Casse Culver

Casse was an influential singer-songwriter. She was born in Bethesda, MD (March 07, 1944 and passed in Milton, DE (December 04, 2019) She is survived by her spouse, Boden Sandstrom. Casse founded her own publishing and production companies (Sweet Alliance Music and Athena Productions). She started out in the early 1970s as a solo street busker, writing her songs from the perspective of a rebel and what she called “a hippie lesbian.” She toured solo as well as with the Belle Starr Band. She gigged with many well-known early women’s music artists, including Helen Hooke, Pam Brandt, and Susan Abod. She played several women’s music festivals as well as clubs in Greenwich Village and beyond.

At the 1969 Woodstock music festival, she made contacts that led to her first record contract (1972), a mainstream album which was unfortunately never released. After moving to Washington, DC, Casse became friends with many of the most politically active radical feminist lesbians in town – The Furies collective. In looking back on those years, she recalled how the earliest National Women’s Music Festivals (in Champaign, Illinois, mid 1970s) were a hotbed of networking and empowerment for out lesbian musicians, and how important the whole women’s music scene became for artists to be authentic rather than packaged.

Casse had many talents and her curiosity was boundless. She was one of the original organic gardeners when she lived in Woodstock in the early ‘70s. After she stopped performing, she started a landscaping company called Good News Gardening; she did this for quite a few years in the ‘80s. She worked for Jubilee in the DC area as a house manager at residences for developmentally disabled women; this was the job from which she retired. She taught herself how to renovate houses, including the one she lived in with her Boden in Takoma Park, and the one they eventually moved into in Milton. In recent years, she was pursuing her creativity through painting and photography, and was a member of the Milton Art Guild. She continued to write songs and poetry.

Casse met Boden in 1974. They started the company Woman Sound together in 1975, and worked on Casse’s Three Gypsies album (Urana Records, 1976). They married in 2013. The documentary Radical Harmonies (Woman Vision, 2002) features interview footage, and more about Casse can be found at the Queer Music Heritage site (https://www.queermusicheritage.com/nov2004.html).