Published: September 01. 2009 2:00AM

By Ann Hicks
ARTS WRITER

Love and marriage brought her to Greenville.

Her singing career followed her.

Sable-eyed Canadian-Armenian vocalist Mariam Matossian knows how to enchant her listeners with songs that throb with life – ancient laments and buoyant lyrics, songs that once rose in the land of Mount Ararat.

Her Greenville debut at the Warehouse Theatre this year, in which she partnered with Asheville-based band Free Planet Radio, packed the house.

At that concert, the Upstate discovered why this artist's first album, “Far From Home,” garnered concerts, airtime on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) Radio and an invitation to be a guest on “Echoes,” the nightly Public Radio International program hosted by John Diliberto.

Matossian has been nominated twice for the Canadian Folk Music Award, and in addition, her 2007 follow-up album “In the Light” has been enthusiastically received by her fans.

Still you might ask: How come Armenian folk songs, sung in Armenian, packed the house in the deep South?

Matossian says her non-Armenian listeners have truly embraced her music. “They may not understand the words I'm singing, but they love the music,” she says. The lullabies, love songs and homesick yearnings speak the language of the heart and need no translator.

Change is gonna come

The funny thing is, Matossian could have used a cultural translator after her 2006 wedding to Greenville resident Haro Setian, also of Armenian descent. Although there was no language barrier between her country of residence and his, her move from Canada to the United States meant serious changes.

“Part of me wondered, am I leaving everything behind. Everything?”

Familiar conveniences turned into unfamiliar annoyances as Matossian struggled to adjust to climate change, from cool to hot and humid, and had to learn to function in a country that doesn't use the metric system. The first couple of months were dominated by homesickness, frustration and feelings of loss for the friends, family and church she left behind.

It took awhile, but eventually her “aha” moment arrived with the realization that her mother went through a form of culture shock when, as a young bride, she moved to Canada from the Middle East, and a generation earlier, Matossian's maternal grandmother had fled from Armenia to Syria.

The singer, now expecting her second child, says she recalled that before her wedding to Setian, her mother tearfully said: “You are living my and your grandmother's life.”

Now she looks at 2-year-old daughter Isabella and wonders if this will happen to her, too.

The tie still binds

Near or far, it is Armenian folk music that binds the generations together.

Her grandmother, Mariam Der Hovaginian, after whom she is named and to whom Matossian's “Far From Home” album is dedicated, was 4 years old when she fled to Syria with her family to escape the 1915 genocide in which 1.5 million Armenians perished. Matossian's grandmother hoped all her life that a day would come when she could return to her beloved homeland.

She never did.

But that ache grew into a desire in her to hear, to learn and to sing the beautiful and plaintive songs of her ancient land, and to pass that knowledge on to her daughter, Matossian's mother. In turn, Matossian's mother, in Canada, taught her own daughter to love them, to sing them and to treasure them.

As fate would have it, instead of the grandmother, it was Matossian, the granddaughter, who made the longed-for journey to Armenia, not once but twice – in 1998 and again in 2002. Matossian took a leave from her teaching job to travel and work in Armenia, first as an English translator, and later doing mission work with street children and orphans.

“My grandmother died very early, she was only in her 60s, and there's this deep bond there for my mother and me through the songs my grandmother loved and sang. And now, to have my own daughter to be a part of that process is just amazing,” Matossian says.

Finding the perfect band

In her first two years in the Upstate, Matossian continued to perform with her Vancouver-based band, and all of her concerts were away from Greenville.

“The musicians I met in Greenville were excellent,” she says, “but they were uncomfortable playing world music. I was at loss as to where I might find a band closer than the one I have in Canada.”

All that changed in the summer of 2008.

At the suggestion of Gene Berger, owner of Horizon Records, she checked out percussionist River Guerguerian's site on My Space. Listening to the tracks, Matossian says, the realization that he was not only a great musician but also a fellow Armenian took her breath away. And he lived only an hour away in Asheville and played with the world music fusion band Free Planet Radio.

She and her husband traveled to Asheville to meet Guerguergian and the two other members of Free Planet Radio, multi-instrumentalist string player Chris Rosser and multi-Grammy winning double bassist Eliot Wadopian.

Matossian found Free Planet Radio to be “an amazing band of fun-loving, no egos, and highly musical guys.” She says after their first jam session, she was driving home from Asheville and thinking how incredible it was that she found this perfect fit practically in her own back yard.

And the beat goes on

In December 2008, Matossian performed in Los Angeles' Zipper Concert Hall, and while in town, she met KPFK Radio's “Global Village” host Yatrika Shah-Rais, who picked Matossian's second album, “In the Light,” as one of the best of 2008. “That was a huge honor,” the singer says with a smile.

She also began negotiations for her next album with a well-known L.A. music producer. “I can't say his name just yet,” she says, “because the project is in the planning stage.”

For the next album and for upcoming concerts she's working with her mother to gather additional music. She calls her mom an “endless source” of old Armenian songs.

Matossian smiles, somewhat bemused by her journey so far. “It has been a neat thing to see how my life has come together,” she says.

Arts writer Ann Hicks can be reached at 864-298-4004