So Early in the Spring
So early, early in the spring
I shipped on board to serve my king
I left my dearest dear behind
She of times swore her heart was mine.
—Traditional, “So Early, Early in the Spring”
ON the eighth of January 1959, in the bitter cold of a Colorado winter after twenty-eight hours of labor in the Seventh-Day Adventist Hospital in Boulder, my son, Clark, was born, a perfect, beautiful boy, my little shining light. He had blue eyes and soft red hair and the temperament of an angel.
Peter and I were just starting out in our life together, a young couple content to spend the cold winter huddled in front of our electric heater, happily watching our son grow. We were barely squeaking by financially. I had a job filing papers at the University of Colorado there in Boulder, and Peter was studying at night, delivering newspapers at four in the morning before going off to the university, where he was working on his bachelor’s degree in English literature.
I came up with ingenious ways to live within our meager budget. I remember one month spent making steak and kidney pie and freezing it; we had steak and kidney pie for six weeks. I had also started combining sugar and mash into a very fine homebrew as an alternative for the 3.2 horse piss that called itself domestic beer. It was potent stuff, if it got the chance to age; more than one bottle exploded in the closet of our tiny apartment.
At six o’clock on a freezing winter morning in March 1959, I was still huddled down among the covers, luxuriating in those last moments of sleep before I had to feed the baby and get the day started. Peter had returned from delivering his papers and was stomping the snow off his boots and making my morning coffee.
“I just had a thought,” Peter said, handing me a big mug of steaming coffee. I sipped it and looked at him gratefully. Coffee was already my second drug of choice.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Why don’t you get a job doing something you know how to do? Like singing?”
The suggestion excited and energized me. I called my dad in Denver and through Al Fike, an entertainer he knew, I was able to get an audition at Michael’s Pub.
There were three clubs in Boulder at that time—Tulagi’s, a relatively unremarkable place to hang out over a few beers; the Sink, a reeking, seedy spot mostly for students who just wanted to get drunk; and Michael’s, a pub that served pitchers of 3.2 percent beer and “real Italian pizza.” Sometimes you could hear music—an accordion player or maybe a barbershop quartet or some ragtime piano at Michael’s. But none of the three clubs had ever featured—or had even thought of featuring—folk music.
The night of the audition I fed Clark his dinner and put him in his father’s arms. With the folk songs I had collected and polished ringing in my head, and dressed like a troubadour, with my tight black pants and red silk top that came to my knees, my old roughed-up Guild guitar in its case, I drove down to Michael’s Pub in the cold. My hair was in a pixie cut just below my ears, a cut my husband Peter had given me by putting a bowl on my head and me praying as he slid the scissors around my head, that he wouldn’t cut off my ears.
The owner, Mike Bisesi, quieted the college kids in the big, smoky room and announced me.
“Surprise! A folksinger will now entertain everyone with her”—he looked over at me with a wink—“folk songs!”
I could hear people ordering more beer or going on with their conversations as I stepped up onto the stage and into the spotlight, my guitar tuned and my heart in my mouth. I waited. And waited a while longer, until the talking quieted down. I suppose they figured they’d better quiet down or I’d never go away, and that after I had sung, they could get back to the business of enjoying a night out.
The smell of beer and pizza filled my nostrils, and the cigarette smoke hovered over the entire room. The sound system was good, and as I started to sing and to play the guitar, the eyes of sixty or so college students began to focus on me, listening to the songs. The crowd would sing along on the choruses of songs they knew, such as “The Gypsy Rover,” but otherwise the room was silent except for my voice and guitar. When I finished, thunderous applause filled Michael’s. I had to go back for an encore, now no longer nervous but pleased and happy. Mike took my elbow as I came off the stage after the second encore and I was smiling at my apparent success.
There was still loud clapping in the room, and many people were getting up from their tables, coming over to tell me how much they had enjoyed the music. Mike pulled me toward the kitchen in the back.
“First I have to tell you that I absolutely hate folk music!” he said. My face fell. But Mike was not finished.
“You are hired. Five nights a week, three shows a night, a hundred dollars a week. You start tomorrow.” He smiled at me, this time with real pleasure.
I was thrilled! I had a job. I would be able to support my family and do what I loved. I felt like the luckiest woman in the world!
I practiced and learned more new songs, listened to recordings, and sought out other people who were doing the same. I had no illusions about my singing or my voice. I knew I could sing well enough when playing the guitar or the piano, but I thought of myself mainly as an interpreter, a teller of stories.
Mike kept hiring me, week after week. He put signs in the windows and ads in the Boulder paper, and the people came to see me. The girl in the tights had broken the barrier. Boulder, Colorado, had a folk music club.
I was, officially, a folksinger.
And I would never have to audition for a job again!