Travelin’ Lady led an adventurous life
ROSALIE SORRELS Folk singer
ROSALIE Sorrels, who died recently aged 83, was an Idaho singer, songwriter, storyteller and folk music legend with a career that spanned more than 50 years.
Sorrels had a history of health struggles. In 1988, she suffered an aneurysm; 10 years later, she battled and beat breast cancer. In recent years, Sorrels struggled with dementia and was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2016. She had been under home hospice care since February, according to her daughter Shelley Ross.
The news of her death sparked an outpouring of grief and fond remembrances for the twotime Grammy nominee.
Known as the Travelin’ Lady, Sorrels, who would have turned 84 today, lived life on her own terms, famously leaving her husband, Jim, in 1966 and travelling from gig to gig, driving the back roads with her five children, a lifestyle that Grammywinning singer and songwriter Nanci Griffith captured in her song Ford Econoline. Later that year, Sorrels made her national debut at the Newport Folk Festival.
Rosalie Stringfellow grew up in Boise. Her mother, Nancy, ran The Book Shop, a cultural touchstone in Downtown. As a child, Rosalie absorbed the words of Thomas Wolfe, William Butler Yeats and other great writers. Her father, Walter, an engineer, played piano and loved musicals. He built the cabin at Grimes Creek that would become Sorrels’ home for many years.
Eric Peltoniemi, retired president of Red House Records in Minneapolis, worked on four albums with Sorrels — including Strangers in Another Country and My Last Go Round, the two that received Grammy nominations — and other projects, such as her contribution to A Nod to Bob, a tribute collection to mark Bob Dylan’s 60th birthday.
‘‘She didn’t just sing a song, she embodied it,’’ Peltoniemi says. ‘‘She was a totally unique artist. She was one of the most passionate performers I’d ever seen. When she recorded something it was an event. People like Bonnie Raitt and Kate McGarrigle would come and play.’’
Sorrels had a big life. She knew Jimi Hendrix and jammed with Jerry Garcia at Woodstock and was a regular at the legendary folkmusic hot spot Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Sorrels and her children often lived.
She performed at the top folk festivals, wrote a book, recorded several albums and received two Grammy nominations, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and an honorary doctorate from the University of Idaho.
Sorrels moved seamlessly in the worlds of major music and literary figures of her day, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey, Pulitzer Prizewinning Ironweed author William Kennedy and folk music legends Malvina Reynolds, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie.
Sorrels wrote about and supported a litany of social justice issues from prison reform to suicide prevention to women’s reproductive rights, and never turned down a chance to perform for a cause she believed in.
She lived a robust life and loved hard. She had a tempestuous relationship with country rocker Jerry Jeff Walker and was reported to be a sometime lover of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote the liner notes for her 1972 album Travelin’ Lady.
She also had a lifelong connection to folk musician Peter Rowan, for whom she wrote the song Go With Me.
‘‘She had appetites, and she was wellknown for them,’’ says her longtime friend and singersongwriter Loudon Wainwright III, who met Sorrels in 1969 at Caffe Lena.
‘‘In my mind Rosalie acted as a kind of twisted den mother to a group of us who lived in Saratoga back then, a gang which included her pal Utah Phillips, Frank Wakefield, Kate McGarrigle and myself. The Thanksgiving, Christmas and Sunday dinners Rosalie whipped up for our scruffy bunch are the stuff of legend.’’
Sorrels often incorporated family life into her songs, revealing that it was both a difficult and adventurous life. There also was tragedy. In the summer of 1976, her son David, then 22, committed suicide while the family was living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her heartwrenching song Hitchhiker in the Rain was her attempt to cope, her daughter Holly Marizu says.
Sorrels returned to Idaho in the late 1980s, settling in the Grimes Creek cabin. She would play occasionally at the open mike at Pengilly’s Saloon or a concert at the Idaho Botanical Garden.
In 2004, Sorrels recorded My Last Go Round, thinking that would be her last big musical effort.
For longtime friend and fellow singer Rocci Johnson, Sorrels’ own lyrics are a fitting epitaph: ‘‘When my wandering soul shall rest, and my last song gets sung, I’ll find the brightest and the best; On my way back home, all my long lost friends and lovers, once again they will be found; And I’ll kiss all their shining faces on my last go round.’’ — The Idaho Statesman