Mary Chapin Carpenter recently ended her annual summer tour with a homecoming at Wolf Trap. The singer-songwriter’s family moved to this area in 1974, when she was 15. She played covers and originals in area clubs for many years, before being signed to Columbia and releasing her first record, Hometown Girl, in 1987.

If Mary seems worldly, it comes of having seen the world at a young age. When she was 12, her family moved to Tokyo, where they spent a couple of years; her father, an executive at Life magazine, wanted to start an Asian edition of the periodical. If she seems to come by her musical talents naturally, it runs in the family; her mother was a folk musician, and Mary learned to play her guitar and ukulele from a young age.