Christina Alexander was born in Silver Spring, Maryland to a musical family. Her father played keyboards, and her grandfather was a recording artist who played the organ and the piano performing in concert halls in northeastern Ohio. He also released recordings on both instruments.

Christina has been singing since she first learned how to talk. Her first love is country music, but she had to wander through the rock and roll wilderness to get there.

She started out singing in rock bands in Northern Virginia. After a while she found that to be a dead end. She took a break from music to get married and start a family. The family part never happened, and so she started singing again. First doing pop music and then rock and roll again. However, she longed for the country.

While at church in Northern Virginia she was introduced to the keyboard player in the band. Years later, having moved to West Virginia, she happened to run into a keyboard player, Elliot Simon, in a music venue on the mountain outside of Harpers Ferry. The timing was perfect, and the result was Mission Road, formed in the summer of 2021.

In December 2023, Mission Road released their debut album, All I Want to Say. It contains 13 tracks, 10 written by Simon, but the final track belongs to her daddy.

One of Christina’s prime influences is Patsy Cline, and the final cut on the album is her rendition of Crazy, her father’s favorite song. She also does Blue Kentucky Girl, her mom’s favorite, in a medley with Coal Miner’s Daughter – dedicated to Simon’s mom who was indeed a coal miner’s daughter.

Simon was born in NYC into a musical family. His mother was a singer, and his father was a songwriter with some chart success.

He left home as a teenager and moved to Chicago. There he played folk, blues and Americana in the local clubs and began to write songs. There was plenty of great songwriting to learn from there, including the amazing Shel Silverstein, Steve Goodman, Michael Smith and John Prine.

While in Chicago he met and teamed up with Lucy Kaplansky,
while she was still in high school, and they formed Simon and Kaplansky. The duo played Chicago venues and then moved to NYC to play the clubs in Greenwich Village, which led to the recording of Simon’s songs for compilation albums, including the Cornelia Street Songwriters Exchange and later, Fast Folk—now issued on Smithsonian Folkways records.

After their breakup, Simon and Lucy went their separate ways. Simon joining a rock band first and then moving on to where he finally found a home in country music.

After a time, Simon became disenchanted with the “music business” and took a break from it to follow other pursuits. He eventually settled in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. There he played keyboard for local singer songwriters playing in honky tonks. Despite his once disenchantment, Simon considers himself a songwriter first and foremost and has never lost his passion for writing.

In 2021, in an out of the way music venue, on the mountain outside of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia he finally found a singer with raw talent that shared his love of country music: Christina Alexander. She also liked his songs.

Together they formed Mission Road. Since then, they have been playing venues in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Northern Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee.

In December 2023, Mission Road released their debut album, All I Want to Say. It contains 13 tracks, 10 of which were written by Simon, but also includes a cover of a Nat King Cole hit written by his father as well as covers of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn classics.