Re: Carolyn Hester and Joan Baez

[music <music...>]

    The book  that I mentioned that has the info about Carolyn Hester and
   Joan Baez is listed below:  Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The
   Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years
 by Eric Von Schmidt,
   Jim Rooney (Contributor) (Paperback - July 1994)


I was going to post this title today--I have the book and knew it was the
one Trudi meant--so I'm glad she beat me to it.

Trouble is, I can't find much information about Hester in the book (and it
has no index).   I'd be glad, and enlightened, to have the way pointed; but
I suspect that there's not all that much about her in the book, because
Carolyn Hester really wasn't part of the Boston folk scene that the book
documents (though she did play Cambridge); she was part of the Greenwich
Village/NYC scene.  Indeed, her face isn't even on the cover of BABY, LET
ME--whose now-famous cover is a collage of photographs of dozens of folk
singers.

In re Seth's citation of POSITIVELY FOURTH STREET, which I also have and
which certainly has stuff about Hester (as she was first wife of Richard
Farina, one of the four people the book profiles):

in Positively Fourth Street, a book about Richard and Mimi and Joan and Bob
(Dylan) there's significant stories of Joan learning other peoples
repertoire and arrangements verbatim and then performing them without
giving credit

that's true (a little discouragingly, I guess), but Carolyn Hester
certainly isn't cited as one of the people whose
songs/arrangements/stylings/interpretations/etc. Joan appropriated.

Though I'd be happy to be corrected and thus enlightened, I seriously doubt
that Joan learned anything from Carolyn Hester.  They were not, as I say,
moving in the same circle(s) originally; the degree of separation between
them was the awkward one of Richard Farina's ditching Carolyn (or vice
versa) for Joan's sister, whom he started courting while still married to
CH; and if anything, they were, on some level and in some sense, rivals.
Carolyn Hester was actually spotted as someone of star quality/charisma
before Joan was, but Joan wound up getting famous first, and Carolyn never,
fbofw, achieved that level--of fame, anyway.  (She was considered for, and
almost always, [PP&] Mary.)

A very fine singer, though.

Shabbat Shalom to all,

Robert Cohen







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