Radio win sweet for Honey duo

By Mary Alice Blackwell

Published: March 28, 2008

There’s a rising star in our midst.
It just took a little out-of-town recognition for us to take notice.
Oh, Laura Wortman and her fiance, Kagey Parrish, don’t have a CD — yet. (They are planning on heading into a studio in the next couple of weeks to lay down a few tracks.) But they do own a national title.
The two local musicians, better known as the Honey Dewdrops, were the No. 1 group on Garrison Keillor’s latest public radio contest, “Talented Twenty-Somethings.”
“Kagey and were listening to ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ a couple of months ago and they announced they were going to have a talent show,” Wortman said.
PHC usually seeks out talents from small towns with populations of less than 2,000. But this year and last, it opened the field to any young hopefuls, regardless of their hometown size.
“You could send in a MySpace page link or a CD, but we didn’t have a CD,” said Wortman, who is a special education teaching assistant at Scottsville Elementary School. Parrish is a special education teacher at Charlottesville High School.
They were in a pool of more than 1,000 entries to the contest.
“The last week in February, we were called and told that we were one of six acts invited to perform on the program.
“It was fantastic,” she said. “They flew us to Minnesota and put us up in a fancy hotel. We both have been listening to the show since we were kids, so it was really exciting.”
Their first taste of the competition came on March 14.
“We did a show Friday night before a live audience,” Wortman said. “It wasn’t broadcast. I think they just wanted to let us get our nervousness out.”
It also was the couple’s first chance to size up the competition.
“We didn’t know much about them, but we did some research [online],” she said. “But after Friday’s show we didn’t think we stood a chance.”
One of the finalists, Ashley Monroe, had written songs for Carrie Underwood. Another had performed with Brooks and Dunn.
“We were completely blown away,” Wortman said.
But the Charlottesville duo blew the audience away the following night with their renditions of two songs by Johnny Cash and Dwight Yoakam as Keillor watched in the wings.
“The audience in the theater voted on a ballot and they opened up the radio polls for a half-hour,” she said. “The votes got tallied and 30 seconds before they made the announcement, they told us that we were first.”
For their victory encore, the Honey Dewdrops played one of their original songs.
“When we got back to town we found out that 4.3 million people had listened on the radio,” Wortman said. “I’m glad I didn’t know that when I was at the microphone.”