More Power to Your Knitting Nell!

New York-trained and based Canadian soprano Melanie Gall hates knitting, but knitting (which totally doesn't hate her) has lured her into its meshes, as knitting tends to do. Gall's sister Deborah is an avid knitter, and in 2009 the two sisters launched a podcast called The Savvy Girls, in which they "take a playful and thoughtful look at knitting, travel, and life". Members of their audience began to write to Melanie and Deborah in order to tell them about knitting songs dating from World Wars I and II. Melanie Gall began to get interested in this subgenre of music and to collect old knitting songs. Once she had over a hundred wartime knitting songs, she decided to use them to write a show. And so the one-woman show, More Power to Your Knitting Nell!, came into being. More Power to Your Knitting Nell! is the story of Sadie Goldstein, an aspiring singer who gets a singing gig playing "Knitting Nell" on a radio show intended to promote knitting for the war effort during World War II. It would be a dream opportunity except for the unfortunate fact that Sadie hates knitting.






More Power to Your Knitting Nell! was performed, among other venues, at Fringe Festivals in a number of locations including Orlando, Edmonton, London, and Winnipeg, in a knitting store in Calgary, and at the National Museum of Military History in Luxembourg where the Battle of the Bulge was fought. If you were weren't able to take in any of these performances, the video above offers a quick preview of Gall playing Sadie Goldstein playing Knitting Nell.






Gall has also uploaded a video of her show performance of "I Wonder Who's Knitting for Me Now".






And here is a video of Gall's performance of "Soldier, Soldier Dear Unknown".

In 2012, Gall also recorded and released an album called Knitting All the Day, which contains the knitting songs she used in the show. You can listen to samples of each song and purchase the CD itself at CDBaby.