Carlene Thissen Singer from Naples, FL

Carlene Thissen is a singer, songwriter and author in Naples, Florida. She learned piano as a child and then her cousin Patsy and her musician father, Carl, taught her guitar. She performed as a young folk singer in Sussex County, New Jersey, doing songs by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell and Melanie. The best three days of her life were at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in 1969 and she presents a multi-media program today about that experience. In the first 30 years of her adult life she was a successful businesswoman where she was well known for speeches, articles and books regarding marketing technology. As she explains in her autobiographical song, Back There Again, this Woodstock hippie girl, “…cut her hair and got a career, and lost herself for 30 odd years.” Carlene says a series of God-driven events led her back to her true self through the agricultural community of Immokalee, Florida, where she volunteered as a music teacher for pre-school children and sang in the choir at Our Lady of Guadalupe church. Her love of the farm workers inspired two books: Immokalee's Fields of Hope and Called From Silence: The Father Sanders Novel. Today she dedicates herself to performing, speaking and songwriting, singing and playing piano and guitar at parties, house concerts, clubs, restaurants, festivals and charity events. She also serves the community as Coordinator of a Farm Labor Supervisor Training program at the University of Florida's Research & Education Center in Immokalee. She graduated with a B.A. in Business Administration from the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1982, and with an M.A. in Latin American History from Florida International University in Miami in 2005. Carlene is a member of Nashville's Global Songwriter's Connection, Women of Substance' Female Musician Academy and the Americana Community Member Association. She visits Nashville several times a year to network, perform and write.