Granville Automatic

Granville Automatic is an alt country duo based in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 2009 as a songwriting partnership, the group is Vanessa Olivarez and Elizabeth Elkins. Writing story songs often about history and the Civil War is the main focus of the group, who spend more than 150 dates a year on the road. The band is unique in its approach to writing songs about historical sites often in need of preservation. Vanessa Olivarez has a songwriting history that includes several songs recorded by Sugarland, and she was the original singer for that band. Elizabeth Elkins is a Grand Prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest.
The touring band rotates members including fiddle/mandolin player Bethany Dick-Olds, drummer Derek Murphy, keys/guitar Jeremy Ezell and bass player David Spicher.
Recording
Granville Automatic utilized a number of notable studio musicians on their debut recordings, which took place in Nashville and Los Angeles throughout 2011. Nashville players included Mickey Raphael on harmonica, Al Perkins on pedal and lap steel, The Mavericks Paul Deakin on vibes and Robert Reynolds on bass, Garry Murray on banjo, Park Chisolm on guitar, Michael Webb on piano and accordion, and Derek Murphy and Wilco's Ken Coomer on drums, as well as members of their touring band. In Los Angeles, the band worked with producer Ted Russell Kamp and members of Shooter Jennings' and JJ Cale's bands. Mixing was handled by Ryan Freeland.
Discography
Known songs and subjects
*Carolina Amen (the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House)
*The Groundskeeper (Carnton Plantation, Tennessee, Battle of Franklin)
*Blood and Gold (mustangs, based on the book "Mustang" by Deanne Stillman)
*Fairfax Harrison Boys (the )
*Oddfellows Cemetery (the WWI prison camp in Hot Springs, North Carolina)
*Mollie Glass (a horse killed at Battle of Bull Run)
*Copenhill (a reflection by William Tecumseh Sherman on the Battle of Atlanta)
*Don't Come to Tennessee (unknown)
*Rose in the Snow (unknown)
*Comanche ()
*Flying Mercury (the Circus of Pepin and Breschard)
*Never on A Sunday (unknown)
*Tacoma Coal Line (the coal mines in Wise County, Virginia)
*Hazel Creek (a community flooded when Fontana Dam was built in 1944)
*The Boy From Saratoga (story of the Saratoga Race Course)
*Winter 1944 (a man fighting at Saint-Mere-Eglise)
*Tucson (the end of the cowboy)
*Grancer Harrison (the ghost of Alabama's Grancer Harrison)
*Ghost of Traveller (Robert E. Lee's )
*House of Bourbon Parts I and II (Marie Antoinette)
Albums
* Live From Sun Studio (Release date winter 2011)
* Title TBA (2012)

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