Richard Yospin and Bernadette Colley met in Cuba in 2018, while studying Cuban music in Havana and Matanzas.  Their paths crossed again a year later, when serendipitously they attended a Québécois music camp, performing together at the Memoire & Racines folk festival and other venues along the Gaspésie.  Then, the pandemic hit, and they began making music together. When venues started to open up, they began to play the Northeast open mic circuit as a duo. Hence, colleyospin began, and this website marks our official launch in 2023.

Professionally, Bernadette plays piano and guitar, has taught music students from kindergarten through university, and is the founder of Colley Consulting arts consultancy. She continues to study diverse forms and styles of vocal performance. Besides Cuba and Quebec, she’s traveled to Corsica, South Africa, Italy, Quebec, and England to learn authentic folk music from local masters. For ten years, she was a guitarist for the Scandinavian vocal group Stämbandet.  Notwithstanding her classical training in piano and voice, she’s fond of the American Songbook and country music, and performs them as part of her solo and duet repertoire on the folk circuit.  

Richard began playing guitar, jug, washboard, kazoo, and washtub bass in a high school jug band after his sister brought back a ten-dollar guitar from Argentina.  Ever since, he’s performed in blues and klezmer bands, a cappella and folk groups of various stripes.  He plays guitar, mandolin, and bass, plus clarinet in a couple of orchestras and chamber groups, sings in a large chorus, writes tunes when the spirit moves him, and sets poems by W.B. Yeats, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson and others to music.  But he’s a guitar folkie at heart.

Together, these two know hundreds of songs in a wide range of styles: country and urban blues; country music from the Carter family to Iris DeMent; songs by contemporary writers and singers; sea shanties; Child ballads and other traditional music from England, Ireland and Scotland; art songs (some written by Richard); and music from around the world, in more than half a dozen languages.  Bernadette and Richard both love songs from musical theater and movies that have become part of the Great American Songbook. As a duo, they have performed their wide and varied repertoire from Maine to Florida.