Mary Catherine Reynolds has found her voice, quite literally. She claims to struggle still with her figurative voice -- songwriting, expression, starting from scratch -- but her actual, physical voice is plenty for now. When she pours it like molten gold into the mold of someone else's song, she is the Queen Midas of folk music.

Reynolds has made a name for herself in Austin, New York City and her native Oklahoma City not as a singular original songwriter but as an interpreter of others' music. She's most often linked to the songs of Austin songwriter Emily Kaitz, and the two often perform together. The two swapped songs on the main stage of this month's Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah -- where Reynolds once again summoned gooseflesh in a broiling Oklahoma pasture with her rendition of Guthrie's "Hobo's Lullaby" -- and they'll meet again Sunday in Tulsa.

Reynolds' admiration of Kaitz's writing runs deep.

"I found I enjoyed singing her songs so much. I love the way they come out of the mouth. They're very musical," Reynolds said. "I never get tired of singing them. I get tired of singing my own songs before Emily's. She's the very antithesis of the whiny singer-songwriter. She's not all caught up in herself, and she thinks that songwriting and performing should be a pleasant human endeavor, something everyone can enjoy together like church. That attitude is really refreshing."

Reynolds first encountered Kaitz after moving to Austin and being asked to perform Kaitz's "Don't You Want a Love That's Real" for Emilyfest -- an Austin celebration of Kaitz's songs -- in 1994. The two struck up a friendship on and off stage. (Kaitz has recently relocated to Fayetteville, Ark.)

While most folkies are stubbornly determined to sing largely their own songs, Reynolds developed less interest in putting forth her own work and more skilled at breathing new life into other songs.

"It's a talent (in itself), and one which most people in the circuit don't recognize," she said. "It's usually, `Sing your own songs, damnit' -- no matter how bad they are. Doing other people's songs is not something everybody does, and it doesn't get the respect of people who doggedly do their own material.

"But I always wanted to interpret other people's music. I can't remember a time in my life down to infant childhood when I didn't want to take someone's song I heard in church or on the radio and do my own thing with it. It's part of me, it's in my genetic makeup. And some of my favorite records are interpreters, like Phoebe Snow. Or Donald Fagen -- his `Nightfly' record where he does `Ruby Baby' is just fantastic.

"Linda Ronstadt writes a little, but I take pure joy in the songs she has interpreted over the years. Plus, I just read an article about Bonnie Raitt, and every page had a different songwriter talking about how wonderful it was to have a song interpreted by her. I mean, that's a good day in anybody's work."

Born and raised in Oklahoma City, Reynolds moved to New York City in the early '80s with the goal of becoming a country and western star. When those plans went south, she didn't -- at least right away; she stayed around long enough to move through the Greenwich Village folk scene, then full of "moody singer-songwriters and neo-blues guitarists and, of course, Suzanne Vega."

She returned to Oklahoma City in the early '90s to care for ailing parents and has been based there ever since, becoming a fixture at innovative clubs such as Galileo's. Her instrumental vocal talents are so varied, too, that she also plays and sings in the jazz band Miss Brown to You and the vocal group The Sisters of Swing.

Her debut CD, "Patience," is informed by these wide-ranging talents and influences, moving from the cheeky title track through an Andrews Sisters echo of "My Blue Heaven," two Kaitz originals ("Could I Undisillusion You" and the evocative "Sand Dune") and even James Taylor's "Secret o' Life."

With one of the most beautiful female voices in the state, Reynolds said she's not worried about losing her artist's voice in the songwriting of others.

"In some respects, what I do is that of an actress," Reynolds said. "Acting is such a weird thing -- you become someone else. That's what I'm doing, sort of. You have to let that song take you over and speak for itself. I'm just a vehicle.

"Any good songwriter will tell you that they don't own the song, it appears within them. It's like Michelangelo standing before a rock and understanding that there's a statue of David inside it. I try to carve that out every time I sing."

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Thomas Conner, World entertainment writer, can be reached at 581-8473 or via e-mail at thomas.conner@tulsaworld.com.