Carolyn Hester’s story is emblematic of the journey folk singers embarked on when they decided to build careers singing the old songs. Hers is an archetypal story. When she came to Greenwich Village to further her career, she had no idea that the Village was going to turn her into a world-traveling singing activist. As far as a career goes, she had come a long way already and was steadily becoming better known. She had released her first album, Scarlet Ribbons, on Coral Records. That record came about in an unusual way and served to show how open the folk music community was back in the early days before the folk revival. She had been playing guitar and singing around Texas, where she grew up, when her mother heard that a man named Norman Petty owned and operated a recording studio in nearby Clovis, New Mexico. Her mother cold-called Petty and informed him that her daughter sang folk music and he should hear her. Petty invited Hester to come up to Clovis to audition. Hester was excited by the invitation; one of the artists Petty recorded was Buddy Holly, whom she revered. “My mother didn’t know who Buddy Holly was but I did. We went up there, I sang for Norman and he said, ‘Why don’t we make a record?’ We recorded my first album and it came out on Coral Records. I was signed to Coral, Buddy was on Brunswick and both labels were owned by Decca.”
Hester and Holly became good friends. He taught her some of his songs and played guitar on four of her recordings, the tapes of which are long lost. Both the studio copies and her personal copies have disappeared. It has long been rumored that Holly played guitar on Scarlet Ribbons, but Hester says that isn’t true. He did, however, play on other sessions that were lost before they could be released.
Hester’s New York move grew out of the restlessness that nearly every developing artist feels. It came about because she wanted, at the age of eighteen, to live “in my own mind.” She had a classmate who aspired to be a dancer, so when they graduated from high school, the two of them and a third girl drove to New York City. “That first night we were in Greenwich Village, I saw it was going to be amazing but I didn’t know a whole lot of my life was going to be in Greenwich Village.”
At that time, Greenwich Village served as the center of alternative culture in New York City. It always had. In the twenties it had become a haven for the city’s Bohemians, sheltering and nourishing such avant-garde artists as poet Maxwell Bodenheim, dancer Isadora Duncan, and playwright Eugene O’Neill. The off-off Broadway theater started there and by the forties experimental theater companies such as the Living Theater and the Theatre of the Absurd had their homes in the Village. The music scene was thriving: The Village Vanguard, The Village Gate, and the Bottom Line all operated simultaneously.
By the late fifties the Beats came to the Village in search of cheap rent and an escape from the conformity that the Eisenhower years had created. There they could be themselves. The folk singers followed the Beats, and by the early sixties clubs and coffeehouses like Gerde’s Folk City, Cafe Au Go Go, Cafe Wha, and the Gaslight blanketed the area. Every Sunday afternoon, all of the folk singers gathered in Washington Square Park, playing and singing for the love of the music.1 This then was the neighborhood that Carolyn Hester settled in. It was also the neighborhood that helped turn her into a civil rights and anti-war activist.
Hester had not been there long when her burgeoning career received a jump-start. One of her roommates was an actress who landed a job at Circle in the Square Theater in Washington, D.C. The company was going to be doing Ibsen’s The Purification, and they had a musician on stage for the entire performance. That musician was jazz and classical guitarist Charlie Byrd. “He said he’d developed an interest in folk music and my friend said, ‘I have a friend who is a folk singer.’ Byrd said, ‘[H]ave her come on down, maybe we’ll have a folk night or something.’” So Hester took a Greyhound bus down to D.C. and auditioned for Byrd with George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Byrd was impressed. Hester remembers, “What happened was, Charlie Byrd said ‘I’m going to be going to Brazil with Stan Getz to do shows and record.’” Byrd owned a club in Annapolis, Maryland, where he performed nightly and needed to cover the time he was going to be gone with other performers. “Mose Allison did two weeks. Shirley Horn did two weeks and I did two weeks.” Hester’s career climbed from that appearance, and she began receiving offers to perform in better venues. “I played the Blue Dog Cellar in Baltimore and [folk music DJ] Dick Cerri came walking in. He said, ‘I know you played for Charlie Byrd and I have your record and have already put it on the air. You’ll have to come do my show.’ So I became quite at home in the D.C. area.”
After a second album was released on the Clancy Brothers’ Tradition label, Hester had become important enough to be signed to Columbia Records by the legendary producer John Hammond. Preparing for her first album for that label she told Hammond, who was producing it, that she wanted the noted session musicians Bill Lee (bass) and Bruce Langhorne (lead guitar) to play. She also asked for a young harmonica player who had never recorded before named Bob Dylan, whom she had met at Gerde’s Folk City. She had been headlining there, and one weekend night for her last song she announced she was going to do a song Buddy Holly taught her. After she sang, a kid in the audience crowded up front and asked her if she really had known Buddy Holly. She said she had, and she and the kid talked for a long time about Holly and his music, which the kid loved. That kid was Bob Dylan. The two stayed in touch, became friends, and when she signed with Columbia, Dylan approached her about participating in the recording session.
“Bob heard I was recording a new album and asked if he could play guitar on it. I told him I already had a guitar player and asked if he wanted to play harmonica. My father had played harmonica on my first album and I loved that sound. We got in the studio with John Hammond producing and he heard Bob and signed him to Columbia. That’s how that happened.”
Her association with Dylan has been a long one. They have remained friends since they met. She has joined him in concert many times and has played any number of tribute shows with him. In fact, she says that when Dylan got his Nobel Prize, “I was asked to do an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, so I wrote about how we came from all over, gathered in the village and built ourselves a fortress of folk. Right now, Dylan’s music is very much needed so I was glad to hear he won that award.”
From the time she was a little girl Hester had the idea of equality on her mind. She was very young and living with her family in Washington, D.C., when the Second World War broke out. Remembering those days, she tells how she became aware of racism and how that knowledge changed her:
My brother and I were displaced children, like in London when the bombing started. My folks worked for the government in Washington so when the air raids started to come, my parents decided we should go down to Texas. Until then I was living in the inner city and my schoolmates were from all kinds of countries. It was a nicely regarded school and I was just an ordinary kid.
When I got down to Texas, living with my grandparents, I found out that the lady who came to my grandmother’s house once a week to clean house wasn’t able to sit down and have lunch with my grandparents. And my grandparents were lovely people. I was so in love with them. I was shocked when the maid told me. I said[,] “[L]isten, grandma and grandpa are going to have lunch too, so let’s go in and join them” and she said, “[O]h, no, I can’t do that.”
I said, “What?”
She said, “Black people can’t sit at the same table with white folks.”
That never left me. That really hurt. I sorted that out. My grandparents never said anything bad about black people. My parents were for sure almost like a different culture. When my father was a teacher in Texas, he coached black debate teams, never said anything bad about black people. I knew my parents were different from my grandparents. They never spoke badly about any minority. It was like there was this invisible law saying blacks and whites couldn’t mix.
I was like nine years old and inequity came through in my eyes and that never left me. Then there was Martin Luther King and I learned that it takes a village thing.
In her first days in Greenwich Village, Hester met Gil Turner, who during the days of the folk revival was a legend there. Turner, a folk singer who served as the emcee at Gerde’s Folk City, was nothing if not well rounded. He was an editor at Broadside magazine, where he selected protest songs for publication in its pages. He was also a Shakespearean actor and a Baptist minister. He founded the folk group the New World Singers, with fellow folk singers Happy Traum and the ubiquitous Bob Moses, which became the first group to record Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” In fact, Turner introduced “Blowin’ in the Wind” to the public by being the first person to sing it on a stage. He was also the writer of one of the first protest classics, “Carry It On,” which almost every folk singer of note—including Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Kate Wolf, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Carolyn Hester herself—recorded.
Since Bob Moses played in the New World Singers with him, Turner was around when Moses was planning Freedom Summer and joined in enthusiastically. When he was getting ready for the trip south, he invited Hester to come along. She went and they “met up with a lot of other folk singers and that’s how we all got down to Freedom summer.” In Mississippi Hester experienced a culture shock bigger than the one she went through when she found out the maid could not eat lunch with her grandparents: “I remember that even in Mississippi, things seemed much more dire than in Austin or Dallas where I grew up. I’d be in the black community and just see hard working people, but when I was in Hattiesburg and Jackson and all the other small places we went, you would see children wandering listlessly, aimlessly. It was like a third world country. It broke my heart.” For Hester, going to Freedom Summer was not really a choice to be made but an imperative. She felt she had no choice: “What was driving me in those days was that I had to go to Mississippi. I didn’t tell my parents I was going but it was so vital to me that I felt I don’t want to be an American anymore if this is what’s going on. I had to get up and do something and I think generations were thinking that. I was in my mid-twenties and there were people older than me and people younger than me.”
She went south at a particularly dangerous time. “Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner had just been murdered at the time we started driving down through New York and about a week or so later, their bodies were discovered and it was a truly frightening experience. Still, it was something I had to do.” Hester and the other folk singers drove from town to town, singing wherever they could—from the back of pickup trucks, to open fields, on rickety home-made stages—wherever they could spread the news and the music. Although she and the others gave all they had to the experience, Hester to this day isn’t entirely certain that their efforts accomplished everything they might have. Since the host families let the visiting performers stay in their homes it made the lives of Mississippi’s citizens more difficult and perhaps even more dangerous. She can’t be sure the musicians accomplished very much but one thing they definitely did was to stand up, to be present, to give support to the African Americans’ struggle. They let them know that they were loved and respected. In truth, they helped to accomplish much more. Before Freedom Summer, fewer than 7 percent of African Americans were registered and able to vote. The state had no black officeholders. Today most of the barriers to voting have been eliminated and Mississippi has over 1,000 black state and local officials—more than any other state in the union.2 Carolyn Hester and the other veterans of Freedom Summer can take a lot of the credit for that.
As Hester’s career flourished, the Saturday Evening Post put her on the cover and called her the “Face of Folk Music.” She played concerts and appeared on television shows all over the world—often teaming up with other legendary folk figures—and she is proud that folk music has always been integrated:
I used to do shows with Mississippi John Hurt. I’d go on first and he’d be sitting in the audience listening and then he’d nod off—he was already in his seventies then—but he’d wake up when I did “East Virginia” because he knew it was his turn to sing.
And Odetta. She was a buddy. Thank God, it could have been a thing where they wouldn’t let blacks and whites make music together. That would have been horrible for me. And Odetta, she was such a buddy. My life was so much nicer because of her. We laughed and screamed together.
Freedom Summer didn’t end Hester’s activism. She made topical and protest songs the centerpiece of the double album she cut live at Carnegie Hall and frequently marched against the Vietnam War:
One march I remember happened when my mother had to fly from Texas to Baltimore, then she came up to New York where I was living. This was ’62 or something, so I said, “Mom, there’s going to be a peace march. I was going to go. Would you want to go and march?” And she said[,] “I’d love to do that.”
So we went out, my mom and I, and we did that and on the way a man stood next to me and before I knew it this man moved closer to me and I felt something was wrong with my hand and I saw that he had put out his cigarette on my hand. He evidently didn’t approve of what we were doing so he was just going around putting out cigarettes on people.
I recovered from that and when we got back to the apartment, my mom said, “Thank you for that. It’s so important. Thanks for letting me do that with my generation.”
Why do it? Why put your life on the line in the deepest South and why put up with the disrespect by, and hatred from, strangers? The answer is simple, according to Carolyn Hester: “There’s that idea, you’re not going to be surrounded by hate.”