Rosalie Sorrels – Singing through the rain
The Salt Lake that Rosalie remembers is a far cry from the whitebread, Mormon stronghold of middle-American uptightness many might assume. “They had an incredibly interesting underground,” she maintains. “There was a Beat Generation poetry magazine, one of the best in the country, called Wild Dog. It was started in Pocatello, Idaho, by Ed Dorn. Two of his students, Gino Sky and Drew Wagnon, took it down to Salt Lake and kept it there. Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson, Lew Welch, everybody came through there because of Wild Dog.
“It was a real jazz town, too. The University of Utah had a summer jazz seminar that George Shearing ran. He brought unbelievable people there, and there was a lot of jazz there all the time.”
Rosalie took guitar lessons and sat in on a folklore class at the university taught by visiting professor Wayland Hand, who was Emeritus Professor of Folklore at UCLA. Not long after, she accompanied Hand back to Los Angeles for a seminar that included most of the U.S. academic folklore establishment of the time — Bess Lomax Hawes, Charles Seeger, John Greenway (compiler of the landmark volume American Folksongs Of Protest), along with artists such as Guy Carawan and the team of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. Yet another new world was opening up to her, and in characteristic fashion, she threw herself into it without looking back.
“I got myself a tape recorder,” she told Sing Out!, “and started accosting perfectly nice old folks who were minding their own business, asking them for their old songs and stories. I collected a couple of hundred old Mormon songs…I read everything I could get my hands on, listened to every kind of music, and I learned more than one song every day.”
She began to invite people she’d met in Los Angeles, or whose music she’d learned about — Jean Ritchie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, bluesmen Jesse “Lone-Cat” Fuller and Son House — to Salt Lake City, where she set up gigs for them. Her home became something of a salon where musicians, artists, poets and storytellers would gather to sing, party and swap ideas.
Rosalie also began to perform, sometimes accompanied by her husband on guitar, at various venues — ski resorts, coffeehouses, clubs — and occasional festivals. During this time she made her first recordings, including several albums of western folk songs and a long out-of-print solo outing on Prestige called Rosalie’s Songbag. “It was all for fun,” she reflects. “It was only a hobby for me. I was married; I thought I would stay married and have children.”
She did have children — five of them, beginning with David in 1953; then her daughters Leslie, Shelley and Holly; and finally, in ’63, Kevin — but as music became a more important facet of her life, the marriage became increasingly strained. In 1966, she was invited to the Newport Folk Festival. While she was out east, she recorded what would prove to be her breakout album, If I Could Be The Rain — although, typically, what she gave her producers at Folk Legacy wasn’t exactly what they’d bargained for.
“They had envisioned me doing an album of sentimental western songs — “‘Little Mohea’, ‘There’s An Empty Cot In The Bunk-House Tonight’,” she chuckles. “And they had already picked out an accompanist for me [she used guitarist Mitch Greenhill instead]. It was all original! Six songs of mine, and six of [Bruce] Phillips’! I got a whole lotta shit for it, but I had found my voice.”
When she returned home, though, the tension between her burgeoning celebrity and the constraints of what was, more or less, a conventional mid-20th-century marriage tightened to the breaking point. Things soon got so bad that, fearing for her safety, Rosalie found herself with no choice but to leave.
“I was 33; I didn’t know how to do anything but cook and clean and take care of children,” she recalls. “I had no marketable skills, no credentials other than having graduated from high school. I became a folk singer because I didn’t know what else to do. I [had done] some gigs in California when I was still married, at the Ash Grove, different places. I couldn’t find a job or anything, so I went down to San Francisco. Everyone told me I was too old to start a new life alone.”
In San Francisco, Rosalie had her share of high times with the hippie elite — she remembers meeting Neal Cassady (“Whenever he talked it sounded like bubbles coming up from under the water”) at a Jefferson Airplane gig, after turning down an invitation from Jerry Garcia to go to a post-show party with the Dead, the Airplane, and the Hell’s Angels — but she focused most of her energies on keeping her family together. This meant going anywhere there was work that paid decently. It also meant either taking the kids along or leaving them with someone who could be trusted while she was away. The network of friends and colleagues she’d been cultivating for years now became her lifeline.
“I met Malvina [Reynolds] at the Sweets Mill Festival, up in the mountains, near Fresno, when I was still married,” she remembers. “Malvina took me under her wing [in San Francisco] and introduced me around to people. I never lived in Malvina’s house; I stayed with two or three people that year. I started traveling farther. I was all over the place, working all the time. I went back to Boise for ’68 and ’69. Then I moved to Lena’s for maybe a year [Lena Spenser, in Saratoga, New York, was the proprietor of Cafe Lena, the longest-running coffeehouse in the U.S. and a legendary folk music venue]. Then I went back to California.
“I’d flit back and forth across; I’d move when I ran out of work. I think I never lived anywhere for more than a year, year and a half. I lived like a homeless person a lot of the time. I slept on people’s floors. I slept in New York on the Staten Island Ferry. But my kids always had a place to stay, they always had enough to eat, they always had good clothes. The money would always go back to the kids.
“Everyone was welcoming and generous. Everywhere I went, people took care of me and put me up. You could just call up and say, ‘You know anybody who’ll put me up in this place I’ve never been, where I don’t know anybody?’ They’d say yes, and there would be somebody! Incredibly kind, generous people everywhere. I believe it had a lot to do with the politics of the time. We felt we were gonna win — we thought we were gonna change everything.”