Rosalie Sorrels – Singing through the rain
As always, though, Sorrels’ set also provides a penetrating glimpse into a life that has careened from the ecstasies of freedom-charged road trips and boho adventure into the torments of devastating personal loss, and back again. Along the way, she’s raised children and embraced lovers; spoken up and sung out for causes including women’s rights and workers’ rights, nonviolence, and environmental justice; crisscrossed the country too many times to count (“I think of myself as a migrant worker”); compiled a volume of Idaho folklore; proclaimed herself, among other things, “Rosa Bizzario, The Famous Outlaw Queen”; and survived the distinction of being perhaps the only living human to have received a “Wretched Excess of the Year” award from Hunter Thompson.
To hear her tell it, Rosalie Ann Stringfellow was destined to be a free spirit almost from the moment she was born in Boise, Idaho, on June 24, 1933. Her earliest memories are of being initiated into a wonderland of the imagination, a world of miracle and delight into which she leapt with absolute abandon, and which — by her own admission — she’s never really left.
“Everybody told stories in my family,” she recalls, her voice softening as the memories return. “Everybody was interested. And they also taught me. My mother’s father — James Madison Kelly — taught me all the soliloquies from Hamlet when I was 5 years old. My grandmother said, ‘She’ll never understand them, Jim!’ He said, ‘She’ll understand everything soon enough; she needs to get the music of the words now.’
“We had wall-to-wall books everywhere. They taught me mythology — Greek and Roman, Celtic mythology, Babylonian, Hawaiian. And Norse; Loki the Trickster was my favorite god. I knew the names of all the gods; I used to play with them up in the trees.”
In Rosalie’s world, intellectuals, scholars and storytellers were just regular folks, hard-working people with a lust for life. They seasoned even their most prosaic activities with literary and cultural riches (Grandfather Kelly would thunder Shakespearean curses at his horses — “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!” — as he sweated behind them at the plough), but did so with an utter lack of pretension.
Rosalie’s father, Walter Stringfellow, was a highway engineer with a roguish bent and a passion for wilderness and solitude. According to Rosalie, both he and her mother wore their erudition lightly. “My father lived in the moment all the time,” she recollects. “He’d do things like jump up and walk on his hands. He was brilliant — really, really interesting.
“My father and mother were very involved in politics. My mother was a precinct committeewoman, she was in the PTA; my dad sang with the Elks glee choir. [Later] my mother was running a bookshop. Anybody who was literate appreciated their literacy, but I don’t think they made a big deal about it. Everybody always liked ’em, and they got along with everybody.”
Indeed, Rosalie was taught early on that respect for all people — and for all things, including the earth itself — was both proper behavior and an indelible part of the history of the land on which she was growing up. Her father’s father, Robert Stanton Stringfellow, was an Episcopal missionary who had migrated west from his native Culpepper, Virginia, as a young man. He approached his Indian congregations as equals, as people from whom he could learn at least as much as he could ever teach them. “My family liked everybody; they thought everybody was interesting,” she shares. “And I was raised like that.”
Not all, though, was sweetness and light in the Stringfellow household. “Dad drank too much and died too young,” Rosalie told Sing Out! magazine in 2004, and in her performances she has sometimes remembered, with disarming offhandedness, how his arguments with her mother could turn ugly, even physical. But the bond they shared was inviolable. In her essay “That’s It,” which Rosalie included in Report From Grimes Creek After A Hard Winter, a compilation of her mother’s writings (Limberlost Press), Nancy Stringfellow remembered how the passion she and Walter shared for the nurturing uplift of great poetry could give them power to weather any storm:
“Once, long ago, when the old cabin was still standing, Mother Nature unleashed her forces, and for a whole day the valley rang like a gong and the lightning did a war dance from cliff to cliff….The storm went on all night. Trees crashed and boulders rolled from the cliffs. In the darkness Walt got up, lit the lamp, and started hunting through the shelf of books. I rolled over and groggily supplied him with the [Robert Burns] quotation I knew he was searching for:
‘The doubling storm roars thro’ the woods;
The lightnings flash from pole to pole;
Near and more near the thunders roll.’
“‘That’s it,’ he grunted, and came back to bed.”
Darker storms were gathering. By her mid-teens, Rosalie was as consumed with music as she was poetry and mythology. “Everybody in the family sang,” she says. “Dad and my uncles sang opera all the time. And they played it around the house. I remember listening to records, Bjorling and Caruso. I could still sing you phrases from a lot of those arias, because I heard ’em so often.
“I wanted to be an actress, too; the idea of acting and singing at the same time seemed perfect. When I was 14, I went to Los Angeles to see La Boheme, and I heard [Brazilian soprano] Bidu Sayao — she had the most perfect human voice I ever heard. I thought, ‘Well, if I can’t sing like that, then I don’t want to sing that.’
“Next, I wanted to sing jazz. I don’t think there was a song Billie Holiday had recorded that you’d play the first two bars and I wouldn’t recognize it right away. I never got to see Charlie Parker, but I had all his 78s. I knew every word Lenny Bruce ever said; I knew every word Lord Buckley ever said. I heard about those people from people who were into jazz.”
Soon, though, the dreamy young hipstress found herself sidetracked by a combination of personal misfortune and the puritanical ferocity of Eisenhower-era America. When she was 16, she endured a gruesome illegal abortion; about a year later she got pregnant again (“Nobody knew about it — they whipped me right out of there”) and gave birth to a baby girl, who was put up for adoption. In the process she lost a four-year drama scholarship at the University of Idaho, as well as, by her own account, “my desire to be an actress, my self-respect.” In 1952, after she’d returned from the Booth Memorial Home for Unwed Mothers in Los Angeles, she married Jim Sorrels and moved with him to Salt Lake City.