Genre: Country/Bluegrass/Southern Gospel, Folk/Acoustic/Americana, Pop/Rock
Members: Mandee Radford (vocals, guitar), Carrie Theobald (accordion, flutes, harmonica, vocals), Cristi Johnson (mandolin, percussion, vocals)
For fans of: Shawn Colvin, Allison Krauss, Susan Ashton, Nickel Creek, Dixie Chicks, Point of Grace
Label: Rocketown Records

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The best way to introduce you to our band, Alathea (pronounced uh-LAY-thee-uh), would be to invite you out to our cabin. To get here, you'd have to drive to the eastern edge of Tennessee, into the Cherokee National Forrest, and alongside Indian Creek. When you pull into our driveway, a fluffy, black mutt will greet you with a not-so-gruff bark and half a tail. His name is Thumper, and he's likely to wrap you around his little white paw-it seems to happen to the best of us.

Now, get comfortable. Pour yourself a cup of coffee, come on out to the porch, and we'll lead you down the road that brought us here.

Six years ago, Carrie Theobald, Mandee Radford and I (Cristi Johnson) were college students who started hanging out with each other because we were all hanging out with teenagers. We were volunteering with Young Life, a ministry focused on high school students who would probably never show up at church. Young Life is primarily a relational ministry-we spent hours a week at ball games and cafeteria lunches hoping to "earn the right to be heard." Eventually, a student would ask, "Why do you spend time with us?" To which we could answer with the life-changing story of Jesus.

We also attempted to answer that question through our weekly programs and our summer camps. The hope was to flesh out the love of the gospel in everything, especially in our relationships with each student.

During one winter break, we got in a car to go to a leadership retreat in Florida. We played the Shawn Colvin cover of "Every Little Thing He Does is Magic" about every 10 miles, driving the poor guy in the car with us crazy. The next day Mandee pulled out her guitar and played some songs she had written, and Carrie and I started singing along. It felt like magic to us. People would come in and out of the room saying, "You all should be a band." We thought it was a funny joke, but we spent every spare hour from then on serenading Mandee's guitar.

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