Rosalie Sorrels 1933-2017

I am deeply saddened today to learn that my old friend and colleague – and folk music legend – Rosalie Sorrels passed away last night at her daughter Holly’s home in Reno, Nevada. Her children – Holly Marizu, Shelley Ross and Kevin Sorrels – and I believe other family members were with her as she slipped away over the past several days. Rosalie would have turned 84 on June 24.

Rosalie was one of the great interpretive singers on the folk music scene. She sang traditional folk songs, cabaret songs and gave us definitive versions of the songs of so many songwriters – notably Bruce “Utah” Phillips and Malvina Reynolds, among many others. And, of course, she was a remarkable songwriter herself.

Rosalie began her folk music journey in the 1950s and early-‘60s, collecting traditional songs and performing locally in Idaho and Utah – and making an occasional trip east to perform at events like the Newport Folk Festival. She made several albums of traditional songs in those years and one of them, “Folksongs of Idaho and Utah,” originally released in 1961, remains in print to this day via Smithsonian Folkways.

In 1967, she made a lovely album, “If I Could Be the Rain,” in which she introduced her own songs for the first time. About half the songs were Rosalie’s and about half were written by her Salt Lake City friend, Bruce “Utah” Phillips. Rosalie’s guitarist on the album was Mitch Greenhill, who would go to work with Rosalie often over the years as a musician, record producer, and agent.

Around that time, Rosalie’s marriage broke up and she hit the road – five children in tow – to earn her living on the folk music circuit. Nanci Griffith tells Rosalie’s story in the song “Ford Econoline.” Lena Spencer of the legendary folk music venue Caffé Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York, gave Rosalie a home base as she began to travel to folk clubs, concerts and festivals – sometimes traveling by Greyhound Bus – in the U.S. and Canada.

Rosalie played in Montreal often. I was still in high school when I first heard and met Rosalie at the Back Door Coffee House in Montreal, sometime around 1970. The gig at the Back Door was four or five nights long and it was during that stay in Montreal that Rosalie wrote “Travelin’ Lady,” which became her signature song.

I began to produce concerts in Montreal as a college student in 1972 and my first booking with Rosalie was a double bill with Utah Phillips at Redpath Hall on the McGill campus in 1973. By 1974, I was running a Montreal folk club, the Golem Coffee House, and Rosalie played there often throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. Sometimes Rosalie came to the Golem as a solo artist and sometimes with musicians like Mitch Greenhill or Tony Markellis. Sometimes she came to the Golem on a double bill with Utah Phillips, and once as part of a three-woman show with Terry Garthwaite of Joy of Cooking and writer and storyteller Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

Rosalie was a quietly mesmerizing performer on stage and I have so many great memories of performances that I produced with her in Montreal – but also of concerts I saw her do in many other places in Canada and the U.S. In addition to her singing, Rosalie was one of the most masterful storytellers ever.

In the late-‘70s, I operated an independent booking agency for a few years representing a select roster of folk music artists and I was honored that Rosalie was one of my treasured clients.

In her song, “Rosalie, You Can’t Go Home Again,” Rosalie refers to lessons that she learned from her “teachers” – not referring to school teachers. Rosalie was one of my teachers. Rosalie taught me much about the endurance of the human spirit and that adversities and personal tragedies can be the basis for cathartic art. And she taught me how to recognize greatness in songs.

Rosalie Sorrels & Mike Regenstreif (1993)

A quick anecdote: I was at a folk festival with Rosalie – it could have been Mariposa or Philadelphia or Winnipeg or Vancouver, or maybe somewhere else, and Rosalie was in a multi-artist workshop. One of the other artists, a folkier-than-thou type who I will leave nameless, ranted on about how there were no good rock songs, that contemporary singer-songwriters starting with Bob Dylan were all terrible, and that traditional folk songs or songs that have lasted 50 or 60 years were the only ones that mattered. Rosalie responded by saying something like, “Yeah, you’re right, let me play you this song.” She proceeded to sing “If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine/And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung…” When she finished the song, the folkier-than-thou guy said something like, “Now that was a great song! Where did you collect it?” Rosalie turned to him and said, “It’s by the Grateful Dead.”

The memories of times spent with Rosalie – in Montreal, Saratoga, Vermont, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, etc. – are flooding back tonight. I remember the performances, for sure, but I also treasure the times around her kitchen tables in Ballston Spa or Burlington or in bars and friends’ living rooms all up and down the road, sitting up late and sharing songs, stories, drinks and memories.

I’m listening tonight to Rosalie’s 1972 album “Travelin’ Lady.” It was her most recent album the first time I produced a concert with her and it remains one of my favorites of Rosalie’s albums. One of the most inspiring songs of Rosalie’s original songs on the album is “Postcard from Indian (Keep on Rocking).” It’s a kind of existential, secular prayer song:

“If I should die before I wake
There’s nothing here I’d want to take with me
I’ve had the best, I’ve had the worst
I’ve been last, I got into the line first
I’ve been hungry, I’ve been satisfied
I’ve seen the carnival, I’ve taken every ride

If I should wake before I die
I’d never stop to wonder why
I’d grab the day, take it and run
Naked, reaching for the sun
I’d run like a rabbit, fly like a dove
All around the world, searching for love…sweet love

And yet here I lie, afraid to sleep
Afraid to look inside too deep
Just want to climb outside this skin
I’ll find out who it is that’s in there
Oh, friends and lovers, keep me afloat
Keep on rockin’…It’s a beautiful boat.”

That’s a message I think Rosalie would want to leave us with: “Keep on rockin’…It’s a beautiful boat.”

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--Mike Regenstreif

Live at Caffé Lena: Music from America’s Legendary Coffeehouse 1967-2013

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Live at Caffé Lena: Music from America’s Legendary Coffeehouse 1967-2013
Tompkins Square 
caffelenahistory.org

I got involved in the Montreal folk scene as a teenager just as the 1960s were about to fade into the ‘70s. I was just a little too young to have hung out at the New Penelope, but I was there at the Back Door, the Yellow Door and the Montreal Folk Workshop. By around 1971, I was helping Chuck Baker run the Yellow Door – which I continued to do until I took over the Golem, another legendary Montreal folk club, in ’74.

In 1972, I also began producing concerts at Dawson College and McGill University and one of the first artists I booked was Bruce “Utah” Phillips (a good friend who I would work with often over the years). Bruce insisted that I had to come down to Saratoga Springs, New York and meet his friend Lena Spencer. Her Caffé Lena, then about a dozen years old, was already one of the most legendary folk clubs in North America.

So, the next time Bruce was playing there – it must have been sometime in 1973 – I made the three-hour trip down to Saratoga and spent the weekend hanging out at the Caffé Lena, chatting with her and Bruce for hours on end, and sleeping in a spare room at Lena’s apartment. I remember thinking that I may well have been sleeping in the same bed that Bob Dylan had slept in 10 or 11 years earlier. That weekend was a big part of my folk music education.

Saratoga became part of my stomping grounds for the next dozen or so years. I’d visit two, three, four times per year, either trips specifically to hang out there or when I’d pass through on my way to or from New York City and I spent may evenings listening to music at the Caffé and many more hours deep in conversation with Lena.

Saratoga is about halfway between Montreal and New York City, so Lena and I sometimes co-ordinated our booking efforts to help route performers, and then in the late-‘70s and early-‘80s when I was running a small booking agency for folk music artists, the Caffé was a place I often booked them at.

Lena passed away in 1989, but her intimate little folk club, the Caffé Lena, has carried on as a non-profit venue. With a history stretching back 53 continuous years, the Caffé is the most historic of current folk music venues, and still one of the most pre-eminent.

By 1967, some folk music aficionados had begun recording some of the concerts at the Caffé and Live at Caffé Lena: Music from America’s Legendary Coffeehouse 1967-2013 is a heart-warming collection of 47 songs on three CDs culled from about 700 of those concerts (or from the regular benefit concerts in larger Saratoga halls held to raise funds to keep the wolves from the Caffé Lena’s door).

While it’s too bad there was nothing from the Caffé’s earliest years – so no Dylan track – but some of the artists from back then who continued to play there in later years like Dave Van Ronk, the Greenbriar Boys, Jean Ritchie and Hedy West are well represented along with a who’s who of folk music greats from 1967 to now.

There are lots of wonderful moments, much too many to list them all, but certainly some of my personal favorites were four songs by friends of mine recorded when I was there in the audience: David Amram’s hipster-jazz-bluegrass tune, “Little Mama”; Rosalie Sorrels’ “Travelin’ Lady”; Utah Phillips’ “The Green Rolling Hills of Western Virginia”; and Dave Van Ronk’s “Gaslight Rag,” a tongue-in-cheek recollection of another legendary folk music coffeehouse.

There are many other old friends represented in the collection. Among them Kate McGarrigle & Roma Baran, recorded in 1972, who do an obscure song of Kate’s called “Caffé Lena,” written in tribute to Lena and her club. Kate would later use the melody as the basis for her song “NaCL” and, in 1974, Kate and Roma formed a trio with Kate’s sister, Anna McGarrigle, that played at a small, very select number of venues that included the Caffé Lena, the Golem, my folk club in Montreal, the Ark in Ann Arbor, and the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto.

Other highlights – many of them by other old friends – include songs by Christine Lavin, who Lena pointed out to me as an artist to watch out for when she was a Caffé Lena waitress, Tom Paxton, Patrick Sky, David Bromberg, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Mike Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Happy & Artie Traum, Paul Geremia, Bill Staines, Bill Morrissey, John Gorka, Pete Seeger, Rory Block, Roy Book Binder, Chris Smither, Mary Gauthier, Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, and Lena Spencer herself, backed up by members of Bottle Hill in a 1972 recording, who quite appropriately ends the third CD with “Dear Little Café.”

If I have a quibble, it would be that there are several artists, stalwarts of the Caffé at one time or another, who really should have been included in the collection. Certainly among them are Tom Mitchell, a great, under-appreciated singer-songwriter who grew up in the Saratoga area; the late Logan English, an influential folksinger and playwright from Kentucky who lived in Saratoga for quite a few years before his death in a 1983 traffic accident; and Michael Jerling, a fine singer-songwriter who has been based in Saratoga for many years.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Christine Lavin -- Cold Pizza for Breakfast: A Mem-wha??

Cold Pizza for Breakfast: A Mem-wha??
By Christine Lavin
Tell Me Press
416 pages
christinelavin.com

Back in the 1970s, I used to pass through Saratoga Springs a lot. It’s about half way between Montreal and New York City so sometimes I’d stop on my way to or from New York. As the locale of the Caffé Lena, then, as now, the longest continually-running folk music coffee house on the planet, it was a place I was drawn to as a destination in its own right. It was a great place for a young folkie to hang out and, as a college folk concert presenter and then coffee house director in Montreal, I occasionally did circuit deals with Lena Spencer – for whom the Caffé Lena was named – to present the same artists in Montreal just before or after they were in Saratoga.

Sometime in the mid-‘70s, Lena pointed out a young woman waitressing at the Caffé to me.

“Her name is Christine Lavin,” said Lena. “Remember her name. She’s a songwriter and she’s very good.”

Lena, of course, was right. Within a few years, Christine was living in New York City and establishing herself as a major league singer-songwriter and gifted performing and recording artist. Her albums were a staple of Folk Roots/Folk Branches for the entire run of almost 14 years that I did the radio show.

Anyone who’s been to a Christine Lavin concert over the years will also tell you that she’s an outstanding – and, often, brilliantly funny – storyteller. She puts those talents to fine use in her autobiography, Cold Pizza for Breakfast: A Mem-wha?? (Is it a sign that you’re getting old when people around your age are publishing autobiographies?)

With great skill, Christine tells the major story of her life – from growing up as one of many Lavin siblings, to her leaving home and finding her way to the career she loves (as do we), and to the ups and downs of her life in New York and on tour – while frequently inserting various anecdotes and occasionally floating off on interesting tangents. And she doesn’t whitewash anything for P.R. purposes. There are tales of bad relationships and bad business dealings – and even some bad gigs, like the time she opened for Joan Rivers before a hostile audience of old folks in Florida.

Some of my favourite stories in the book are about her encounters with influential artists including a great one about briefly hopping on to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue caravan with Lena. Christine actually taught Dylan a new verse to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” that she’d heard Pete Seeger sing.

A story that brought back memories for me was about a January 1976 Utah Phillips and Rosalie Sorrels concert in Saratoga and about the landmark church fire in Saratoga that happened in the middle of the night after the concert. I was there that night having driven Utah and Rosalie around on that short tour which, by the way, culminated with a concert that I produced in Montreal. (This was the tour that Utah announced he was running for president of the United States on the Sloth & Indolence ticket.)

There are also some stories about our mutual friend, Dave Van Ronk.

Christine, like so many others, was mentored by Dave and tells of how she actually first moved to New York City because Dave offered to give her guitar lessons.

And there are great, often hilarious, sections about Christine’s severe addiction to Dame Edna, how she became the first (and only) folksinger to integrate baton twirling into her stage act, and about starting up knitting circles with audience members as a pre-concert ritual.

Virtually from the time she first had any success in the music business, Christine has been one of the most generous of artists in terms of other performers. There are legions of performers who’ve benefitted from Christine’s singing their praises over the years – from peers like various members of the Four Bitchin’ Babes to legendary songwriters like Ervin Drake – and many of them get further exposure in Christine’s mem-wha.

Christine’s natural gift as a storyteller kept me in my seat turning the pages until, too quickly it seems, I’d read the last page.

--Mike Regenstreif