By Chuck Frederick, Duluth News Tribune

(Editor’s Note:  This article was published in the Duluth News Tribune on Saturday, July 28, 2007.)

Julie Vogt’s debut CD isn’t unique because of the wonderful music on it, nor is the gospel record unusual because it took her 14 years to record—one year for every song. The sweet-sounding, piano-and-vocals work of art is, however, more than a little special because Vogt produced it almost entirely with the help of blind people.

Blind people like her.

“I am so pleased with the final outcome,” said Vogt, who’s hosting a CD release party at 5 p.m. today in Pennell Park Commons on Arlington Avenue in Duluth Heights, where she lives. The party will move to Carmody Irish Pub on East Superior Street at 8 p.m.

 “It took so long to get done.  It felt like a big weight was lifted because it was something I had endeavored to do for so long,” she said.  “It’s been a journey.  Each song is like part of a journey.  That’s why I titled it “As God Leads.”  He promises he will lead his people who are spiritually blind.  I like to apply that to those of us who are physically blind as well.”

Vogt’s life, likewise, has been quite a journey.

She was born prematurely in June 1945, one of three girls raised in St. Paul on a car mechanic’s salary.  Tiny, she was placed as a newborn in an incubator where, perhaps, there was too much oxygen.  That can lead to blindness, though Vogt will never know for certain why her eyes didn’t fully develop.

At 3, she discovered music.  More specifically, she discovered the piano owned by the family who lived above her family’s basement apartment. “I just started tinkering on it and making songs out of what I heard on the radio,” she said.  But perhaps she tinkered too much.  Her neighbor eventually rigged the piano so the keys wouldn’t make noise.

At 6, Vogt was sent by her parents to the Minnesota State Academy for the Blind in Faribault, Minn.  The school then was known as the Minnesota Braille and Sight-Saving School, although Vogt always wondered, jokingly, “how much sight it really saved.”  The school was good for her, she said. She came home summers and vacations and every other weekend.

When she turned 21, Vogt decided to pursue music.  She enrolled at the MacPhail College of Music in Minneapolis.  After a year, the college merged with the University of Minnesota, and she experienced her “first taste of discrimination,” she said.  “The University of Minnesota did not want blind people studying music in their school.  They didn’t want us to be teachers.”

At 22, Vogt married and moved to Iowa.  But like her stint at the university, wedded bliss didn’t last long.  After only two years, with her husband focused too much on alcohol and other women, she divorced.  “I kicked him out,” she said.

Seven years later, in 1975, at her family’s urging, Vogt returned to Minnesota and became active with the National Federation of the Blind.  She also began playing piano, singing and performing at churches and elsewhere around the Twin Cities.  “I launched my music ministry,” she said.

She wrote her own music, too, and performed her own compositions.  In 1981, she recorded two of her songs on a 45 rpm single called “Smile, God Loves You.”   The flip side was “That’s Worth Everything.”

In 1993, as she learned how to use a computer to save the music from her keyboard, Vogt decided to record more of her songs onto a compact disc.  She paid a producer in Iowa to mix her work and produce a record. Six long years later, he delivered—with a mix so bad “I was sick to my stomach listening to it,” Vogt said. “I never thought I’d have the money to get it fixed.”

For 14 years, she saved as she moved from the Twin Cities to the Twin Ports.  Earlier this year she started working with a friend, a blind man at Affordable Studio Services of Cape Girardeau, Mo.  E-mailing songs back and forth, she and Chris Belle “rescued” her record.

It’s a wonderful CD.  I listen to it daily,” said Elaine Dickerson, who met Vogt seven years ago when Vogt performed at Dickerson’s St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church in Duluth.  “Julie’s a very, very Christian woman.  She has a beautiful heart and she’s one of the finest musicians I know. She’s a very caring, loving person and a musical talent.”

Vogt also has performed in Duluth at Carmody Irish Pub, for her neighbors on Sunday afternoons at Pennell Park Commons and elsewhere.  She’s saving her tips, she said, to buy a keyboard with a built-in recording studio.  Her hard-to-keep-tuned, 100-year-old piano won’t last much longer.

But Vogt’s music will.  Now that it’s recorded for posterity.

(Chuck Frederick is the News Tribune’s deputy editorial page editor.  He can be reached at 218-723-5316 or cfrederick@duluthnews.  “As God Leads,” a debut CD by Julie Vogt, is available from Vogt at 218-727-9093 or jcvogt@pressenter.com.)