SORRELS SINGING

Folk singer who channelled a tough life into hypnotic tunes

Rosalie Sorrels, a singer who drew on her tempestuous life in songs of struggle and heartache that inspired a generation of rising folk musicians in the 1980s, died on Sunday in Reno, Nevada, at the home of her daughter Holly Marizu. She was 83 and had been suffering from dementia and colon cancer.

Sorrels first came to widespread attention at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, where she performed traditional songs from Idaho, her native state, and Utah, where she lived with her family. She soon began writing her own material, about life on the road, her marital difficulties and the challenges of raising children. She then broadened her scope to include social issues like prison reform, suicide prevention and women’s rights.

Sorrels was influenced by Billie Holiday, and her jazzinflected phrasings often perplexed her accompanists. But she delivered her songs with a throbbing intensity that came straight from the folk tradition. The critic John Rockwell, describing her voice in The New York Times in 1979, wrote: “It’s full and rich, with a plaintive vibrato that thins out delicately on top, unless she’s pushing for volume, in which case it becomes – if such a thing is possible – an evocative, stirring bray.”

Sorrels developed a storytelling approach, surrounding her songs with tales of her childhood, her parents and grandparents and the early settlers of the West. The effect could be bewitching. “It’s usually a big dark room, and there’s this woman onstage with this beautiful, rich, velvety voice who’s telling you this story or singing you a song, and then she stops and she tells a little story, and then the song continues, and she stops,” singer Christine Lavin said in 2003. “It’s like you’re sitting around a campfire and there’s this great wise shaman. And it completely transports you out of yourself.”

Although she performed before multitudes at Woodstock in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1972, Sorrels didn’t break through to fame and fortune. She once estimated that she had never earned more than $20,000 in a single year. She spent most of her career in small clubs and often performed, gratis, at benefits for a variety of social causes.

But her personal songwriting style and intimate way with audiences influenced younger folk artists like Lavin, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Nanci Griffith, whose song Ford Econoline paid tribute to Sorrels’ travels around the country, five children in tow.

The music historian Elijah Wald, writing in The Boston Globe in 1985, called Sorrels “a legend in folk music circles,” adding: “She travelled around the country while raising five children. She drinks strong men under the table and is the first one up in the morning, bright and cheery and planning one of her famous dinners. And she can make the noisiest barroom crowd shut up and listen when she sings.”

Born Rosalie Ann Stringfellow on 24 June 1933, in Boise, Idaho, her father, Walter, was an engineer for the state highway department. Her mother, the former Nancy Ann Kelly, ran a bookshop in Boise. Both loved song and poetry. Rosalie, capitalising on her father’s offer of 50 cents for each “chunk” of poetry she could recite, once pocketed three dollars by memorising Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.

She sang and played leading roles in high school drama productions. After being accepted to the University of Idaho on a drama scholarship, she was raped and became pregnant. Sent to a home for unwed mothers in Los Angeles, she gave birth to a daughter, whom she put up for adoption. While performing at the Boise Little Theatre, she fell in love with a fellow actor, Jim Sorrels, a telephone lineman by trade. They married in 1952 and moved to Salt Lake City, where their house became a magnet for visiting artists, singers and writers.

Sorrels began tuning in to the folk singing traditions of the West. She learned to play the guitar and studied folk songs that her grandmother hadpastedintoascrapbook. “I got myself a tape recorder and started accosting perfectly nice old folks who were minding their own business, asking them for their old songs and stories,” Sorrels told the folkmusic magazine Sing Out! in 2004. “I collected a couple of hundred old Mormon songs.”

The Smithsonian Institution’s Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage recorded her performing a selection of Western folk songs, accompanied by her husband on guitar, and released it in 1961 as Folk Songs of Idaho and Utah. That year she also recorded Rosalie Sorrels Sings Songs of the Mormon Pioneers, accompanied by her husband and the Singing Saints.

Turning manager, Sorrels brought Joan Baez and Jean Ritchie to Salt Lake City. Ritchie returned the favour by inviting Sorrels to sing at Newport.

It was a pivotal moment. That year she left her husband and recorded the album If I Could Be the Rain. Released in 1967, it included six of her own songs. She made good on the record’s promise in 1972 with the album Travelin’ Lady, whose title song, about leaving her husband and heading out on the road, became her signature.

Sorrels lived a vagabond life, moving from town to town and staying with friends, often “parking” her children as she went on tour.

She recorded two dozen albums, including Miscellaneous Abstract Record No. 1 (1982), a collection of her favorite traditional songs. Two of her albums were nominated for Grammy Awards – Strangers in Another Country: The Songs of Bruce ‘Utah’ Phillips and My Last Go-round: Rosalie Sorrels and Friends (2004), a live recording of a tribute concert.

Sorrels moved back to Idaho in 1983 and settled into a cabin her father had built near Idaho City.

In addition to her daughter Holly, she is survived by another daughter, Shelley Ross; a son, Kevin; five grandchildren and two great-grandsons.

Speaking in 2005, Sorrels summed up her career: “I’m an actress. I’m a troubadour. I take the news from place to place. I do it with music. I do it with poetry and stories, and I try to connect.” © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

“It’s like you’re sitting around a campfire and there’s this great wise shaman. And it completely transports you out of yourself”