Traveling lady goes home
Jerome Clark | Canby, Minnesota | 10/02/2004
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Rosalie Sorrels became the grande dame of the American folk scene the hard way. In the mid-1960s she left her husband in Idaho and hit the road with her five children -- daunting enough -- and was determined to work as a folk singer -- just as the folk revival was being washed away under the tidal wave of Beatles-era rock and pop. But somehow, through it all, she not only succeeded, becoming as famous as anyone does in a marginalized genre, but triumphed: respected as an artist, revered as an exemplary human being.
My Last Go Round is a live concert recorded on March 23, 2002, on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to honor her decision to leave the road and return to a quieter life in the countryside of her native state. In her early 70s, Sorrels's voice is as good and wise as ever, and maybe even better and even smarter. The tone of the disc is both celebratory and bittersweet, perhaps never so much as in her reading of the ambivalent Utah Phillips retrospective on the Western frontier experience, "The Telling Takes Me Home." In another powerful moment, she recalls the now-gone Dave Van Ronk and dedicates another superb Phillips song, "I Think of You," to the memory of that great man. Guests include such folk luminaries, past and present, as Jean Ritchie, Patrick Sky, Loudon Wainwright III, Peggy Seeger, and Christine Lavin. The tribute proved as loving and musically rich as anyone -- participant, audience member, or CD listener -- ever could hope for."