matthews, as well as featured on National Public Radio. On recordings such as The Hills Will Cradle Thee, Lainie's writing surpasses hackneyed narratives of the coal mining experience to achieve a unique chronicle of one mountaineer's odyssey through what lies yonder. In recent years, Lainie has lent her maverick vocal style to environmental advocacy, writing songs that protest Mountaintop Removal Mining in her native Appalachia, as well as Kinder-Morgan's pipeline plans for the rural Tennessee countryside where she currently resides. Additionally, Lainie is the creator of Green Kabaret, an educational cabaret dedicated to environmental advocacy, which she presents with her students at Tennessee State University, in community forums, and as a one-woman show in café venues. Green Kabaret fuses music, storytelling, and theater to advocate for positive change regarding various environmental concerns.
The presentation of Jalopy: An Unsustainable Relationship at the Nashville Sideshow Fringe Festival marked another foray into green theater for this diverse and always surprising creator. Her first was a decade ago at The Southern Festival of Books where she presented, with a stellar cast of Nashville musical artists, Meanest County: An Appalachian Folk Opera. All of Lainie’s dramatic works address the necessity for mountaineers---and people everywhere---to move beyond the crushing past of coal into a future of renewable alternatives.
Coming up in 2026 is the publication of her climate-fiction/fantasy space opera titled The Glacial Pace, an only slightly futuristic saga about saving the Earth from the ravages of climate change. Integrated in this work are scenes from the ballad operas "Mermaid Asylum" and "Black Ophelia," both of which debuted at the Tennessee Women's Theater Project in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
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