Singers, Songwriters, Sinners & Saints — Musicians Ellen Harper and Sam Barry explain why there is “Always a Song”
March 2022: A Note from Hope Katz Gibbs, creator, Inkandescent PR + Publishing Co.— It is an honor to feature this 2021 book by Ellen Harper and Sam Barry: Always a Song, a collection of stories from Ellen, a singer, and songwriter, and the folk matriarch and mother to the Grammy-winning musician Ben Harper (pictured, above).
Ellen shares vivid memories of growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s among famous and small-town musicians, while raising Ben (pictured below) and his brothers and helping to run the family business — the historic Folk Music Center in Claremont, CA. Jackson Browne calls the book: “An eloquent searching account of a life lived for true love and music.”
The book tells tales of many music icons who crossed through the threshold of the Folk Music Center, including Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, The New Lost City Ramblers, Doc Watson, and more.
Ellen shares: “Growing up, an endless stream of musicians and artists came from across the country to my family’s music store. Bess Lomax Hawes, Joan Baez, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGee are all the singers, organizers, guitar and banjo pickers and players, songwriters, painters, dancers, and husbands, wives, and children—we were all in it together. And we believed singing could change the world.”
Music lovers and history buffs will enjoy this rare invitation into a world of stories and songs that inspired folk music today.
Great for those who loved Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band Van Morrison Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock by Barney Hoskyns and Girls Like Us: Carole King Joni Mitchell Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller.
Sam Barry: Author, badass harmonica player, member of the Rock Bottom Remainders
About Ellen’s co-author — Book Doctor Sam Barry: Sam is an author, musician, and publishing professional. He is the author of How to Play the Harmonica: and Other Life Lessons. He coauthored Write That Book Already! The Tough Love You Need to Get Published Now with his late wife Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Always a Song: Singers Songwriters Sinners and Saints—My Story of the Folk Music Revival with Ellen Harper.
As a member of the literary rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, Sam edited and coauthored Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All with his bandmates Stephen King Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Dave Barry Roy Blount Jr. Matt Groening, Greg Iles James McBride Roger McGuinn Ridley Pearson and Scott Turow.
Sam is currently a freelance editor, book doctor, and publishing consultant. Previously he was an ordained Presbyterian minister who worked for HarperCollins and later created and directed Book Passage’s Path to Publishing program and wrote the popular Author Enabler column in BookPage. Sam lives, writes, and plays music in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Scroll down to read the introduction of the book!
Grammy-award winner Ben Harper
Voices of the People
By Ellen Harper, author, Always a Song
My life has seen an endless flow of musicians, activists, and artists eddying through my home and the Folk Music Center my parents founded, and I maintain today. Some were musicians who played and sang for a living. Others played and sang for the sheer joy of it. They were working people, union people, family people, and traveling people. Some had money, and some were broke. Some had recognizable names—Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie, Hedy West, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee, Pete and Mike Seeger, Joan Baez—but most did not. These musicians, music lovers, pickers and players, songwriters, painters, poets, dancers, political activists, and their husbands, wives, and children had in common was singing. Singing was essential. Everyone’s voice mattered, regardless of fame, or skill, or any other label. Community mattered. We were all singers, and singing could change the world.
My mother, Dorothy Udin, gave me a great gift: the world of folk music and folk musicians. She sang me to sleep with mournful lullabies from Eastern Europe, the British Isles, and the American South. She taught me the power of music through the work of great folk singers and musical ambassadors such as Pete Seeger and his American Folk Songs for Children and Woody Guthrie’s Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child—the joyous, raucous albums that inspired and empowered me. I grew up listening to her giving music lessons. My ears were filled with the music of hootenannies and song circles; the glorious sing-along music of the union, civil rights, and antiwar movement songs; along with the blues, hymns, and gospel tunes that undergirded them. I took up the guitar and learned to play the songs I had been singing my whole life, including the beloved folk classics “Gold Watch and Chain,” “Goodnight, Irene,” “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” “Single Girl, Married Girl,” “Midnight Special,” and dozens more.
Ellen Harper: Songbird, mother, author, and owner of the Folk Music Center in Claremont, CA
I developed my own musical passions. I embraced the music of my generation—folk-rock, rock and roll, and psychedelic rock. I joined my fellow musicians and explored the sources of our music, such as Delta blues and country music. I discovered that all these genres grew from the same roots, the music of generations of anonymous musicians who made music for their lives and communities, which we call folk. Not the commercial-variety folk music that bloomed and faded in the 1950s and 1960s, but the legacy of the voices of the people expressed in poetry and lyrics that shaped my life, my musical taste, my style, and ultimately the music of my children. Throughout my life, the traditional folk songs I learned at my mother’s knee have always been in me, old friends that speak the wisdom of the ages as I faced new challenges.
Folk music is a living art form that tells and retells its history, even as it creates it. As with any vital art form, there are passionate debates. The very term folk song is contentious. Blues musician Big Bill Broonzy, upon being asked “What is folk music?” is purported to have answered, “All music is folk music. I ain’t ever heard a horse sing,” a comment that unleashed a decades-long feud among musicologists about the origins and definition of folk music.
Ultimately what matters is that the music lives on, enriching our lives. We know enough. We know that American folk music originated in the oud strummers of the Middle East; the lute pickers of Europe; the balladeers and bawdy pub singers of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany; the fiddle bowers of eastern Europe; the n’goni pluckers of Africa; the chants, plaints, calls, and hollers that came from everywhere to the New World, bringing lyrics, melodies, marches, and polyrhythms that invented and expanded the American musical horizon forevermore. No matter how much Americans tried to segregate themselves, the music ignored boundaries and slipped in and out of parochial communities, creating something bigger than the sum of its parts: American music. The folks who created folk music borrowed stole, shared, and learned from each other until the music became something distinctly American, something that influenced world music, which in turn influenced American music.
For me, a good song is a good song. Defining folk music is best left to the experts. What matters are the songs, which connect us across generations and cultures? What matters is the singing.
The community and the social and political activism that are as integral to folk music as the music itself are woven throughout my story—our story. It begins in New England during the early days of the folk music revival. It travels through the fear and hatred of the McCarthy-era blacklist that drove so many nonconformists, bohemians, leftists, and ordinary people who believed in a better world—including my father—out of their jobs and underground. Forced to leave our home, we moved to the West Coast, and my parents founded the Folk Music Center and went on to play a vital role in the 1960s folk boom that impacted the counterculture and its music—an influence that reverberates to this day.
Always a Song is the story of the challenging, transformational times in which I have lived, loved, and sung, from the dawn of the age of the singer/songwriter as the premier artist and the guitar as Western music’s dominant instrument, accompanied by the popularization of new, “exotic” instruments such as the sitar and the ukulele, and the legacy of love-ins and decades of protest movements. Always a Song is my witness of the world of folk music that is the fuel and inspiration of American music. It is the story of the extraordinary times in which I have lived and the people who have flowed through my world with a song for every reason—songs about hardship and good times, songs of love and loss, songs of hope and hurt, songs of endurance and solidarity, and some songs just for fun—but always a song.