Negatively 4th Street - Book Review - Part III

A lot of information, but a lack of synthesis...."A work still waiting to be done."

I asked Carolyn Hester what she's been up to during the intervening years. She took ten years off between her last RCA recording in 1973 and 1982, during which time she acquired and operated a folk dance club, Cafe Danssa in Los Angeles. She raised two daughters, (Karla and Amy Blume), who are now grown and play in a group called The Throwaways. She fondly remembers the Madison Square Garden tribute to Bob Dylan, although she noted with some amusement that the men performed solo while the women who participated were grouped together. She has toured recently with a Houston-based group of writers, calling themselves Women in the Round, including blues singer Ann Armstrong and Lynn Langham (whose song "From These Hills" Hester recorded as the title track to her 1996 album). Last year she recorded a Tom Paxton tribute album after having toured with him, and she's planning three new albums: one of her own songs, another a tribute to English singer-song writers, and the third a jazz-influenced hybrid with her husband, pianist David Blume.

The sixties are especially missed by young people, muses Hester, who wonder how it happened and how another golden age like it could be ushered into the world again. This generation, she says, is "very service oriented, ecologically minded. Maybe that's why these books are coming out now. We have to accept the book but we have to make sense of it."

"The gossipy veneer of the book doesn't capture how much [the era] did mean and how it influenced our world. It won't change the message of what happened then.... This was powerhouse, this was gutsy, this changed a generation. I don't feel like one little person like me can really figure that out." "There is a lot of quality, a lot of time, a lot of information," in Hajdu's book, she said with real admiration, but there's a lack of synthesis. "It is "a work still waiting to be done."

Here's a new link(01/03/02) to a multimedia site for the book (Windows only):
http://bookwrapcentral.com/bw.asp?isbn=0374281998&buy=nb

-HB

Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com