Monica Rizzio is singing something new. Her strong, sure voice fills the room; the guitar in her hands sounds bigger than it is. It creates its own kind of gravity: the dog at Rizzio’s feet settles down, the people in the room move closer. Everyone wants in.

Rizzio is at Washashore Music, her school in Orleans. She fell in love with the building when she first walked by it in 2019. A simple one-room structure, it was a Quaker meeting house in the 1800s, she says.

“I had found out that my mom’s ancestors apparently landed in Eastham and Orleans,” says Rizzio. “I’m in this building, wondering if they were ever in here.” She bought it in 2021.

Attached to the back of the main part of the building was an unheated shack on stilts. Rizzio decided to replace it with a small addition that houses several music studios for lessons. She’s at the school four days a week, teaching fiddle, guitar, ukulele, piano, voice, and songwriting to students ranging from elementary schoolers to retirees.

She especially loves teaching girls. With them, she tries to ignite a love for music that goes beyond the sounds they can produce. “I want to be able to help them feel like, ‘I can do this,’ ” she says. A few of them — fifth-graders to seniors in high school — “aren’t even really practicing anymore,” she says. “But they still come, and we work on music. They’re here because they want to be.”

One such student recently came to Rizzio with an original song and asked what came next. “Writing is just the beginning,” Rizzio told her. “Now we’re going to go into the studio and record it. I’m going to show you how to put it up online.” It was a magical moment, she says: ambition becoming reality.

Rizzio was born in White Plains, N.Y. — she’s a washashore here. She’s also a cowgirl. When she was four, her family moved to “the middle of nowhere”: Quitman, a small town in East Texas where her father built a house on 30 acres. “I grew up a super tomboy,” says Rizzio. “I was an avid barrel-racer as a kid.”

As a child, she sang in church, then at fairs around the state. She pursued music in college, too, at Adelphi University. “But after being there for two years, one of my vocal instructors sat down with me and said, ‘Do you think this is the place you should be right now?’ ” It wasn’t. The school’s focus was musical theater. She wanted to write her own songs. She moved to Nashville.

“I was the smallest fish in the biggest pond,” says Rizzio. “It was there that I cut my teeth on songwriting.” Inspired by the women songwriters around her, she learned to play guitar. For five years, she absorbed the musical culture of the city. People shared their music freely, she says. They co-wrote songs and jammed into the night.

It was in Nashville, in the ’90s, that she met her future bandmate Demetrius Becrelis, a singer and guitarist from Barnstable. “We formed our band, Tripping Lily,” says Rizzio. “I eventually moved to Yarmouth because of it.” She bought a violin and learned to play the fiddle. The band toured for about 10 years, she says, and made four records.

In 2013, Rizzio, with her husband Peter Fasano, founded Vinegrass, a nonprofit that produces small Americana and Roots concerts and an annual festival. Now in its 10th year, the Vinegrass Music Festival will take place on Sunday, Oct. 6, at Truro Vineyards. Rizzio’s band, Monica Rizzio & the Round-Ups, will kick it off. Proceeds from the festival go to music scholarships, grants, and instruments for kids on Cape Cod. So far, the festival has given over $115,000 to those causes, says Fasano. Students can apply for scholarships at vinegrass.org.

“I grew up in a family that didn’t have a lot of money,” says Rizzio. “Without help from people in our community, I wouldn’t have been able to go to music camp or have an instrument.

“This is the first year that one of our scholarship recipients is a performer,” she says. Tyler Herman, a junior at Berklee College of Music, grew up in Sandwich and went to Falmouth Academy. He plays guitar. “He just gets it,” says Rizzio. “He’s one of those kids where music is everything for him.”

That’s how it is for Rizzio, too. In 2008, she founded a music school, West Bend Music, in Dennis. She taught there until the spring of 2020, then opened Washashore Music. Someone had called her a washashore when he found out she had moved to the Cape from away and it stuck. In 2016, when Rizzio released her debut solo album, she called it Washashore Cowgirl.

She’s nearly always written songs with her guitar in her arms. She plays the music, and it takes her to a place where the lyrics are. “The music comes first — it always comes first,” she says. But this winter, she says, she’s going to try something new. “I’m going to see what happens if I write something first.” For her next record, she says, she wants to “get a little weird.”

In Washashore Music’s main room, two adult students pick up their fiddles: Valerie Rhodes from Eastham and Holly DiMartile from Brewster. They suggest tunes to play, and Monica agrees emphatically. She strums her guitar, accompanying them, then she fiddles. If they forget the tune mid-bow-stroke, she hums it for them until they remember.

Some adult students tell Rizzio they’re not songwriters, and she tells them, “Well, have you ever gone through anything in your life? A proud moment, a sad moment?” One of those women will record an original song next week, says Rizzio.

“No matter how old you are, music is therapeutic,” she says. “You can go anywhere in the world and sit down and play music with somebody, whether you know their language or not.”

Bluegrass Sunday

The event: Vinegrass Music Festival
The time: Sunday, Oct. 6, noon
The place: Truro Vineyards, 11 Shore Rd., North Truro
The cost: $55 at vinegrass.org