With her mural on the side of Home Hardware and her hand print near the bowling alley on Coutlee Avenue, Canada-born country singer Lisa Brokop has performed in Merritt many times over the last 20 years and next month she’ll be back, this time performing with her husband Paul Jefferson.
The Nashville-based couple that performs as The Jeffersons will sing for locals at the Crossroads Community Church on August 10.
“We just really want to have a nice family evening and play for the Merritt people,” said Brokop on the phone from her Nashville home. “I’ve played at music festivals there, but that’s not really the locals.”
Brokop, who hails from Surrey, has a special place in her heart for British Columbia and has passed though Merritt many times.
“I love that part of the country – my whole life we’ve been going up into the Interior to camp,” she said. “Merritt has always been the stopping point and it was great that it became this music town – it’s kind of like a home away from home.”
With a bug for performing that started when she was a three-year-old wailing out songs from her swing set and grew as she performed with her accordion-playing mother at various community events, Brokop knew from a young age that she wanted to go to Nashville.
When she got her first record deal and made the move down south, she said the transition seemed pretty natural. Still, she returned to Canada often and has done much of her touring north of the border.
Her tours took her to the Merritt Mountain Music Festival on more than one occasion and in July 1995 she first made her hand print, which was unveiled when she returned for a performance in May 2004.
Around the same time that she was making a name for herself in the world of country music, the California-born Paul Jefferson was doing the same.
The son of a guitar teacher, he grew up playing and singing and when a friend played him a Willie Nelson album he was hooked.
Though he graduated with a degree in bio-engineering and earned a commercial pilot’s life, he couldn’t get music out of his blood and made his way to Music Row where he snagged a record deal.
With successful solo careers neither would have anticipated singing as a duo one day, not even when Brokop’s friend (whose husband played in Jefferson’s band) played matchmaker and they met for coffee at Starbucks.
“I had talked to him on the phone and liked the sound of his voice,” she recalls. “We met as Starbucks and we wrote a song together.”
Though they got married, they were hesitant about combining business with their personal lives and shied away from singing together. Occasionally though, he would join her on the road and sing a song with her.
“I think it was at a winery in the Interior – he got up and sang a song with me and the response was just incredible,” he said. “We didn’t expect the chemistry, but it chased after us and we thought, ‘OK, let’s do it.'”
Now, four years after they started performing as The Jeffersons, Brokop says they are even better together than they were apart.
“We try to stay real and we share lead vocals,” she said, explaining that sometimes she sings lead and he sings harmony or vice versa. “We also have the odd duet that seems to work out.”
They released their debut album “The Jeffersons, Vol. 1” and they tour together performing at smaller venues like the Crossroads Church, which seats 300 and even smaller house concerts.
While smaller venues are partly the results of a tough economy, Brokop says these intimate settings allow musicians to really connect with the audience.
“We’re really excited to be up there,” she says of the Merritt show which will be on Aug. 10 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $12 each and kids 12 and under will get in for free. Tickets can be purchased at the church.
