By Vivian Lassiter
JAMESTOWN — There is a particular kind of star power that doesn’t need a spotlight. It shows up in a YWCA day camp in Jamestown, sitting with a circle of kids, or on the Amphitheater stage at Chautauqua Institution, talking about nursery rhymes like they are the most important thing in the world.
Natalie Merchant has that kind. The Jamestown native, founding voice of 10,000 Maniacs and the solo artist behind “Carousel,” “Wonder” and “Jealousy,” has spent 2026 out front again, this time for the youngest audience she has ever courted.
That makes her the third subject of Buffalo’s Finest, the Chronicle’s column about the striking, magnetic people of Western New York, doing what they do and looking great doing it.
A scrappy kid from the furniture capital
Merchant grew up in a working-class family in Jamestown, in the Chautauqua County city that also gave the world Lucille Ball. She has described herself, in a word, as “scrappy.”
“By the time that I was coming of age in the late ’70s, early ’80s, there was a severe recession going on in the country, and a rusting of the belt was beginning to happen,” she told Metroland in its September issue. “It was an industrial town when I was growing up, and then it became post-industrial. That made a big impression on me in my formative years.”
The band that made her famous started almost by accident. “It was very informal,” Merchant told The Post-Journal this summer. “There was a warehouse down in the downtown area called Broadhead Mills that some artists had taken over and were having parties there. There was a PA system and a kind of open mic night, and I just showed up and sang with them and we became a band.”
She was 17. The group signed to a major label when she was 19, and the rest is alternative-rock history: five top-ten Modern Rock hits with the Maniacs, including the No. 1 “These Are Days,” and then, after she went solo in 1993, a run of albums led by Tigerlily.
She remembers the early road years with a grin you can hear. “It was my first experience traveling,” she told The Post-Journal. “We met lots of great people, slept on a lot of floors, traveled in a converted school bus and we had a tent and would sometimes camp out.”
Miss Natalie and the Cabinet of Wonder
These days the project is Cabinet of Wonder, a free early-childhood enrichment program built with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Children’s Theatre and the National Head Start Association. Its 17-song album, which reimagines Mother Goose rhymes alongside three Merchant originals, came out Aug. 21 on Nonesuch Records, with videos, sheet music and teaching guides free at cabinetofwonder.org.
It grew out of three years she spent as artist-in-residence at a Head Start preschool in Troy, where she taught music and poetry to several hundred children while writing the songs and, as the New York State Writers Institute noted ahead of her Sept. 2 conversation at UAlbany, designing and sewing the costumes herself.
“I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m considering what I’ll leave behind,” Merchant said in the Nonesuch announcement. “I believe Cabinet of Wonder will be my legacy.”
She is clear about what separates it from screen-time filler. “This is about the souls of children,” she told Metroland. “There’s entertainment and then there’s enrichment. Enrichment is about cultivating a sense of awe and a respect for beauty, an aesthetic sense and sensibility.”
Coming home to Chautauqua County
In late July, Merchant brought the project home for a weeklong residency at Chautauqua Institution: two morning lectures in the Amphitheater, a free family concert with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, and visits to the Jamestown YWCA, the YMCA’s Camp Onyahsa and the Boys and Girls Club of Jamestown, all organizations she has supported since 1997.
“It’s really important to me,” she told Erie News Now. “I remember the influences that I had as a child at the Prendergast Library, listening to the very folksy library assistant who played the acoustic guitar and being a part of their literacy program; being surrounded and supported by very patient and kind adults. Those experiences were really formative and important to me, and so I just wanted to be that for these kids.”
Her own sense of style, she suggests, was born in the same place. She told The Post-Journal about Das Puppenspiel, a Westfield marionette troupe whose hand-sewn costumes enchanted her as a girl.
“I was a little kid and I remember it very well, and I’m sure it shaped part of my aesthetic,” Merchant said. It is, she added, the reason she wants to give children “music and movement and poetry and beautiful costumes and a land of make believe that is accessible to them and not created by a computer on a screen somewhere.”
“It’s been a fantastic opportunity for our kids to not only be in the midst of someone as incredible as Natalie Merchant, but to learn from her, to sing along with her, and to experience music,” said Amanda Gesing, executive director of the Jamestown YWCA, in the same Erie News Now report.
Why it works
On stage, Merchant’s look is entirely her own: long, flowing hair, a simple dark dress, no fuss, and a way of moving to the music that makes a theater feel like a living room. She has never seemed to be performing glamour. She just has presence, the kind that holds a room full of grown fans and, it turns out, a room full of 4-year-olds.
That is what makes her one of Buffalo’s Finest. Four decades after a teenager walked into a Jamestown warehouse and sang, she is still choosing beauty on purpose, sewing it, singing it and handing it to the next generation for free.
“Artists have that ability; we know how to draw people together with a common purpose, and that common purpose can just be love and joy,” she told Metroland. “There’s a lot of anger and desperation going on in the world right now, and the best way to counter that is with love and joy.”
Know someone who belongs in Buffalo’s Finest? Send nominations to editor@buffalochronicle.com.
Featured photo: Natalie Merchant performing in July 2017. Photo by Justin Higuchi via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped.
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