Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (17 page)

Again, from Alice Adams's
Superior Women:
watching Janet Cohen's dinner-table humiliation at the hands of her husband, and understanding the divorce it portends, one of Janet's friends imagines a silver lining. Freed from her obsession with her husband, “[M]aybe now Janet can go to med school,” the friend hopefully muses. Eventually, there would be a similar liberation for the real-life young woman whom Alice Adams's character coincidentally resembled: Carole.

1961–early 1965

Joni had had a style tips column, “Fads and Fashion,” in the Aden Bowman Collegiate paper, and she had been the school fashion plate, with her color-coordinated outfits and headbands. So it stood to reason that she would get a job in fashion after high school, while saving for the $800 yearly tuition required by the College of Art within the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, to which she'd been accepted. A job in fashion in Saskatoon meant selling better junior sportswear at the local department store while doing freelance modeling. (Wholesale clothiers hired models to come to a suite at a local hotel, where the girls became, as Joni has said, “quick-change artists, exhibiting clothes for retail buyers. You wore a black slip and changed behind a screen because you were a young woman working in a hotel room with a traveler.”) She had generous employee discounts at the department store, which allowed her to dress to the nines, in stylish ensembles complete with hats and gloves.

Sandy Stewart, Joni's old neighbor from North Battleford—the tomboy with whom she had frequently locked horns over the backyard circuses—had moved to Saskatoon, and at night the friends hung out with the post-high-school/young college crowd at the popular Commodore Café. “We would sip Cokes in the big high booths in the back,” Sandy recalls. “It was a neat place where all our friends came—Sugie [Bob Sugarman], Tony Simon, Joan Smith and her fiancé Barry Chapman. We traveled as a group.” Joan Smith was planning her wedding; Joni would be an attendant. The senior Andersons—with whom Joni was still living, of course—were welcoming to the crowd. Give or take a few things (immediate college, say), this was the life Joni was supposed to be living.

Sometime in the early autumn of 1962, however, Joni reconnected with D'Arcy Case, the wild child from Lake Waskesiu, now living in Saskatoon. D'Arcy had seen Joni around town in the intervening year, wearing, as she recalls it, “little Jackie Kennedy, princess-line coats. She had a model-y, tight-assed persona, but I
knew
she wasn't that.” D'Arcy remembered Joni's poetry, drunkenly recited while D'Arcy had steadied the wobbly Joni on the golf course under the prairie sky.

“I can't remember if I called Joni at the store or at her house,” D'Arcy says. “Or maybe she just came into the coffeehouse on her own.” The coffeehouse was the Louis Riel, Saskatoon's only folk club, housed in a former library on Saskatoon's Broadway Avenue and named after a Métis (pronounced May-tee: part-European, part-Indian) hero; D'Arcy and her boyfriend, Rudy Hinter, were its managers. “I told Joni, ‘All these people come here and sing their poetry.
You
could sing
your
poetry.'”

Walking for the first time into the dark room with its twinkling wall lights, Joni might have felt as if a curtain had just been slashed open on her future. There was D'Arcy in hipster mufti: black, thick-ribbed Dalkeith sweater, dark sheath skirt, and black tights. At top volume, the record player blared Edith Piaf singing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” followed by a Lenny Bruce album. As coffee boy Ralph Martin manned the noisy grinder, the rich aroma of espresso mingled with the pungent hashish snaking up from the performers' lounge in the basement. On the small stage Mickey O'Nate might be trying to vary a stand-up routine that, when heard three nights in a row by the same audience in that one-club town, drew laughs the first night, grimaces the second, and boos the third. Featured singer Karen James would arrive, her twelve-string strapped on her shoulder, her dog, Blue, at her side. Earl, the sandwich man, would drunkenly slice the meat and cheese for his Reubens and hot turkeys. At his corner easel Rockney McKay brush-stroked his hallucinogenic masterwork
Nun in Purgatory.
Elsewhere Rene Gold—a bespectacled, Oxbridge-accented young doctor who co-owned the club, drove a Jaguar XKE, and lived in Saskatoon's poshest penthouse—would be hitting on one or both of the waitresses. But the Louis Riel's central melodrama was D'Arcy's. Her coworkers suspected that Rudy had a mean temper. “Poor D'Arcy,” the staff would whisper when she'd arrive at work, her face dappled with bruises. This serving of underground life could seduce a tortured rebel. So Joni became a Louis Riel waitress, consigning her Jackie Kennedy suits, gloves, and pillbox hats to the darkest depths of her Hanover Street closet.

Waitressing at a coffeehouse, a jazz club, or an “underground” restaurant was the way girls of the 1960s transformed themselves from onerously middle-class to instantly cool. Such labor was a mark of honorable rebellion, of class-transcendent wisdom—the female version of rich boys doing construction work. (Plus there were always men—
uncorny
men—to tell you you were beautiful.)

By 1962 coffeehouses with folksinger entertainers could be found in most major North American cities. The Louis Riel was owned by four men—three doctors (Ted Tulchinski, Michael Smith, and Rene Gold) and the club's interior designer turned shareholder Colin Holliday-Scott. Indeed, club ownership seemed a man's game by definition: Doug Weston owned L.A.'s Troubadour; Manny Rubin, Philadelphia's Second Fret; in Chicago Albert Grossman's Gate of Horn had prefigured Grossman's management of all the newly minted folk sensations, from Peter, Paul and Mary to Dylan. Yet these early-1960s clubs that proffered Viennese java, plucked chords, and earnest voices were (as opposed to the coffeehouses linked with Beat poetry, Lenny Bruce, and
jazz
—Los Angeles's 1955-opened Unicorn, for example) the heirs of seminal clubs that had been launched by four proprie
tresses.
In 1956 a generous but tough-minded woman named Liz (last name, lost to history) opened the Caricature on Greenwich Village's MacDougal Street, where hungry folkies (whom Liz fed, gratis) strummed and sang when the cops chased them out of Washington Square Park; elegant, blond Tulla Cook founded the Coffee Grinder, which was, in 1957, a haven for Harvard Square's amateur musicians; and two twenty-three-year-old Brandeis graduates, Paula Kelley and Joyce Kalina, bought a nearby antique store and, doing the electrical wiring themselves, turned it into Club 47. Within a year Kelley and Kalina showcased a girl who was everything a female entertainer in the late 1950s was not supposed to be—somber, drably dressed, not conventionally beautiful—yet she drew an SRO crowd of tweed-jacketed Harvard men. Her name was Joan Baez.

The 1960 mainstream ascendance of folk music, by way of Baez (hit album,
Time
cover, thousands of young girl clones all over America) was actually two years in the making. The Big Bang had been the Kingston Trio's 1958 surprise #1 hit, “Tom Dooley,” a reworking of a Civil War–era ballad about the hanging of a man who'd killed his love (the last folk hit before
that
had been the Weavers' version of “Goodnight, Irene,” which had reached #10 in 1948). It was through the congenial, wholesome trio that a whole generation of college students began singing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and “Kumbaya” at fraternity campouts and incorporating a watered-down version of the folk ethos into their sensibility.

Of course, the emerging folk sensibility for which the Kingston Trio served as unthreatening appetizer was actually quietly revolutionary. One of its two founding fathers, Pete Seeger (from whom Trio founder Dave Guard had bought his first guitar in 1954), was blacklisted for his membership in the Communist party and had served as a self-styled “Johnny Appleseed of protest music,” publishing instruction books (Joni had bought one) that taught young people how to appropriate the musical genre that he was banned from performing. Well before that—in 1939—in the communelike Almanac House on West Tenth Street in Greenwich Village, Seeger, sometimes the revered Woody Guthrie, and others wrote new songs that sounded like real Southern and rural working-folks' plaints. Writing respectfully faux “people's songs” was the closest that many folksingers got to the Appalachian hollows, road gangs, and steel mills. (Bob Dylan spent many weeks looking at nineteenth-century newspapers at the New York Public Library to inspire his own writing.) The music Seeger's followers made popular eventually pushed left-wing social protest—against the bomb, the blacklist, the arms race, and particularly for civil rights—in from the red-diaper-baby margins of society to the center of youthful concern, popularizing an aesthetic that valued the unpolished and handmade over the mass-produced and the commercial.

Most histories of the folk resurgence stress its political import and gloss over the fact that its dramas were vicarious. And they bear a masculine imprint. The Kingston Trio were male. Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie were male. So was Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, who thrilled young white middle-class folk devotees by being the genuine article: a black man whose voice carried the pain of the Jim Crow South and who'd done real time on prison chain gangs. (He was a convicted murderer.) And, of course, the artist who eventually vaulted folk music into the social and cultural epicenter, essentially inventing the American counterculture—Bob Dylan—was male. Other than Lead Belly, these folk avatars got their material from their sympathetic imaginations and old newspapers. Yet for all the masculine icons and political themes, what was so quietly significant about the rise of folk music among North American youth in the late 1950s was that it kicked wide the door to
female
storytelling—and storytelling based on an exaggerated version of
real,
not imagined, experience (family treachery, mating and pregnancy, all larded with troubling consequences). Folk, in the 1950s, allowed young women to use deceptively ultratraditional vessels (high, pure, trilling voices; long skirts and hair; imagery of hearth, heart, and childbirth) to test social and cultural limits and to mine an antique lode of tough-minded songs about emotional wars and reproductive perfidies.

This lode was the Child Ballads, the group of Scottish and English topical tales that had been handed down on the Scottish moors since the sixteenth century. Nineteenth-century English folklorist Francis James Child had collected and codified these antique story-songs—hence their name—and they became a substantial part of the playlist of the new American folksingers, many of whom, in the mid-1950s, were women: Jean Redpath, Judy Henske, Bonnie Dobson, Jo Mapes, Peggy Seeger, and breakthrough artist Carolyn Hester, a Texan who moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan early in the decade to perform at Greenwich Village's folk clubs, and whose sensual good looks paved the way for the phenomenon that was Joan Baez. In voices clear as running brooks, with a pious-sounding sorrow that camouflaged their sometimes violent messages, these women sang Child Ballads such as “Greensleeves,” “Barbara Allen,” “Maid of Constant Sorrow,” “Geordie,” and “Mary Hamilton.”

Although the Child Ballads were anonymous, Drake University historian Deborah A. Symonds recently unearthed the fact that their nameless writers were overwhelmingly—ten to one—female. Employing the mayhem of the earlier male battle ballads, the women of the Early Modern Age wrote of their own battles, which were every bit as bloody as the crashing clank of sword on chain mail: murders of lovers, murders of spouses, murders of sisters. Then, as feudal life in Scotland and northern England gave way to the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century, the ballads became obsessed with a single subject: these hard-pressed women's abandonment of their infants and, in the frequent extreme, their desperation-bred acts of infanticide (as in “Mary Hamilton”).

The intense refocusing of the ballads' subject matter reflected events in the changing society. In feudal days, a woman's pregnancy would trigger a betrothal, and the newly married couple would live on the family's land. But with the buying up of small farms in the eighteenth century by the emerging bourgeoisie, the poor were left landless—you couldn't marry without land to live on—so the young poor
stopped
marrying. While the shamed, land-poor menfolk ran away to join the army, the shamed pregnant women were left to bear out-of-wedlock children in vast number. A novel,
The Heart of Midlothian,
was written about the phenomenon—as it happened, by the man that an ancestor on Joni Anderson's mother's side had worked for, Sir Walter Scott. Probably out of reader-friendliness, Scott made the heroine ladylike, wealthy, and sympathetic: her midwife, not she, kills the baby. But when scholar Symonds embarked on her research on the real stories behind the Child Ballads (culminating in
Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland
), she discovered that the actual woman upon whom Scott based his novel was not a wronged noblewoman but a poor commoner, and she was not innocent but guilty. Terror at giving birth unmarried had led her to smother her child rather than abandon it to inevitable slow death by cold, starvation, and scavenging animals. Yet, Symonds found, after the mother did the deed, she virtually begged to be found out. She interred the newborn in a shallow grave, along with a clue: a half-buried remnant of her own easily identifiable garment. With this boldly self-indicting gesture, she announced to her village that her guilt and her sorrow were painfully real but were devoid of shame or dishonesty.

To bear a baby out of wedlock during a time of social revolution when young people, in large number, had stopped getting married; to “cold-heartedly” relinquish the infant while leaving clues of your guilty act; to sing about it and your life, somewhat transforming the culture in the process: this antiquated pattern of the Scottish moors, which gave birth to so many songs, would be repeated. By Joni Anderson Mitchell.