wow...every post I read makes ME think of one more experience..

where to start? This might take several posts..

in the early 1960s, out local library used to lend out LPs...and one day I picked one by some young Scottish lady named Jean Redpath...The record was "Scottish Ballad Book", and I think I paid a fine for keeping it too long. (I had no tape recorder to copy it in those days)...I just couldn't believe that voice. I could listen to Jean sing the phone book.

Still in the 60's...late '64, walking a picket line for 'voting rights' in Hattiesbug, Miss., (much to the consternation of the locals)..we were trudging 'round & 'round, bored....when directly in front of me, a small black girl about 15 years old began singing, in an absolutely beautiful, clear voice, in perfect time to our steps:

"Go tell it on the mountain
Over the hills and everywhere--
Go tell it on the mountain
To let my people go!"

...the hair stood up on my neck as various folks joined in, and we got thru maybe 4 verses before the chief of police appeared and told us "You got a permit for marchin', not for SINGIN'!"....but I could hear that song every step we took for the rest of the week. I never found out who that girl was, but she should have had a career singing.

Maybe 30 years ago, I got several volumes of the Peter Kennedy & Alan Lomax "Folksongs of Britain" series, and on Vol 2, I think, was Davy Stewart doing "The Merchant's Son and the Beggar's Daughter"....and it just grabbed me in ways .....anyway, I NOW knew what it meant to put one's whole self into a piece of music. Then again, the first time I heard Jeanne Robertson sing "My Son David" I was transfixed...wow...it felt like it WAS her son being quizzed.

......but perhaps one of the most single moving moments was one night at a little vegetarian 'coffeehouse', long since departed (The Bethesda Co-op) when, with lights low, Helen Schneyer sang "I Know Moonlight". I had heard her sing it before, and was impressed...but sometimes a singer is just 'on'....and the power of that song, with most of her local friends providing humming and harmony........ummmmmmmmmm