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Reshana Marie was born in Fort Wayne Indiana and grew up in a musical family. Her earliest memories are of being a very young child play-acting and dreaming about being a performer. Reshana, along with her younger sister Tasha would sit on the basement steps together and watch her father's country band practicing. She would dream about being a singer in the band (when they both weren't swooning over the bass player in the band!). During other times, she along with sister, Tasha, would go to their Hallway’s large built-in closet and fling open the wide doors, emptying out the top of it they would climb up into it and she would sing her heart out with her pretend microphone or sometimes holding a toy guitar. Later in those childhood years, and shortly after the family moved to Florida, Reshana would receive her first real experience singing in front of others outside
her family. At age nine, she and sister were invited to sing for their church's
congregation. They sang the song “Give Me That Old Time Religion” and intermingled that tune with
some lyrics from the song “Standing In The Need Of Prayer”, each taking parts. She remembers feeling very relaxed and at ease and totally loving it. Years later she had her first opportunity to
sing totally by herself at her middle school for a graded assignment in music. Her father accompanied her with a guitar while she sang “Amazing Grace” to the tune of "House
Of The Rising Sun". She relates “I really thought I would die, I was so scared, but I loved music
and singing so much that I just pushed through it”. It would take years of stage
performances as a teenager to overcome her fear and eventually feel "right at home" on the stage. Those years of stage performances happened when as a young teenager she started traveling the nation with her parents, four sisters and three brothers for seven years. She and the older ones performed over 200 dates per year singing leads and harmonies on original and classic Southern Gospel music. Years later, now almost 19 and following a show in Indiana, near the Ohio border, not far from where Reshana had met a young man while on the road a couple of years prior, she literally ran right off the bus and eloped with her now current husband! (and much to her family's dismay and shock at the time!) For a while after, she sang and played bass guitar with her new husband in his state of Ohio. With the rest of the family traveling in two buses, another was soon married, and then another yet engaged, so the decision was made to localize themselves back in the state of Florida. At the same time, Reshana and her husband moved to Florida and rejoined the family musical group. Just months after that, another decision was made to go back to their father, David McDowell's original roots of country music which was instilled in him by his father, Porter McDowell. For years after, the family performed singing country music together as Sweet Water Junction Band, before deciding to retire the family band in mid 2019.
In the spring of 2016, Reshana was diagnosed with a
large inoperable cancerous brain tumor and had to undergo high dose Chemotherapy at Duke University Hospital in Durham NC.
Her last
treatment
was
in April of
2017. The
next month
she was
found to be
cancer-free
and the
brain
tumor
completely
gone!
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