Always a Song: Singers, Songwriters, Sinners, and Saints – My Story of the Folk Music Revival by Ellen Harper & Sam Barry

Author:Ellen Harper & Sam Barry [Harper, Ellen & Barry, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, music, Genres & Styles, Folk & Traditional, art, Women Artists
ISBN: 9781797201580
Google: s_j6DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Published: 2021-01-26T23:27:18.319110+00:00

If you are able to sing a song, whistle a tune, tell a story, dance a dance, strum, bow, pick, pound, blow, or tap on an instrument, you are welcome to stay at our house. Or so it seems. If you have ever taken in stray cats, you know that as soon as one is gone, another shows up in its place. There were so many guests in our home: Molly, and the storyteller Richard Chase—the only guest ever asked to leave—and a friend of Joanne’s named Sharon, and Mike Seeger and so many other performing artists. There is Guy Carawan, a frequent guest over the years, famous for introducing the protest song “We Shall Overcome” to the American civil rights movement, and the accomplished folk dancers Peter and Polly Gott. Polly teaches me an old Halloween song about getting lost in a hayfield while my father teaches Peter how to build and repair instruments.

Not everyone is a famous performer or gifted musician. One day a young man named JC arrives on a motorcycle, builds a lean-to in the backyard, and moves in. My father lets him stay there and do some odd jobs in exchange for food and a guitar. I don’t ask why. This is just the way it is.

Another stray in my parents’ collection is Dave Copeland, a fisherman who specializes in singing whaling songs and sea shanties. He is good, but the demand for whaling songs and sea shanties is limited and his music career soon runs aground. He sells my mother his little green Hillman Husky, an English car she thinks is cute. I love the Husky—and hate it. I have to park it facing downhill so I can jump-start it. Parts fall off when I drive over railroad tracks and speed bumps. Sometimes the hatchback pops open. I have to stomp the brakes to get the door to slam shut. The Hillman finally dies for good on Garey Avenue in Pomona, leaving me and my mother stranded by the side of the road.

“Not such a cute car, now, is it?” asks my father when he picks us up.

As the end of my senior year approaches, I introduce an actual boyfriend into this chaotic lifestyle of people and music and instruments and houseguests. Jeff is my age. He wears white fitted T-shirts and jeans, works on his car, and listens to KFWB, the local radio station that is popular among kids our age. We go to In-N-Out Burger and park in the orange groves. Jeff is my idea of normal because our relationship isn’t complicated by politics or an age difference or life-and-death issues. Jeff has never seen anything like my family and does not know what to make of us, but he likes me and he tries gamely to fit in. We’re looking forward to summer break.

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