MARRIED TO THE MUSIC; JEANETTE AND BRIAN DRISCOL HAVE BEEN MAKING MUSIC TOGETHER FOR 25 YEARS

In their nearly 25 years together, Jeanette and Brian Driscoll have traveled the land playing country and folk music at festivals, theaters, bars, hoedowns and wherever else listeners gathered 'round.

They like the same kinds of music, old buildings and furniture, coffee and cigarettes. She sings alto, he sings baritone and plays guitar, mandolin and fiddle.

It's a marriage almost made in heaven.

"Brian and I have had some of our most heated arguments over what harmony note is right," says Jeanette.

The Driscolls will be joined by guitarist Kelley Sims when they perform at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at "Wailing in the Woods," a benefit for Southeast Hospice to be held from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday at Black Forest Villages. (See related story.)

The Driscolls moved to Cape Girardeau in 1990 after many years of musical vagabondage.

They met in Wichita, Kan., in 1974. Brian was a 17-year-old high school dropout from upstate New York who'd been playing guitar in his room most afternoons after school since he was 10. He was exposed to country music by Jerry Garcia and John Hartford. "I'd never heard a pedal steel until `Sweet Baby James," he said.

Jeanette, a one-time voice major at Kansas State, had taken a trip to Boston and for the first time saw a band with a female lead vocalist. When she and her brother decided to form a band, they heard about a young guitarist named Brian Driscoll.

Here was someone who would enter the National Flatpicking Championship in Winfield, Kan., and play without accompaniment.

The members and names of the band changed over a few years before an acoustic unit called Southwind emerged. With an odd lineup of three instrumentalists and two female vocalists, Southwind won a contest sponsored by Wichita's biggest country station even though they only knew three songs at the time.

Southwind also won the Telluride Bluegrass Contest, finished third in the Kentucky Fried Chicken Bluegrass Festival in Louisville and played all over Kansas on a grant from the Kansas Arts Council.

The band recorded an album and warmed up for the likes of Emmylou Harris, Ricky Skaggs, Jethro Burns of Homer and Jethro fame, and Bill Monroe. They played Austin.

Then one of the singers left, and a year later Southwind drifted apart.

The Driscolls took off for upstate New York, where they played in bands with musicians who went on to the Tractors and K.T. Oslin's band.

They also did their time in Nashville, performing regularly at the famed Bluebird Cafe and writing songs. But the business of trying to sell yourself in Nashville was not for them.

After a stay in Arkansas, they moved to Cape Girardeau so Brian could pursue a degree in the Historic Preservation Program at Southeast Missouri State University.

"I was trying to find something I could feel as strongly about as I did music," Brian said.

But while he studied and Jeanette took a job as a clinical casework assistant at the Veterans Home, they also played music.

"We've never lived anywhere we didn't do music," Jeanette said.

For five years they were part of the house band at the Little Ole Opry near Jackson.

And in 1993 they appeared in Dr. Sharon Bebout's "Walking On Our Knees," a University Theatre play about the lives of coal miners. The Driscolls were onstage providing the haunting music between scene changes.

Brian wrote a song for the play called "One Day's Pay."

Saturday their set will include blues, an Irish song, some bluegrass, a Dylan tune and a jazzy novelty number called "Chicken."

Brian graduated with a degree in historic preservation and is a member of the Cape Girardeau Historic Preservation Commission. He recently started his own company, Preservation Services, which specializes in remodeling historic buildings and houses.

Starting a business is a big change from those years when they wandered wherever the next gig took them.

"We had a great time and went to all kinds of places," Jeanette says. "I wouldn't trade it."