Nevadan makes progress as country-folk musician

It has been awhile since Luke Mitchem walked the streets of Nevada and played Tigers' football and baseball, but the city is always in his thoughts and often in his music.

Learning to play guitar and mandolin after graduating from Nevada High School in 1997, Mitchem has released three albums of country-folk music and is organizing a summer tour.

His latest project, "Love, Laura and the Bomb," chronicles an unsuccessful relationship and it's easy to see, listening to the 14 songs he wrote, that love can sometimes be as shattering as it is euphoric. "Once the dust clears, you have to move on by capturing those moments in time and putting them into musical form," Mitchem said from his home in Vienna, Va.

"The Bomb" refers to the relationship's unpleasant end, he explained.

Mitchem played first base for the Fort Scott Community College Greyhounds and took a 2003 bachelor's degree in history education at Ottawa University.

He was an Army intelligence officer in South Korea and Germany before working as a teacher and doing research for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which he combines with music.

Having recorded in Littleton, Colo., he will perform May 25 at Jammin' Java in Vienna, May 31 at 12th and Porter Lounge in Nashville, June 1 at Cicero's in St. Louis and June 5 at the Walnut Room in Denver. "The farther you get away from home, the closer you are," Mitchem said.

"The musical lines are so blurred anymore that it's easy to move back and forth between genres," he said. "We use mandolins, guitars and fiddles for bluegrass, Americana and classical rock.

"The hardest thing as an independent musician is putting tours together, convincing a venue in a new city, 'Hey, you want me to come and play.' I find local artists in different cities. We have that camaraderie and lean on one another."

To save money, Mitchem sometimes stays with native Nevadan Marci Mitchell, who also is pursuing a musical career in Nashville.

His dad Ray, shop foreman at W.F. Norman sheet metal company, is pleased to hear himself immortalized in his son's song "Old Man on the Front Porch Swing."

The elder Mitchem says Luke got his talent from three late Nevada forebears -- great-uncle Fred Ellis, a multi-instrumentalist, great-aunt May Agee, a pianist, and grandmother Marye Adams, a Cottey College graduate who had studied piano and voice at the Juilliard School in New York City.

Luke's brothers are Tony and Dusty of Nevada and Zeke of Milledgeville, Ga. His mom is Connie Heathman of Kansas City.

"My Sweet Marye," a song about his grandmother, is on his first album, "It Won't Last Forever," which he was recording when she died on Oct. 24, 2008. "I think music is something Luke acquired a taste for when he was in the Army," his dad said.

"He was away from home and began listening to a lot of the type of music he plays now. Most of it is based on things that have happened to him or people he knows.

"Everybody is proud of him to be able to get up on stage and sing for people. The average person can't do that kind of thing."

Inspired by singers Ryan Adams, Joe Purdy and Ray Lamontagne, Mitchem applies his strong, evocative voice and deft musicianship to tales of Southwest Missouri and beyond like "Girl from the Mountains," "Walk with the Queen," "Strong, Strong Woman," "Time for Me to Fall," "Point My Compass Back," "An Angel's Anchor Awaits" and "A Fire Still Burns."

On "Weeping Willow Tree," he sings,

"It was an old-fashioned kind of love story,

Writing letters about running away.

We held shaky hands as we walked the brick streets,

Kissing under the movie screen.

I never wanted to let you go,

But I never let you know."