SEQUIM — When he heard her singing, it clinched the crush.
“That voice,” Kip Tulin said of that woman who, back in the early 1990s, was named Mary Fewel.
“I can’t talk to her,” Kip thought. Too beautiful.
Mary, meanwhile, was thinking: “He’s really cute. But, he doesn’t talk.”
This was at a Sant Mat meditation retreat near Ukiah, Calif. Kip, a pediatrician, lived down in Bakersfield while Mary, a musician who made her living as an organizational development consultant, was in Boston.
The pair got over their initial speechlessness. They wed in 1993 — and went back to work on their respective sides of the continent. Their commuter marriage lasted five years; Kip was chief of Pediatrics and one of four founding doctors at Bakersfield’s Kaiser Permanente while Mary consulted for big and small companies.
While in New England, Mary got into Celtic music, having sung and played guitar since girlhood. Like so many of her era, Mary first found music in church.
“I was a Catholic girl, and we had guitar Mass, folk Mass in the ’60s,” she said. An older high school classmate helped her develop her guitar skills; then came the Bob Dylan and Joan Baez songs. Mary, still a teenager, started playing in bars.
This was in Folsom, Calif., which at the time was a “neat little gold country town,” she remembered.
Soon after high school came the pinnacle of her young life: opening for Jerry Garcia at the Keystone in Berkeley. She was 19.
That peak experience, though, turned out to be only the trailhead. Mary moved to Sebastopol, finished her bachelor’s degree at Sonoma State University, then earned a master’s and eventually a Ph.D. in organizational development at Boston University.
Cut to 1998, when Mary went through several deaths in her family. She had also grown tired of being in the air so much of the time, flying to and from her husband.
“I would like to have cereal with Kip in the morning” on a regular basis, she remembers thinking.
So the Tulins, half a decade after tying the knot, set up house together in Bakersfield. And Mary went to the music store there to buy an Irish bouzouki, a long-necked mandolinlike instrument, to expand her repertoire. The music store staff, naturally, introduced her to a group of Celtic music players.
“There was this cadre of musicians in Bakersfield,” she said. And they knew, and loved, the difference between a jig and a reel.
In the next few years, Mary’s consulting work tapered and her music intensified. Together with Brenda Hunter and Jill Egland, she formed Banshee in the Kitchen, a Celtic trio that started out playing the local cafes and went on to events such as the Live Oak Music Festival near Santa Barbara, Calif., pubs on the East Coast and even a trip to Japan.
Kip didn’t get to go on all of these jaunts. But on March 31, 2010, he retired from Kaiser. The next morning, “we climbed in the truck,” said Mary.
They drove to Sequim, the place they had fallen for after a long search. The Tulins had looked at Bend, Ore., Flagstaff, Ariz., and other places around the West, but when they found Sequim and Dungeness, it was all over.
“We felt an immediate affinity,” Mary recalls. “There’s something about it.”
In the 3.3 years since, Mary and Kip have put down roots, and in more than one direction. Mary found the Irish jam session in Port Townsend and met Gil Yslas, the songwriter and guitarist with whom she formed the duo Fret Noir. The two started playing at Rainshadow Coffee Co. in downtown Sequim during the First Friday Art Walks and developed a following for their self-described “sweet, dark blend” of Celtic and English folk songs and American blues.
Kip, for his part, became a volunteer physician at the Dungeness Valley Health and Wellness Clinic, aka the free clinic at 777 N. Fifth Ave. In December 2011, he became medical director — still as a volunteer.
That title doesn’t convey what Kip brings: his down-to-earth approach to one patient at a time, said clinic director Rose Gibbs.
“People love talking to him,” she said, adding that he has taken especially complicated patients under his wing.
“When is Dr. Tulin on again?” they ask.
Kip deflects a question about how many hours he works at the clinic. He talks instead about the other 11 providers: doctors and nurse practitioners who also volunteer their time.
He does lament the way poverty, and the lack of insurance coverage, hurts the people he cares for.
“I had no need to be a doctor” after retirement, Kip said. “My ego is full.
“But there is a need at the clinic.”
Like his mate, the doctor practices music as medicine. He’s played the accordion since he was a boy, and now visits nursing homes to play early 20th-century songs like “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” And like many people, he enjoys making fun of the instrument.
Later this month, Kip will make a special appearance at the Clinic Fun Walk and Health Fair. Accordion in arms and bowler hat on head, he will stroll and play as participants set out from Trinity United Methodist Church for the fundraising walks, which take place around Carrie Blake Park and John Wayne Marina.
“He’ll be jazzing it up,” said Gibbs.
Mary has some September gigs too, with a brand-new Celtic duo. Yslas moved away last fall, and at a Silverdale Irish jam session, Mary met Mike Saunders.
The fiddler-singer-guitarist “had this fierce look on his face. I thought: He will brook no fools,” Mary recalled. Saunders proceeded to play a fiery Cape Breton-style set — “awesome,” she said.
Saunders was likewise wowed by Mary’s voice and guitar. As they got to know each other, they discovered they share the important things: a sense of rhythm and fun.
The pair adore traditional Irish music. Saunders, who now lives in Gig Harbor, has been a student and performer of Celtic and American folk songs for some 40 years. Playing music with Mary, he said, has given his musical career “a much-needed jump start,” in Sequim of all places.
“I had a ‘y’all come’ thing at Rainshadow [Coffee Co.] with my buddies from Port Townsend and Mike,” said Mary. Then she and Saunders did another gig at Rainshadow in July.
Fret Noir fans came up quick to tell her: “We like him. You should do a duo with him.”
And so grew RowanTree, Mary Tulin and Mike Saunders’ band playing “traditional Celtic music, filtered through two people who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s,” in Mary’s words.
The man behind it all is Kip: shooting publicity videos and photos for www.RowanTreeMusic.com and helping haul gear. With a broad smile, he calls himself the “band boy.”
Kip “is devoted to helping Mary’s music career, and by association, mine as well,” said Saunders. Besides his photography skills, “he keeps us laughing when we need it.”
Talking about this life of music, volunteering and making a home in Sequim, Kip, 63, smiles and shakes his head. These are the “good old days,” he said.
“We can’t believe we live here,” Mary, 54, added, looking around their backyard, summer-lush and green.
She and Kip look forward to taking RowanTree on the road, perhaps across Washington, Oregon and California, as well as to local venues. The duo is set to play a number of gigs this month including an Art in the Library concert at the Sequim Library during this Friday’s Art Walk, an evening show at Next Door gastropub in downtown Port Angeles on Sept. 15 and Sequim’s Wind Rose Cellars on Sept. 21.
“We’re at the time of life when we still have a passion for the music, and we just want to share it,” Mary said, “and then come home.”
