“Our fans are our friends,” Pam Linton said, drawing up a chair in front of the free stage at the Sherburne County Fair last Sunday morning. She and husband Sherwin Linton had just finished the first of three shows planned for the day, opening with a Gospel show featuring standards like “The Church in the Wild Wood” and “The Old Rugged Cross”, which had the audience singing along like Sunday meeting.
She has been performing with Linton since before they married in 1988, when she and younger sister Patti (now known as Brittany Allyn) began singing with his show after he heard of their singing talents when he performed near their St. Stephen, MN hometown in the early 1970’s. Their parents used to drive them to appearances in the five-state area in those early days, which later led to performances in Nashville, Las Vegas and throughout the mid-west.
While she enjoys performing, often startling newbie audiences who learn that the petite star can belt it with the best of them, as well as carrying soft, melodic ballads. And while she enjoys performing, she is still a “homebody” at heart, as her biography notes, a “super star with the qualities of the girl next door.” That has led to her successful 34-year partnership with her husband, and opportunities to create her own personal image with albums like “In a Nineteenth Century Lifetime.” Her renditions of “Silver and Gold” and “River of No Return” put her on the charts internationally and in the U.S.A.
She was inducted into the National Traditional County Music hall of Fame in 2002, and released her first solo CD “Looking Back” in 2004.
While the band has bookings through Jan. 10 in the Midwest and well into March of next year in Texas, the Lintons are most excited about a documentary project due to air in October on Pioneer Public Television titled “Sherwin Linton: Forever on the Stage.” Every time producer Tim Bakken and his crew visited their Twin Cities home, she said, another item of memorabilia would surface from some attic room or old dusty trunk that she had not even known was there. “He saves everything,” was her comment.
A special showing of the documentary is will take place at the Heights Theatre in Columbia Heights, MN Sun., Oct. 12, and Oct. 10 and 11, Linton will be performing a special “Two Hour Tribute to Johnny Cash” at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, she said.
Showing that down home side at the end of the interview, Linton noted that she has also compiled a cookbook, which she titled “I’m Cookin”, creates jewelry in her off hours, and is proud of her younger sister Brittany, who has opened touring shows for Lorrie Morgan and Toby Keith and, most especially, was very close to the late country superstar George Jones, who she sang with for several years.
