It's funny how sometimes we meet the most interesting people without even meaning to.

I met Susan Nikas in late 2003 when I was working on a project on California's highly expensive workers compensation system. She was the owner of a ceramics business in San Dimas, Calif., and her business had been absolutely clobbered by the rising cost of her workers compensation insurance.

Her problems became the focus of my project, the example I used to make the issue easier for my readers to understand. When the story ran, she was pleased with the job I had done and she sent me a compact disc. She had told me she was part of a bluegrass group called Clay County, she the CD was an album of the group's music.

I played it and thought it was pretty good, but it somehow got put aside and I didn't think about it for a while.

This spring and summer, when I was loading all my music into my computer for inclusion on my 160-gigabyte iPod, I cam across the CD again. For the first time, I wondered if the group had made other albums. I checked on<a title="Amazon" href="http://www.amazon.com" target="_self"> Amazon</a>, and was pleasantly surprised to find several other Clay County CDs as well as two apparently made by Nikas as a solo artist after the group disbanded.

[caption id="attachment_639" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Susan Nikas"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Hard_Times_Bad_Times_Broadjam_lg.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-639" title="Hard_Times_Bad_Times_Broadjam_lg" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Hard_Times_Bad_Times_Broadjam_lg.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="200" /></a>[/caption]

I picked up two of the other Clay County CDs and one by Nikas herself. Then I downloaded the other solo album from iTunes, so I now have 60-70 songs by Nikas and her group.

She is the lead singer on nearly all of them, and while her voice certainly would never be called classically beautiful, she sings well and her voice is interesting and intelligent.

One recent song I really like is off the album pictured here. It's called "We Go Marching On," which is something of a folk roots song with political lyrics. It has its say in a pretty effective way about the seemingly endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I haven't seen Nikas since I wrote the story, but I hope she sees this blog and learns how much I've enjoyed her music.

It's definitely different, definitely cool.