"her drawn-out notes in, for instance,
Golden Songs / The Water is Wide
give the listener goosebumps…
a Judy Collins-esque voice”
- Mark S. Tucker, FAME
Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange
“Hauntingly beautiful”- Jon Stein, radio host of Hootenanny Café.
Loralyn Coles has performed in the Washington, DC area since 1994, singing her own songs as well as traditional folk. Her CD, Blue Moonlight, tied with Tom Paxton for a 2008 Wammie award.
One of the songs on the CD, Golden Songs, The Water Is Wide, is a rewrite of the traditional folk song, and was published in a 2002 issue of Sing Out! magazine. In March of 2026, Loralyn released the song as a lyric YouTube video.
In 1999, her friends, Barbara Ryan and Bernard Argent and their pan-Celtic group, IONA, recorded one of Loralyn’s songs, “Lark in the Morning, Wild Geese at Night,” on their CD, “The Sound of IONA.” IONA’s 2006 retrospective CD, “A Celebration of 20,” also contained their version of Loralyn’s song.
Loralyn’s holiday song, “One Last Letter to Santa,” appeared on the 2005 Hungry for Music compilation CD, “Holiday Feast 8."
More recently, Loralyn has written a young adult fantasy novel, Dangerous Voice, to be released on September 20, 2026, in which a teenage girl must learn to sing or die. The vocal lessons are real, but the teachers aren’t human. Since there are song battles between the characters, Loralyn is writing the songs mentioned in the book.