By CRISTY SHAUCK
As a tot, Margie Butler danced tap and ballet competitively. At age 4, she insisted on singing during a performance instead. Butler comes from a musical family; her father was an Irish tenor, and three other siblings developed professional music careers. She herself danced and sang her way through school until college and learned to play piano, violin, guitar and harp.
Today Butler plays Irish harp and the tin whistle in a band with her husband, Paul Espinoza, and Florie Brown. The trio, known as Golden Bough, has been playing traditional and original Celtic music for 17 years.
On Friday and Saturday, they bring their show to Sunnyvale.
Originally trained as a classical musician, Brown grew up in San Jose and performed in the Youth Symphony, then played fiddle in a band at Mountain Charlie's with her brother.
Espinoza plays accordion, guitar and mandolin and writes most of the group's original songs. He was playing in coffeehouses when he and Butler met in San Diego while attending college in 1971. The two have a son, Arion, who attends UC-Santa Cruz, and a grandson.
Over the years, the trio has performed in Europe and Asia. Butler loves to perform "anywhere in the British Isles, especially Ireland and Wales." The worst place to perform is in smoky pubs. "My voice can't take it," Butler said.
It's hard to imagine a folk music band embroiled in an international controversy, but that's the situation in which the group found itself recently. In 1993, the Lutheran church in Germany blacklisted Golden Bough, an action that Butler says the church took because the band members are Scientologists.
As part of the blacklist, promoters and booking agents were cautioned against hiring Golden Bough. Previous bookings were canceled, and protesters demonstrated during one concert. The German government closed the group's bank accounts. (The members eventually did get their money.)
Why is this happening? Butler believes it's a matter of economics. In Germany, tax money was set aside for the two main religions: Catholicism and Protestantism. A citizen marked the preferred box on the tax form. In the early 1990s a box titled "other" was added. Germans started using it, which meant churches took in less money.
"It was about this time I saw our name listed in a book by the Lutheran Church," Butler said. She isn't sure how the church found out, but thinks someone may have noticed their name on a record label which was recorded earlier with other Scientologists.
Golden Bough will tour Holland and return to Germany in May to honor previous commitments. "I'm apprehensive," Butler said, "but the people who have supported us in the past are doing so even more now. We want to come for those loyal fans."
Last year Golden Bough came out with a holiday CD, Christmas in a Celtic Land. This year Butler is working on a sequel to The Magic of the Celtic Harp. Espinoza and Brown will perform as guests on the instrumental CD.
Sunnyvale residents will have the opportunity to hear Golden Bough at the Sunnyvale Community Theater on Friday, March 21, and Saturday, March 22, at 8 p.m. The program will include ballads, sing-alongs, instrumentals, jigs, reels and lullabies. "We encourage people to bring their children," Butler said.
For tickets or more information, call 733-6611.
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, March 19, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.