Subject: RE: Hedy West - new CD from Fledg'ling
From:
Joe Offer
Date: 19 Apr 18 - 02:19 PM
I chanced upon a New York Times article about Hedy, dated 1981:
HEDY WEST RENEWING FOLK TRADITIONSBy JOHN ROCKWELL
ALTHOUGH buffeted by fashion and largely ignored by the rest of the musical world, this country's Anglo-American folk purists forge ahead. They go to concerts on a circuit of folk performers, they gather for singing and picking sessions, and they flock to special weekend and summer festivals. Moreover, they seem to have an absolutely wonderful time doing all of it.A principal keeper of the folk-music flame in the New York area is the New York Pinewoods Folk Music Club, which will present Hedy West in its last concert of the season tonight at 8 in the Public School 41 auditorium, 116 West 11th Street. Tickets are $3 and the telephone number is 594-8833 - which is also the number for information about the club and its other activities. Folkies enjoyed a brief burst of national attention in the 1960's, when an entire generation of young, folk-influenced performers evolved from their ranks and went on to wider pop and rock success; Bob Dylan was only the best-known of them. And although the Pinewoods Club, which celebrates its 15th anniversary in September, was founded at the height of that enthusiasm, it has easily survived the trends. The club's name was taken from the Pinewoods adult summer camp in Massachusetts, run by the club's parent body, the Country Dance and Song Society of America. Monthly Newsletter of Events The New York club's 650 members receive an exhaustively detailed monthly newsletter about folk events, attend some 20 club concerts a year and busy themselves with a wide range of other activities - all of them, in the words of the club's founder and president, Suzanne Szasz, 'maintaining the marriage of the amateur and the professional.' Miss West, tonight's featured performer, is maintaining another kind of marriage just now - one with a research professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook - that has recently produced her first child, eight-month-old Talitha. Miss West was born in 1938 in Cartersville, Ga., the daughter of Don West, a poet. 'My mother was always the full-time breadwinner in our family,' Miss West said the other day. 'My father was a radical in the South, and you don't always keep jobs that way. So I never grew up wondering if motherhood and jobs were a conflict.' The arrival of Talitha has put a temporary halt to her touring, however, just as a period of study between 1969 and 1974 had done. But she says she will resume her regular schedule in a couple of years, when she feels comfortable leaving her daughter with a sitter during performances. Lived in England in the 60's With her delicately timbred yet strong soprano, her widely knowledgeable yet freshly rendered repertory of traditional songs and her diverse banjo and guitar playing, Miss West has won a notable reputation on the folk circuit in this country and abroad. Between 1963 and 1969 she lived in England, toured there extensively. She then returned to pursue a master's degree in composition at Berkeley and at Stony Brook. Since the mid-70's she has again toured folk clubs and festivals in this country and in Europe. In her formal composition, Miss West works in a variety of mostly dissonant idioms, but hasn't yet found her own style. She also writes folk songs, but considers them not composition but part of an oral, un-self-conscious tradition - 'formulas that everybody has in their heads and can set down.' Still, she doesn't reject either side of her musical personality. 'Music is music,' she insists. 'As a child, I sang my family's songs, which I didn't know were 'traditional,' and I studied music formally, and in college I majored in piano. Now, I don't want to give up either kind of music.' Long Line of Folk Singing Miss West's next principal task is documenting the legacy of her grandmother, whose songs Miss West tape-recorded before the older woman's death last summer at 93. 'She is the primary source for the songs I sing,' Miss West said. 'And her primary source was her mother, Talitha, which is why Talitha is called Talitha. Our family came to Georgia in 1837, when the Cherokee lands were auctioned off.The songs they sang came from the British-American mongrel tradition.' Folk performers and fans are divided between those who adhere strictly to the old songs and recordings and those who feel free to interpret and extend the tradition. Miss West tries to strike a balance between these. ' 'Purity' is such a dead way of thinking about music,' she said. 'Maybe that's why I've studied formal music - because I didn't want to tart up the folk music. However, there's never been a folk music that was 'pure'; all of it accepted influences from the outside. 'In my family, grandmother was almost an exact repeater, but her brother Gus changed words and melodies around and was a much better performer. Deep in my soul I care for my tradition, but maybe I model myself more on Gus.'
|
sj
