Thanks, Bruce. Sue Kessell just posted the Tribune article to the FOLKDJ-L, so I assume we could add it here.

FOLK SINGER LEFT A LASTING MELODY IN MANY HEARTS
Eric Zorn.

The tune "Gay Gordons" changed Marjorie Ann "Gerry" Breen's life on a hot June night in 1952. She was an aspiring 22-year-old Chicago folk singer and had been invited to appear on a live performance program on radio station WFMT, then a very obscure FM station that broadcast a hodgepodge of programs from studios in a West Side hotel. Among the other performers that night was George Armstrong, 25, a bagpiper who she later said struck her as a "glamorous creature." She was looking for an excuse to speak to him, and found it when at last he played something she recognized--"Gay Gordons." She said to him, "I know the dance that goes with that tune. Do you?" He did. Armstrong put down his bagpipes, and, with both of them humming, they danced Gay Gordons up and down the hotel hallway. Less than two years later they were married.

And so began what many call "the first family of Chicago folk," a partnership that both nurtured and produced traditional music for four decades until George Armstrong's death in 1993.

Gerry Armstrong had a voice "of soaring purity," remembered Studs Terkel, who often emceed shows in which she sang. "If you needed to cast someone to sing the role of the Virgin Mary, it would have to be Gerry," he said.

The Armstrongs were never big box office nor did they sell millions of records or write famous songs. Instead they collected, performed and recorded the best of the old material and helped prevent the local scene from straying too far from its roots during folk's commercial boomlet in the late 1950s and early 60s.

"They were the keepers of the flame, the folk conscience of Chicago," said former WFMT program director and folk-music host Norm Pellegrini, who engineered their early recordings. These recordings include a 1961 album titled "Simple Gifts," from a Shaker hymn that became their signature song.

They performed at the opening of the Old Town School of Folk Music in 1957 and guided the booking for the first University of Chicago Folk Festival in 1961--two institutions that also guarded tradition. Gerry added storytelling to her performance repertoire and published several storybooks for which George, an illustrator by trade, did the artwork.

"(Folk) was just sort of a hobby that gradually consumed our lives " Gerry told local folklorist Paul Tyler in a 1990 interview, the tape of which is punctuated frequently by her merry laugh.

"Their house (in Wilmette) was always full of music," said veteran singer Art Thieme. "They were a real inspiration."

Several hundred of those who were inspired or otherwise touched by Gerry Armstrong turned out Wednesday afternoon to say goodbye to her in a "ceremony of joy" at what her daughter Rebecca Armstrong said was her mother's "favorite spot on this green earth," the beach at Gillson Park in Wilmette.

Armstrong, 69, died Sunday afternoon at home after a three-month illness. The family has tentative plans for a public memorial concert on Sunday, Oct. 31, at the Lake Street Church in Evanston.

She died "her face aglow with triumphant passion," according to a poem written Monday and read at Wednesday's service by Maureen Flannery, a friend who attended the all-night singing party that followed Armstrong's death.

Armstrong's other daughter, Jennifer, a professional folk singer now based in Boston, sang an emotional tribute. So did Jennifer's grown daughters--Susannah and Georgia Rose--who have recently released their own CD, a recording that demonstrates the Armstrong family tradition is in no danger of fading away.

In the end, the gathering sent Gerry Armstrong off on the same note on which she came in, figuratively speaking. On a hot September afternoon in 1999, Jennifer Armstrong picked up the bagpipes and, just as her late father had 47 years earlier, began to play "Gay Gordons."

And as she played the song that started it all, she began to march. The procession followed her several hundred yards out to a pier that juts into Lake Michigan.

Rebecca Armstrong stood on a high rock and faced everyone. "A blessing on all of you and on my mother's spirit," she said, casting a flower into the waves. "May it sing on throughout eternity."

(ericzorn@aol.com)