Gates of Horn and Ivory
And the ship, the black freighter
Turns around in the harbor
Shooting guns from her bow.
—KURT WEILL and BERTOLT BRECHT
(translated by Marc Blitzstein), “Pirate Jenny”
SUMMER in Chicago, 1960. A big, sprawling apartment on the lake, on the South Side, a sublet from friends of the owners of the Gate of Horn. When Peter and I walked into this place our eyes nearly popped out. It was huge, luxurious, on the lake, and near the University of Chicago. It was only a few miles from downtown Chicago and the club where I would be working.
The Windy City was hot as hell in the summer but even warmer with appreciation for artists and musicians, a real center of art, music, and culture. Chicago had harbored this richness going back more than a half century, when the World’s Fair of 1893 had brought together artists, architects, and visionaries of every kind. The city became a magnet for talent and boasted world-class theaters and a distinguished opera house. The lakefront, chosen for the site of the fair by Frederick Law Olmsted, offered a gleaming vista of white sails, green parks, and public gardens, with the Art Institute of Chicago and Louis Sullivan buildings strung along a winding boulevard of fine shops. There could hardly have been a better place to have a folk club where the music could flourish.
Albert Grossman and Alan Ribback, both Chicago natives, founded the Gate of Horn in 1956. I would get to know both men well over those first years of working at the club, and I liked them both enormously. The club was a true gathering place for musical greatness and represented the tastes of the two owners.
Alan and Albert told me that the name of the club came from the musings of Penelope in The Odyssey, who has a dream that she relates to a stranger:
“… I dreamed of two gates, a gate of horn and a gate of ivory. I was told that dreams which make it through the gate of horn are the dreams that can come true.”
The Gate would help many of my dreams come true.
My first night at the Gate, I was still in a cast, and swung through the entrance on my crutches. Alan’s skeptical frown greeted me. After my first show, however, his face lit up with a smile.
“You can sing here in a cast anytime,” he told me, “as long as you sing ‘The Great Selchie’!” It was his favorite song, and for many seasons he would insist I include it in my shows.
Afterward, Alan and I shook hands on my salary: $125 a week. The following year he had me back at the Gate for $250 a week. He was honest, and a handshake was all it took.
Alan knew what he liked and was generous to a fault. He had a limp from a childhood bout of polio. He introduced me to his Chicago friends, among them the actor Severn Darden from Second City; Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, the English comedy duo, who came through Chicago to perform; Nelson Algren, who wrote The Man with the Golden Arm; Barbara Siegel, who owned Barbara’s Bookstore and became a friend; and other club owners. The journalist Studs Terkel became a friend when he first interviewed me during an appearance at the Gate; Norm Pellegrini at WFMT put me on his radio show often when I worked at the club; Roy Leonard made sure folk music got on the airwaves in the Windy City; Ken Ehrlich produced a television program with the Canadian folksinger Leonard Cohen and me and would take the knowledge he gained from Midnight Special and Soundstage in Chicago all the way to the Grammys, which he has produced for decades.
Alan regaled me with his intelligence and passion—for the music as well as the politics of the times. I learned a great deal from Alan, and through him I met and worked with some wonderful artists, from Theo Bikel and Sonny Terry to Cynthia Gooding, Odetta, and the South African singer Miriam Makeba. These were experiences that would help my life as well as my career in the folk music community into which I was being initiated, where I began to find my musical place.
Albert Grossman appeared only from time to time at the Gate. He was the traveling partner, flying even then between New York, L.A., and Chicago, looking for artists to hire and, sometimes, to manage. I always liked Grossman and appreciated having a drink with him on his visits to Chicago, sharing his quiet, subtle humor. Some nights after my shows we would walk the windy streets of the Near North Side, talking or harmonizing on old sea chanties. I sometimes glanced over at Grossman as he spoke about all the artists he was looking to manage and all the groups he wanted to start, and he seemed to me like a barracuda waiting to pounce. (Bob Dylan, who first met Grossman at Gerde’s Folk City in New York and would become one of his first management clients, said Grossman looked like Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon.)
It was at the Gate of Horn, in that little club in the center of Chicago, that I began to drink in a brew of diverse musical sources and genres and appreciate musical stories from different times and cultures.
THAT first gig, I opened for Will Holt and his wife, Dolly Jonah. Will was always dressed to the nines in a tailored suit, a tie, and a crisp white shirt, and he wore his close-cropped hair neatly combed. He would pull out my chair for me, or hand me the crutch I was still using. I thought he was daring and amazing. Will and Dolly’s repertoire was wide-ranging. In the same set they might sing a Kurt Weill song, perhaps “Pirate Jenny,” and then “Lemon Tree,” a song that Will had written and Peter, Paul and Mary would make a standard. “Raspberries, Strawberries” was another of his compositions, which had been a hit for the Kingston Trio. Then he might sing “Streets of Laredo,” and Dolly might do a heart-wrenching version of “Surabaya Johnny” from Kurt Weill’s Happy End. I loved to hear Dolly sing this song. The lights framed her heart-shaped face in white while the rest of her body disappeared into the cigarette smoke and soft lighting. She staggered on her high black heels at the end, teetering toward the barstool that served as a chair on the stage behind her. She would kind of collapse and reach for her drink as the applause rose, and then toss back the contents of her glass and take a bow. It was all very startling and dramatic. Will would let her cool her heels, finishing the set with “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” a song based on a William Butler Yeats poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”
Dolly would say, as I spun out the tenth or twentieth verse to a seemingly endless ballad, “When are you going to find some up-tempo material? The audience is dying here!” I thought they were merely mesmerized! But I did start, when I was working with Dolly and Will, to take some of the advice that Bob Gibson had already given me to lighten up a little. Still, Dolly would have to sit through a lot more long, sorrowful songs about drowned maidens and silver daggers.
Will had begun his career in the 1950s, and by the time I worked with him he had made a couple of records for Stinson—The Will Holt Concert and Pills to Purge Melancholy, the latter a collection of happy-go-lucky mood-changing songs about therapy and self-help. Will had studied at Exeter and also at the School for American Minstrels in Aspen, Colorado. The school was started by the English countertenor Richard Dyer-Bennett, who recorded beautiful folk songs in a clear, vibratoless voice—and had I known, I would have tried to get over Independence Pass from Denver to study with him in Aspen.
Will and Dolly became my friends. One of the things I learned from Will was that you could protest and be a force of change while looking dapper, being elegant, and having manners. You could cut like steel, sting like a wasp, go for the jugular with language, style, wit, and music while wearing a suit and tie.
That first summer at the Gate of Horn reinforced the importance of my life with my son and my husband. The years to come would be harder, as I began to travel on my own, sleeping in strange hotels, traveling all over the country, making my nights and my days as tolerable as I could, with one-night stands and fair-weather friends.
But in the summer of 1960, in the thrill of my fourth truly grown-up, professional engagement, I went home to my husband and my baby every night, and it was heavenly—a loving and settled time. Sometimes Peter and I could find a babysitter and he would come to the Gate to watch me work. If we had been able to continue sharing our worries and our pleasures, our marriage might have stood the test of time.