Baby You're the Best Are You Thinking Rosalie

REMEMBERING ROSALIE SORRELS

Difficult Travelin' Lady

June 24, 1933—June 11, 2017

Rosalie Sorrels grabbed her D-28 and took the Westbound—she didn't say where she was going. She was living in hospice intendance at her daughter Holly Marizu's home in Reno, Nevada. It'south a blessing that U. Utah Phillips (May 15, 1935 – May 23, 2008) preceded her in decease; for had he heard this sad news of dear Idaho folk singer Rosalie Sorrels passing at the age of 83 in Nevada—his home—information technology would have killed him anyway. I first heard her perform with him when I was a graduate educatee at SUNY-Binghamton in 1973, when she was young and beautiful. Rosalie and Utah put on a show at Caffé Lena's in Saratoga Springs that remains the single greatest concert I take e'er had the good fortune to hear.

Utah famously refused permission to Johnny Greenbacks for recording an album of his songs, simply he had no problem with Rosalie doing information technology; she recorded his If I Could Be the Rain as the title song of the start album they did together—including six of his songs and vi of hers—dorsum in 1967, fifty years agone this year. But we demand to go dorsum further than that to get some perspective on what fabricated her the artist she became—for she began as a true folklorist and "song catcher in the southern mountains," the mountains of southern Idaho.

"Rosalie Ann Stringfellow was born on June 24, 1933, in Boise, Idaho, to Walter Pendleton Stringfellow and Nancy Ann Kelly," a literary and musical liberal left family of Southern Idaho. Her parents, like their parents earlier them, had a love of language and song which they passed to their children. Her male parent worked for the highway department and the family often travelled with him as he did field work." (Wikipedia) Her female parent endemic the Book Shop downtown, and that is where Rosalie hung out and started to acquire her encyclopedic knowledge of poetry, story and song.

Rosalie Stringfellow met Jim Sorrels while performing in theater in Boise, Idaho. Jim was a lineman for the canton; he worked for the phone company and was 7 years older than Rosalie. He was as well a guitar role player and they married in 1952. They started a family in the 1950s, and, according to folklorist Polly Stewart, interviewed by the author in 2011 at USC, they moved to Salt Lake City in 1958 and became a function of the folk music burgeoning community—indeed forth with Bruce Phillips—they became its leaders.

Her vocalisation was the most inimitable matter well-nigh her performances: recollect of her every bit the white Billie Vacation. A vibrato that extended into the furthest reaches of emotional expression, she could connect with any audition—from children for whom she wrote the classic I'm Gonna Tell, based on a conversation she overheard from her own v children, to the 22-year old son she couldn't save (Hitchhiker In the Rain), to adult lovers for whom she wrote Go With Me (for Peter Rowan), to old-timers facing the end of the road (My Terminal Get-Round). Her songs embraced the whole of life's journey, as in her signature1972 Philo album Travelin' Lady—which she explored in its bittersweet tragedy and comedy. Only Rosalie could get away with writing a lullaby that fantasizes about dropping one of her babies out of a tree—her hostile Baby Rocking Song, with her priceless opening bluster:

BABY-ROCKING MEDLEY

All correct, information technology'due south 5:30 in the morning time. That kid has not quit howling now for half dozen hours. Y'all're getting sort of drastic, breaking out into a cold sweat considering you know that all those other kids are going to get upwardly in about another half hour and they're going to need cereal and peanut sandwiches and milk. And you forgot to go milk. Oh, God. All the paregoric is gone. It's gone considering y'all drank it. Things are getting awful bad and you need something else. Every culture's got i: it'south the hostile babe-rocking song. You simply can't keep all that stuff bottled upwardly inside yourself. You need to let it out some way, or you'd get foreign . . . punch the baby in the mouth . . . and yous can't practise that. You'd go an awful large ticket for it, and it makes you experience lousy. And then you take that infant and you rock it firmly, grin sweetly . . . and y'all sing the hostile baby-rocking vocal:

This is the mean solar day we requite babies away

With a one-half a pound of tea

You lot just open up the lid, and out pops the kid

With a twelve month guarantee.

This is the day we requite babies abroad

With a half a pound of tea

If y'all know whatever ladies who want any babies

Just send them round to me

[chorus:]

There's an island style out in the sea

Where babies abound up on the trees

It's oh so much fun, to swing in the dominicus

But you have to watch out if yous sneeze, you sneeze

You have to spotter out if you sneeze

—Rosalie Sorrels

From the cradle to the grave Rosalie confronted life head on. She told the funniest story I always heard—and because she often performed with America'due south greatest storyteller U. Utah Phillips, the Aureate Voice of the Bang-up Southwest, that is maxim something. Her yarn told of making a bet with a banker, and since I can't retell it in a family mag at the stop I'll give y'all the link so you tin look it upwards yourself. Rosalie knew how to leave 'em laughing.

Rosalie likewise gave the best history lesson I ever heard—about the Castilian Civil State of war. She used one of Utah's songs to illustrate the dedication and commitment of the American volunteers who became a role of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; a piano player who lost his arm named Weepy. Utah heard him at a piano bar in Spokane, Washington, playing with i hand. Curious every bit always, he stayed until after the show and asked him how he had happened to lose his arm. Weepy told him he left it on the battlefield in Spain, and Utah went home and wrote a song about the one-armed Lincoln brigade veteran pianist whose story Rosalie carried on after Utah passed away. It was transcendentally beautiful.

In story and song Rosalie Sorrels sang songs that mattered—that confronted the heartache of life without e'er giving into it. She always found a way to fight back—against suicide, confronting poverty, confronting injustice, against oppression, and when she had a life-threatening brain aneurism thirty years ago, and survived breast cancer ten years after that, against death itself. How sadly ironic that someone who treasured what Phillips dubbed "The Long Retentivity" the title of their last album together in 1996, with an introduction by Pete Seeger—would wind upwardly with dementia, and have to face watching—like Charley in Flowers for Algernon—her precious memories disappear.

Nonetheless, she celebrated life to the utmost. I all the same remember vividly when Dot Harris, who coordinated the Barn Folk Club at UC Riverside, told me that Rosalie had been diagnosed with this aneurism and was fighting for her life. Nosotros spoke about her health updates a number of times and historic when Rosalie was able to begin performing again. Of grade Dot booked her at the Barn immediately and she gave a comeback concert that had a sense of both urgency and fragility about information technology—a sense that nosotros could not accept her music for granted—she might not always be there. It was a heroic effort and reminded me of the last tape Cisco Houston made—when he—like Rosalie in time—was dying of cancer and knew he might not alive to make another. Rosalie sang her heart out—like it was at present or never. She went dorsum to Boise, Idaho—where she was born—and left her fans with an appreciation for the connectedness folk music makes with the whole customs that embraces it.

When she could no longer perform—like Hemingway who too came from Idaho—she went back home with "grace under pressure"—Hemingway's definition of courage—to Grimes Creek, near Idaho Metropolis, and lived in the colorful log cabin her begetter had built as a immature human being. She fabricated information technology colorful, with an amazing overhead peace quilt she received from the Boise Peace Project in 2001 and attached in a higher place her bed, illustrated with photos, quilt patches, paintings and favorite sayings. The largest such analogy is in the center, from which the others radiate out, her inspiration as a folk-jazz singer, Billie Holiday.

Every time she lay down, similar Toulouse Lautrec in the final scene of the movie starring Jose Ferrer, she was able to watch a gathering parade of figures from her sometime lifetimes come to say farewell~ including Jean Ritchie, Jerry Jeff Walker, Malvina Reynolds—who influenced her equally a songwriter and whose songs Rosalie performed in a one-woman evidence dedicated to her retention after Malvina passed away in 1976—the same year she lost her oldest son David to suicide at merely 22—and folk-country vocaliser Tom Russell, who wrote a song for her called Pork Loin and Poetry, after a memorable visit to Grimes Creek; it volition be on a iv-CD boxed Tribute to Rosalie Sorrels now in the works.

In 1966 she got her first major booking for a national audience, at the Newport Folk Festival. Possibly not coincidentally it was the same yr she left her husband, with whom she had recorded a number of albums (all now available on Smithsonian Folkways) of traditional songs from Idaho and Utah, including Songs of the Mormon Pioneers she had painstakingly collected in those southern mountains. And that is where she and Utah parted ways—intellectually speaking. Rosalie had a profound respect for Mormon culture and was steadfast to its folk music contributions, whereas Utah tended to refer to it only in satiric and comic terms—"The only identify you can get virgin wool in Utah is from the sheep who can outrun the Mormons."

Rosalie's first albums were recorded with Jim Sorrels accompanying her on guitar, and remain standards of folk song collecting with brilliant annotation by Austin Fife, who edited one of the start books of cowboy songs. It was simply after Newport that she began to add her own songs into the mix. That is why I treasure her as a folk singer/songwriter and not just equally a singer-songwriter. Her songs—like Phillips' and Bob Dylan's—grew out of a deep understanding of traditional music.

Most chiefly in terms of revealing and affectionate who she was as both a person and an artist who would come up to embody the women'south motion, she may have left her hubby only she never left her children. She carried all five of them with her as she toured across the state—in a Ford Econoline. Nanci Griffith paid tribute to in her song for Rosalie:

She drove west from Salt Lake City to the California coastline

She hitting the San Diego Pike doing sixty miles an hour

She had a hubby on her bumper

She had five restless children

She was singing sugariness as a mockingbird in that Ford Econoline

[Chorus:]

She'southward the salt of the earth

Directly from the bosom of the Mormon church

With a vox like wine

Cruising along in that Ford Econoline.

Polly Stewart fabricated a memorable observation in the interview I conducted for FolkWorks in 2011—bachelor on our website. "Afterward leaving Salt Lake Metropolis at separate times in the late 1960s, each fell into professional person folk singing more by catastrophe than past pattern. Sorrels was of a sudden a single parent with five children to rear and no job; Phillips was an out of work labor organizer, unemployable in Utah because of his loftier-contour politics."

Later in the interview Professor Stewart recaptures the moment when their hybrid folk vocalizer-storyteller performance style grew out of a theatre production created past Rosalie: "From the artistic perspective, probably the defining moment in the lives of both Sorrels and Phillips was in March 1963, when the 2 of them performed in a full-length production at the Academy of Utah, scripted and staged by Sorrels, called Confront of a Nation, a spoken collage of prose and poetry past Thomas Wolfe, Woody Guthrie, Nelson Algren, and John Dos Passos, interspersed with songs by Woody Guthrie, Bruce Phillips, and others.19 A local radio announcer, Willy Lucas spoke the poems and narrative portions and Phillips and Sorrels sang the songs."

Call information technology a portrait of the creative person as a young woman—and it is well worth keeping in mind adjacent to the belatedly and gripping photograph of Rosalie Sorrels in the throes of dementia and colon cancer that took her life—without her glorious hair, and nonetheless at peace and almost Buddha-similar in her sense of having left cipher unsaid or undone. It was such a privilege to have her grace the national stage for so long, and to have been able to recognize the real affair. She gave us the real music and stories of a nearly forgotten America—the country that has been zip if non caricatured by its current leader so ignorant of American history. If y'all want to remember America at her best, recollect Rosalie Sorrels; bound for glory.

To my friend Ellen Sway for breaking the sad news to me, and encouraging me to write this obituary, this remembrance is gratefully dedicated.

Rosalie's children are planning a memorial for her in Boise, Idaho. Her ashes will exist scattered on Grimes Creek

cf.:

Rosalie Sorrels Disography (Wikipedia)

When Wise Women Speak – Article on Rosalie Sorrels by Jean Sheldon

Joke of the Twenty-four hour period version of her banking company-teller gem.

Rosalie is survived by her daughters Holly Marizu and Shelley Ross, her son Kevin, her brother Jim, five grandchildren and ii peachy-grandsons. Her daughter Leslie died in 2016.

Folk singer Ross Altman has a PhD in Modern Literature from SUNY-Binghamton; he belongs to Local 47 (AFM); Ross may be reached at greygoosemusic@aol.com

sandersabso1986.blogspot.com

Source: https://folkworks.org/milestone/remembering-rosalie-sorrels/

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