Casse Culver

Karen "Casse" Culver (March 7, 1944 – December 4, 2019) was an American folk singer and songwriter in the women's music genre.

Early life and education
Culver was born in Bethesda, Maryland, the daughter of Ronald H. Culver and Thyra Marjorie Ferguson Culver. Her father was an electrical engineer and her mother was a beautician. She attended St. Mary's College of Maryland. In the 1980s, she took a course of Bible study at the Way of Faith Christian Institute in Virginia. Her older brother Donald M. Culver was president of the Gay Restaurant Owners of Washington.

Career
Culver began singing and playing guitar as a busker in the late 1960s. She had a record contract in 1971, and recorded an unreleased album. Culver played her "very personal, folk-sounding music" at women's music festivals, and toured nationally in the 1970s. Susan Abod performed with Culver in concerts, and on Culver's album 3 Gypsies (1976). She and Boden Sandstrom began a sound company, Woman Sound, in 1975.

Beyond music, Culver was an organic gardener in Woodstock, New York, in the late 1960s, and ran a garden and landscaping service in the 1980s. She enjoyed doing home renovation projects, and was a house manager for a group home in Washington, D.C. In the 1980s, she taught at a church, Hear and Be Healed Ministries, and was known as "the Rev. Elder Casse Culver" by the early 1990s.

Publications and recordings

 * Casse Culver Songbook
 * 3 Gypsies (1976 LP)
 * "What We Gonna Do (About Anita)"/"Queen of the Night" (1978 single)
 * Songs and Other Dreams (1982 LP)
 * "Ride, Sally Ride!"/"Blame it on the Moon" (1982 single)
 * Casse Culver Live in Concert (1984 cassette, recorded in 1974)
 * "Perfect Child of God" (2018, poem)

Personal life
Culver married Boden Sandstrom in 2013, but they were together "on and off" from the mid-1970s. Culver died from lung cancer in 2019, at the age of 75, in Milton, Delaware. There is a large collection of her papers in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History at Smith College. There is a recording of Casse Culver and Willie Tyson performing in 1976 on WBAI in New York, in the Pacifica Radio Archives.