Cle Elum Girl.

Maggie has Cle Elum pretty well nailed. Rough town in the early days, fairly nice little community now. It's about eighty miles east of Seattle, in the Cascade Mountains, just to the east of Snoqualmie Pass on Interstate 90. It's only a couple of miles from Roslyn, the little mining town that stood in for Cicely, Alaska in Northern Exposure.

Nancy-Lu Patterson (née Gellerman; she graduated from Roosevelt High School a year before I did) was a, tall, willowy, beautiful young woman with long, flowing light-brown hair. She possessed a bundle of undifferentiated talent that she could focus on just about anything she chose and everything she turned her hand to, she did well. Bob, I'm sure, remembers the mural on the huge (about 4' by 20') sheet of paper that was used as the backdrop for the Pacific Northwest Folklore Society booth at the big, city-wide arts, crafts, and hobbies fair at the Hec Edmondson Pavilion in 1953 (this was the first time Bob Nelson and I met). Nancy-Lu painted that. In a style appropriate for a cartoon poster, she depicted scenes from four or five folk songs. I can't remember what all she did, but I think it showed Sweet William on his death bed as he died of love for the haughty Barbara Allen, complete with intertwined rose and brier; a reclining cowboy with comrades gathered 'round from The Streets of Laredo; and a couple ships firing smoky broadsides at each other from Henry Martin or any of a number of pirate songs and sea ballads. The one that drew the most attention was The Foggy Foggy Dew, but I'll just let your imagination play with that one.

Sometime in the very late Forties or very early Fifties, Nancy-Lu had occasion to be in Cle Elum. There, in a restaurant or tavern, she met a woman who had lived in the town for a long time and they fell to talking, particularly about the woman's rather dismal life there. The woman's story struck Nancy-Lu as very sad—and the sort of thing that folk songs are made of. Nancy-Lu was interesting in folk music and she sang a bit, but despite the fact that she didn't really fancy herself a song-writer, she felt impelled to write Cle Elum Girl.

She taught the song to Walt, and he sang it quite a bit. At the party after Pete Seeger's concert at the Wesley House auditorium in 1954, she sang it for Pete and told him the story. He was very interested and he wrote down the words, but I don't know if he ever did anything with it.

I haven't seen Nancy-Lu since the Fifties, and it's been decades since I've heard the song. The tune, as I recall, was very similar to Leadbelly'sBlack Girl (In the Pines), but not quite the same. Nancy-Lu may have had that in mind when she wrote the words. If one were to sing it to the tune of Black Girl and "folk process" it a bit, you'd probably come pretty close.

Don Firth