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The Ballad Of Carolyn Hester; Four Decades After Stardom Passed Her By, She's Singing Her Heart Out

Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
2,136 words
12 January 2005
The Washington Post
FINAL
C01
English
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved

Close your eyes and you're not in 2005 any more.

You're in a coffeehouse within harmonica range of Harvard Square. There's a guitar being strummed, a beautiful young woman singing. You're back in 1961, with the great American folk boom approaching its peak. Perhaps it's the night the scraggly kid shows up from New York. He's hoping the beautiful young woman can get him a gig, or at least bring him up for a song or two.

John F. Kennedy is president. There are Freedom Riders in Mississippi. The kid, Bob Dylan, will soon record his first album. And Carolyn Hester, Queen of the New York Folk Singers, is playing at Club 47.

Open your eyes and she's still singing, high cheekbones framed by a mane of white hair, high notes still hit in a sweet soprano voice:

Well, if somehow you could pack up your sorrows,

And give them all to me.

Well, you would lose them, I know how to use them,

Give 'em all to me.

The song could bring tears if the melody weren't such a catchy one -- and if Hester, on this frozen January night, weren't smiling so widely as she sings.

Carolyn Hester is the proud protagonist of a classic American tale. Call it "How a Star Was Almost Born." It's a story about ambition, talent, competition and the hottest musical trend of the day. You could tell it about hip-hop or punk rock or even classical opera, but in this case it's set amidst the intense, short-lived romance with traditional folk music that swept the nation from the late 1950s until the Beatles invaded in 1964.

In a winner-take-all culture, the biggest names crowd out other talent. There can be just one King at a time, or one Boss, or, in the case of the '60s folk revival, one Joan Baez, who was anointed on a Time cover in November 1962. Baez remains the female folk icon (with apologies to Judy Collins) whose name non-folkies are most likely to know.

Yet the pecking order is always clearer in retrospect, and there was a time when a lot of people thought Carolyn Hester would be The One.

"At the beginning, she was the queen of folk music -- long before Baez and Collins came along," says DJ Dick Cerri, a moving force behind the Washington-based World Folk Music Association. Last year the group gave Hester its lifetime achievement award. Saturday she'll play the Birchmere as part of WFMA's 20th annual benefit concert. Tonight she's in Annapolis at 49 West.

"Carolyn was a contender, no doubt about it," the late folk and blues singer Dave Van Ronk told journalist David Hajdu, author of "Positively 4th Street," a few years back. "Beauty, talent, charm -- she had it all."

"She was a huge star at the time in Texas," says Grammy-winning contemporary folk-country artist Nanci Griffith, a longtime admirer who stood in line for Hester's autograph in Austin around 1963 or 1964. "I've always been in awe of her."

What happened?

The answer is complicated, as these things tend to be in real life as opposed to legend. But a plot element to watch is another classic: the showbiz marriage gone wrong.

Hester was born in Waco, Tex., in 1937. Her parents moved to Washington to work for the government in 1939 -- she wore her little white boots on the train ride and remembers making snowmen on the Library of Congress lawn. But by the time she was in high school the family was in Dallas, which is where her musical life began.

She got a church choir scholarship that paid for voice lessons. Her father bought her a Sears guitar that made her fingers bleed. A teacher loaned her an album by a folk singer named Susan Reed; having a female role model fueled her ambition. When she graduated from high school, she turned down a college scholarship and headed east.

Her mother did her best to lure her home. She sent a postcard to Norman Petty, Buddy Holly's producer, who had a recording studio in the Southwest. This led to Hester's first album and a connection with Holly himself, but it didn't keep her away from New York.

She was starting to perform in Greenwich Village. Van Ronk saw her first at Gerdes Folk City -- a lovely brunette with a three-octave range. "My God, she tore the place apart," he said.

Before long she was venturing out of town. In Washington, she played the old Showboat Lounge. In Boston, a folk revival hotbed, Joan Baez came to hear her. The younger singer was "maybe 17," Hester recalls, and just beginning to be known. After the show, at Baez's request, the two sang "Virgin Mary Had One Son" together.

Back in New York, New York Times critic Robert Shelton asked Hester out to dinner. During the course of the evening, Hajdu reports, he introduced her to "a lean, dark fellow with longish black hair and a fiery glare." This was the Irish Cuban charmer Richard Farina, an advertising copywriter and would-be novelist, who said he'd come to see her next time she played in town.

He did.

Eighteen days later, they got married.

She sang "Once I Had a Sweetheart" at the reception.

More than four decades after that -- after Farina dropped her for Baez's sister Mimi; after Richard and Mimi became a well-known folk singing duo; after he finished a novel called "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me"; after he died in a motorcycle accident while celebrating its 1966 publication; and after Mimi died of cancer in 2001 -- Hester still sounds a bit startled by the force of nature who blew so suddenly in and out of her life at such a critical time.

"That was my turn to live with the whirlwind," she says.

Carolyn Hester "is one of the nicest people you'll ever know," Dick Cerri says. As such, she's relatively forgiving of Farina and the gossip-worthy psychodrama that threatened to derail her career. "I knew early on that I was in trouble," she says, "and I cried every day." But still: "I wouldn't trade it."

Yet to consider the course of the Farina-Hester whirlwind, in the light of her Almost-Stardom, is to wonder how far off track she was blown.

On their first date, her would-be Svengali told her she ate too much and would lose her nice figure if she kept it up. After they were married, he got mad at her for practicing while he was trying to write. Worst of all, he was determined to insert himself into her career. He learned to play a dulcimer she'd given him and started to join her onstage when he could. Eventually he headed for London, where he wasn't known as Carolyn Hester's husband and where he started to have some success.

"He had his work, his writing, and I got to type the manuscripts," she told Hajdu. "I had my music, and he had to have that, too."

To this day, she's irked by one small but symptomatic encroachment: Farina claiming credit for Bob Dylan's big break.

After Dylan showed up that time in Cambridge, looking for work, she invited him to share the stage at Club 47. She also asked him to play harmonica on her first major-label album, on Columbia. The contact helped Dylan get his own Columbia deal.

There's one other thing she wants to correct for the record.

Yes, it's true that she pointed Farina's pistol at him in a Paris hotel room and told him to stay away from her. This was after he had become infatuated with Mimi Baez, who was 16 at the time and living with her parents in France. Yes, it was the same pistol he had insisted Carolyn smuggle across the French border strapped to her back -- at the risk of 20 years in prison -- because, he claimed, he was afraid an Irish Republican Army connection might come back to haunt him.

But hey: She never took the safety off.

It was obvious that her marriage was over. Still, she typed the first 90 pages of her husband's novel before she flew home to arrange a Mexican divorce.

The divorce came through in 1963. In May 1964, Hester made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. But that was a year and a half after Baez's Time cover, and besides, the Beatles had already done "The Ed Sullivan Show."

In 1965, Hester filled New York's Town Hall. But she had to produce the concert herself, and besides, that was the year Dylan went electric.

The folk boom was over. And Carolyn Hester wasn't The One.

Folk music didn't suddenly disappear -- folkish types such as James Taylor and Joni Mitchell would soon get very big indeed. But like Dylan, they were singer-songwriters, not just interpreters of traditional material -- a distinction that became increasingly important. Eventually Hester would start writing her own songs, but this requirement did not play to her strengths.

In the late '60s and early '70s, she went through a rock phase. She and pianist-record producer David Blume formed a group called the Carolyn Hester Coalition, about whose album the less said the better. "You can only get it on eBay," Hester says.

Around the time of Woodstock, she and Blume got married. They moved to California and had two daughters. Eventually Blume gave up the record business and settled into a copy editing job at the Los Angeles Times. Hester put what was left of her career on hold to stay home with the kids.

Talk about your classic story lines.

"You wouldn't advise a young lady to quit anything for 10 years," she says, "but in my case, that was just the way it was going to be, that's all."

She kept her hand in a bit. Every year she'd go back to Texas for the Kerrville Folk Festival, where she took younger singers like Nanci Griffith under her wing. Griffith returned the favor, once she got big herself, by inviting Hester on tours and to recording sessions.

In 1992, she finally made it to Madison Square Garden -- as part of a Bob Dylan 30th anniversary bash.

"I think she's had the best of both worlds," Griffith says of Hester's career-motherhood combination. Hester agrees. But as the girls got older (they've got their own group, the RBIs, with their own debut CD), she was able to work more. There have been some CDs on small labels, with the most recent being a Tom Paxton tribute put out by an English outfit called Road Goes On Forever.

Now, with Almost-Stardom in the rearview mirror and Blume on keyboard -- "as an orchestra, he's very inexpensive," she jokes -- she's back on the road herself.

Club 47 has long since changed its name; it's been Club Passim for years, and it's moved a few blocks from its original Cambridge location. There are no Carolyn Hester CDs for sale in any of five nearby music stores, though you can find plenty of Joan Baez and Judy Collins. There's no Carolyn Hester vinyl, for that matter, though you might think you'd hit a gold mine when you see a sign for a boutique called Hootenanny.

Turns out it's a clothing store with a midwinter sale, and the cacophonic music it's playing is definitely not folk.

Never mind. Here's Carolyn Hester in person, a few weeks from her 68th birthday, white hair gleaming in the Passim spotlights, big smile taking years off her age. Twenty-somethings like Nelly Furtado should look so good 40 years from now.

"If you think I'm trying to make you sing, you're right," Hester tells the 50-odd assembled listeners after she opens with "Pack Up Your Sorrows" -- a Richard Farina tune, as it happens -- then moves on through "Flatlands of Texas" and starts in on "You Never Break Even in Love."

A bit later, there are technical difficulties.

"Is that a mess?" she asks Blume, who's trying to help her out.

"No -- it's not perfect, but it's not a mess," he tells her.

"Story of my life," says the contender who was almost a queen.