Oh goodness me. Reading this thread I laughed til I cried, not a new experience where Helen is concerned. I loved it that she had to stop sometimes in the middle of a song until she could control her tears. I admired her for it. She never lost connection with the feelings.

The most poignant moment for me in Mary Cliff's program last Saturday was hearing Jonathon Eberhart's voice singing, "When you come to the end of your life's trolley ride ..." Thanks Mary for a fine set of mementoes of Helen.

It's wonderful to read the stories on this thread. Haven't seen her for a long time and they bring her very clearly to mind. To me Helen was the queen of folk music in the D.C. area and the heart and soul of the FSGW while she lived here. Her two-hour Sunday morning gospel workshop was the highlight of the FSGW Getaway. Her personality and her singing voice and her sheer love of it all just shaped the musical experience.

One of my favorite memories of Helen (besides Gordon Bok's remark that Bill quoted above, and apart from memories of hearing her sing) is from a concert at a cafe in Bethesda. She invited Riki and Jonathon to join her on the chorus. Now, if you never heard this I should explain that they didn't exactly "sing along" on the chorus. What they did was blow through their hands, like a kazoo, to make appropriate boisterous and totally irreverent trumpet noises. (You can hear it like that on the record, I think it's on "Somber, Sacred & Silly.") Helen said that when the song was recorded the producer (was that you, Sandy & Caroline?) told them to re-record it without the monkey business and she said, Nope. You get it with trumpets or not at all.