The Cast Iron Queens, an all-woman band, set to play at Greeley Blues Jam this year

 Emily Nelson, far right, of Greeley, is set to play with the Cast Iron Queens at the Greeley Blues Jam. Courtesy photo.

By Dan England

 Editor’s note: This story also appeared in Bandwagon Magazine

 Emily Nelson cleared out some space in her life. She had a feeling the universe had something in mind for her.

By that Fall of 2020, she’d already spent the last few years transforming her life, partly by her own choosing and partly, well, not so much.

She got a divorce and went to the University of Northern Colorado in 2013 to become an artist after years of running a chiropractor clinic in Greeley. She took a ceramics class because it was a requirement, and it clicked: Now she has three kilns out back, and her dining room table doubles as a display counter of sorts, and the money she makes from it contributes to a good chunk of her income.

Five years later, she had a double mastectomy, and while regaining the use of her body with the help of UNC’s cancer rehabilitation center, she went to her basement and began playing the drums again.

She’d played music since she was 10, starting with the piano and then teaching herself the drums in junior high school before playing them for Foursquare Community Church in Greeley for several years, but after the marriage, she’d stashed them in her basement, along with her music career, and ran the clinic while trying to make life work. The surgery seemed like a good time to play again: It would strengthen her soul as well as her body. She was in her mid-40s, and she needed music to bring her back to life.

“Music is life for me,” Nelson says today. “I need it to breathe.”

She says that as she prepares for the Greeley Blues Jam with the Cast Iron Queens, the all-woman band founded and fronted by Erica Brown, the Denver blues diva and Greeley favorite. She met Brown, in fact, after the blues crowd that runs the Jam put on another jam at the Moxi in downtown Greeley. Nelson was there because by then, the drums worked and she was back in Greeley’s music scene where, today, she knows she belonged. She’d played the Greeley Arts Picnic with Alison Hamling, and after that, she made some room in her calendar because of her feeling. She went up to Brown that night in October at the Moxi and asked, or, really, demanded to jam with her.

Nelson really just wanted a jam because she was a fan of Brown, but in the middle of the song, Brown had something else in mind.

“I didn’t know her from Adam’s housecat,” said Brown, who loves to pepper her vocabulary with phrases like that. “But I turned around and just stared at her as she was playing the drums.”

Nelson always thought of herself as a musician, but she never thought she was all that good. But that night changed that attitude. She had a thought as she played: “I’m gonna kick ass, and I can now.” When Brown asked for her contact info, Nelson not only gave it to her, she fought when Brown assumed Nelson wouldn’t want to drive to Denver to meet her demanding rehearsal schedule. Nelson knew, after that night, that this was what the universe had in mind.

“The drums were just an easy thing, a fun way to get healthy again,” Nelson said, “and a year later, Erica was there.”

Girl power

Nelson acknowledges that it probably wasn’t just her drumming that got Brown’s attention. One book in a stack by a lamp, ready to be soaked in, is entitled “The Wild Woman’s Way,” and her hair, a flurry of tight curls that reflect a little bit of adorable cuteness and a lot of unleashed fury, could be the cover. Her house smells like incense. Zen seems to leak through the roof.

“I have a feminine spirit,” Nelson said. “There’s an energy. People tell me that all the time. By me being who I am supposed to be and more authentic with myself, it oozes that.”

Feminine energy is probably what Brown wanted when she put together the Cast Iron Queens, but when she’s asked, she honestly doesn’t know. Brown tried an all-female band before, and it didn’t turn out well. Brown says only this about that breakup: “I’m not going to get into why it didn’t work out,” which says enough. Still, she was determined to give it another try, and this time, things are different.

Brown had not formed the band yet when she heard Nelson play, but it helped push her to get it together. The meeting seemed pre-ordained in a way: Brown talks about fate a lot when she talks about the band. Even the name feels that way. She heard the words “cast iron” and “queen” at a photo shoot and thought it would be a good band name. She trademarked it a few days later.

“I was 15 kinds of shocked when I heard no one had tried to copyright it,” Brown said. “But it’s mine now. That’s another thing that tells me what I’m doing is on the right track.”

The band has its own sound, although Brown said it’s fluid, as she doesn’t know where it will go. They have a few originals that they’ve written together and play some covers as well. There’s a bit of country and soul and, of course, there’s the blues. Everything Brown does is steeped in the blues, she said. She is in her 60s and already has a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Colorado Blues Society: The blues are going NOWHERE.

“I bring my blues sensibility to it,” Brown sad, “but we aren’t scared of anything.”

But the band’s shifting sound makes it as much fun as it is hard work.

“This may sound pretentious, but no one will work as hard as I do,” said Brown, who still works a full-time job. “But what I want is people who are willing to work as hard as I do. So we work like gangbusters.”

Everyone in the band plays more than one instrument, and they trade off in between songs. Brown, in fact, will play a snare and sing for the first time at the Blues Jam, which makes her nervous, and she just recently broke out her flute after putting it away 40 years ago. Her daughter, MJ, sings with her on many tracks. All this hard work sure feels like fun.

The band had to pause a bit, as we all did, because of COVID-19. The pandemic hit just three months after the band’s first gig at a sold-out show in Dazzle. But they had some opportunities for streaming, and Nelson said those may have benefited the band more than playing random gigs: They got some widespread, mainstream exposure as a result. They also wrote some material.

‘’We have a couple songs no one’s ever heard yet,” Brown said, “and they are GOOD.”

Feminine energy

Nelson felt a groove like she’d never felt before at that sold-out show in Dazzle. She describes it in a rated-R way, dropping several F-bombs because nothing else suffices to capture the raw, electric empowerment she felt.

So it was a bit of a bummer, at first, that COVID shut everything down, until the disease made her realize that the band was more than a way to express herself: It was a family. Nelson lost her mother to COVID.

“Just the way they were,” Nelson said. “They were so supportive. I’m so grateful to have Erica in my life. She is a mother figure to me.”

It’s stereotypical to suggest that the support came from the fact that they were all females, but like most stereotypes, there’s a hint of truth to that, Nelson said through tears as she talked about her mother.

“There’s something to that feminine energy,” she said. “It’s a beautiful combination. We are all so different, and Erica can be intimidating in the best way, but we are a band of just fierce females.”

Nelson felt a touch of imposter syndrome playing in a band of seasoned, incredible musicians, she said, but she’s learned to banish that gremlin. The cancer, or perhaps the universe, helped her.

“I would like to think I would have been able to jam with Erica that night anyway,” Nelson said. “But the cancer gave me a reason not to be paralyzed by perfectionism. I could just fucking get out there and do it.”

She internalized stress for many years, and it literally made her sick. Now she releases it through music. She calls it “life giving” and “feeding your soul” and “having a heart space,” but later, she hopes others call it inspiring.

“I feel like we all do that in different ways,” Nelson said of inspiration. “For me, it’s ‘Is it perfect? No.’ But is it possible. Yes. It’s never too late.”

About Blues Jam

When: Friday, June 4 through Saturday, June 5

Where: Friday: Varying locations downtown, Saturday: Island Grove Regional Park, 501 14th Ave. in Greeley

For more information on the event, including a full line-up and how to buy tickets, go to https://greeleybluesjam.org/.