Articles about Kate Wolf

All articles are copyright their respective publishers. Old articles are reproduced here because they are not to be found online.

Kate Wolf – a short life
Alan Ashworth, A & M Records, May 17, 2021

Remembering Kate Wolf and the Sonoma County Sound
Gaye LeBaron, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 12, 2019

Singers Honor Country-Folk Legend Kate Wolf at Festival
George Snyder, Chronicle Staff Writer Published 4:00 am PDT, Friday, June 23, 2000

Remembering Kate Wolf
Derk Richardson, Special to SF Gate Published 4:00 am PDT, Thursday, June 17, 1999

The Reintroduction of Kate Wolf
J. D. Smith, Whole Earth Review, Sausalito, California, Spring, 1996

Five years before Kate Wolf died of leukemia, I was forty years old, living in a hired man's shack with an open pint of Jim Beam and a Martin guitar which I could not chord. In the haughty hills of Marin County, big productive Holstein cows were being branded on their faces and sold for slaughter. The USDA had determined that there was a surplus of milk on this planet.

I was working for a woman who owned just a little too much of northern California. The toughest parts of the job were disposing of a thousand dollars cash money every month and suppressing the desire to strangle peacocks. I was wearing out my bootsoles walking around pool tables. I believed that old drunks spoke the truth.

One Sunday morning came down awfully hard. I awoke with a flash of energy as the last of the double shots and slow dances blew through my nerve endings, then, five minutes later, the goddess of excess smote me behind the right ear with a splitting maul, and I crawled back into my flannel bed with the Sunday Chronicle. In it was a small panel advertisement announcing that, on that day, there was to be held in Cotati a healing fair, with Mimi Farina and Kate Wolf providing the tunes. Two bucks. Cheaper than church. I did need the healing. I fired up Red-haired Nancy, the Ford stock truck and rolled down into the flatlands above the Bay.

Mimi sang in semitongues of neoChristian joy. Kate Wolf sang of dirt and love and hands and feathers and honest eyes and freedom lost and found. Kate sang of the bunkhouse soul. I sucked at her voice. I jerked down my hat against the sun and studied her breasts. I was healed. I simply had to change my ways.

It took four sober bunkhouse nights to compose a letter of courtship to Kate Wolf. I told it all. I told of learning whiskey in the morning in the milkhouse from my Uncle Mart, and how he died in the morning pitching hay to the horses. I told of poaching a deer on the Pine Ridge Reservation on my wedding night and of the sweaty terror of a rotting marriage. I told of months of imaginary chess games with Harley McGhee, through the iron wall, in the next cell, the man without a tongue. I professed an admiration for her very essence, and promised that if she ever needed anything, she had only to think my name and I'd be there to help.

The bosswoman flaunted a smokey intuition. She was sure that Kate Wolf lived in Berkeley. I laid all my whiskey need before a directory assistance operator, and he granted me the address for Kate Wolf, in Berkeley. I whispered to the stamps as I licked them.

I spent a week of afternoons fixing fence within sight of the mailbox, every night fighting the urge to shoot nineball and play Indian eyef*ck with the barmaids, until, finally a legal-size envelope arrived for me, from Kate Wolf, in Berkeley. I squatted in the red dirt beside the road and smelled the letter carefully before opening it.

      Dear Mr. Smith,
      Thank you so much for the letter.
      You have led a very interesting life,
      and you seem to be a very kind man.
      I must confess to you, though, that I
      am not the Kate Wolf who sings.
      I am Kate Wolf, the nurse.
      If, on the other hand, the Kate Wolf who sings
      is getting these kinds of letters,
      I intend to learn how to play the guitar.
      Yours Truly,
      Kate Wolf

She enclosed my original letter. I went to the bar when I should've gone to Berkeley. But Kate Wolf's music continued to heal me. I learned the words and the chords to "Green Eyes." I began to care whether I died in a barroom toilet. I drank the whiskey stash on my mud porch dry, then didn't replace it. I washed my truck. When Kate Wolf played the community center in Petaluma I sat with my toes curled in my boots. Afterward I stood at the periphery of fans until it was my turn to shake her hand, and I told her the story of the mistaken identity, and delivered the letter. She read it there on the basketball court, patting her foot in three-quarter time. She smelled of lemon grass. When she finished the reading she folded the letter into the pocket of her skirt, then wrote her mailing address on the envelope and handed it to me. "Write to me more, from Idaho." She winked.

Kate Wolf, the singer, and I became the best of pen pals. When her bone marrow transplant failed we were discussing the perfect Koolaid mustache. This planet needs a whole lot more milk like her.

Kate Wolf: Links In The Chain -- From A Conversation With Utah Phillips
Terry Fowler and Jean Berensmeier
Stone Soup, A Journal of the San Geronimo Valley Cultural Center, Spring 1989

On February 8th, 1989, Utah Phillips met with Terry Fowler and Jean Berensmeier following his concert at the (San Geronimo Valley Cultural) Center. He spoke about Kate Wolf -- both as a musician and a friend in the community. The following article is adapted from that interview.

Kate was a true artist. She did not come back refreshed by the applause. That's exhausting. She came back refreshed because she knew that what she was doing artistically held together. That she had been successful in creating a piece of art on the stage. Like a painter. Or a poet, who looked at it and said, “That's done. I have put something in the room and it stands by itself.” Refreshed by the internal perception that it is correct, it is good art.

Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, once told me, “Praise corrupts the house of the soul.”; As an artist, you can't think clearly about art if you are just into praise. The image of the American entertainer, sculpted by the media, is so overwhelming that it's so easy to let your ego run away with you. But what happens to the art? Kate found comfort in the integrity of the piece of work that happens on the stage.

In times where we are given over to machines (televisions, VCRs, automatic tellers), it is important that we not only try to create intimacy, we must demand it. Kate did that. Not just created it, by being there and doing what she did. But to consciously demand it, and work at it until its forthcoming.

Ask people what they really know, and they'll tell you the truth. They will tell you their good news. And out of that you may become good news yourself, despite all the bad news in the world. Kate was able to do that, and people brought her their good news.

I felt that as she listened to poets, she was trying to get some tools that she couldn't get from songwriters on how to get it out. On how to resolve things. With her last records, when you listen to “Slender Thread” or “In China or a Woman's Heart”, it was paying off.

Kate invited me to the Santa Rosa Folk Festival. She had gotten an old Rosalie Sorrels/ Mitch Greenhill record [featuring many of my songs]. It was one of those things. That was the record which convinced her she could write, that she should be making songs. She simply wanted to meet me and invited me to the festival. But she got into my notebook and started pulling out songs, pulling out words. My notebook was like a box of rubbish. And she took one of those, put a tune to it, and sang it at the main concert.

I had been doing quite well in the East, where most of the old folk music societies go back to the days of the CIO. If you are going to crack this nut, you are going to crack that one. Either that or go industrial. So I decided that there were all these audiences back there who needed to listen to Kate.

We drove to Washington, where there was a rally for Karen Silkwood by the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union. Kate had always said that I do a lot of external politics, politics of the world, and she did the interior politics. Between us, they kind of met. On the stage it was as if there was one whole person. On the drive down I gave her the material I had on Karen. And then she asked to sing. I went to the head of the Union, and said that Kate would like to sing. They had never heard of her. But they had the time. And she sang “Links In the Chain”. She had been making it up in the back seat all that way. It was the first time she had ever looked at the situation and stepped outside herself. It was a great song. And a fair trade. It was always a fair trade.

My last memory is from a concert in Berkeley. There was an enormous line out in front. Old friends. As I was cruising the line, everyone wanted to know about Kate. I got up on stage and told the audience to ask her. She was sitting there in a shawl. Everyone drew their breath like a ghost was there. But during the intermission, she got up and sold all my records. Just stood there dealing. Taking cash. Counting money. We were trades people and were doing it right.

The first time she felt really part of the community was here. She was able to look at what she had written against the background of community. So, of course, she came here, to the Center, to carve out that basis for existence that doesn't depend upon your notoriety. Where you are putting in time with your peers in the community.

A Column Left Unwritten
Gaye Lebaron, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, California, December 12, 1986

Hey, this is one I don't want to write. I'd rather just sit here, looking out the window on a gray and gloomy evening, and let my mind roll back 15 years or so to a funny little restaurant on College Avenue with avocado soup on the menu, '60s style murals on the walls and outrageous graffiti in the restrooms.

There at Carl Repfening's Painted House, with a group of good friends, after a semi organic dinner, I heard a new singing duo called Wildwood Flower for the first time. We clapped our hands and sang along, we hushed when the song turned serious, a protest of war in general and Vietnam specifically. We marveled at the vocal clarity of the woman who sang a capella songs she had written about Sonoma County, about the hills and the hawks and the lilac trees, the orchards and the country roads she traveled to get there.

* * *

THAT’S WHERE I want to be again this afternoon. Not here. Not writing that Kate Wolf of the clear voice and clearer mind is dead.

Wednesday night, at UC Hospital in San Francisco, she lost her eight month battle with leukemia. It was a battle she had no intention of losing. The last time she called here, she was talking about rescheduling her "Homecoming" concert in Sonoma County, which she had to cancel in April, just as soon as the marrow transplant was complete.

She might have sung the old songs she wrote when she lived out there in the country, near Sebastopol, the songs she called "Sonoma County Music" even when she had to explain what that meant to audiences in New England or the Midwest, at the famous Wolftrap near Washington, D.C., or on the national broadcasts of "A Prairie Home Companion," or PBS's "Austin City Limits." She wasn't ours, you know. Not anymore. She had achieved a certain stature that took her far.

But for that Homecoming Concert she might have sung like she sang at O'Connell's Grove in the good old days of the early '70s, before insurance companies turned nasty, when like minded people could still get together, borrow an orchard, and have a concert. Boy, I'd give anything to hear her.

* * *

I HAVE NEVER been a person to gush over entertainers but I was an unabashed, wholehearted fan of Kate Wolf. By the time I met her for the first time -- at a benefit concert at Windsor Vineyards (she did more benefits than Bob Hope)--I had written so many glowing pieces on her music that she greeted me with: "I'm happy to finally meet you. People keep asking me it you're my mother."

When our kids turned up in the same elementary school, we became friends. Her son Max played with our son. Kate advised our junior high age daughter on choosing a guitar. She was becoming famous, and very busy, but she always had time to sing for the Girl Scouts, to share an adventure from a road trip. When she moved to the Bay Area, I missed seeing her.

* * *

WHEN KATE left Sonoma County she took something with her. She didn't intend to, but time was passing. SRJC instructor Ed LaFrance, who was the on the air partner in radio station KVRE in those years, put it well. "Kate spoke of the rural, small town flavor of Sonoma County. She took what we had in those years and put it into words. She was really more of a poet than a song writer and that was what was special about her music. She embodied the spirit of a whole bunch of people. She put it all in words. It was a time."

It was, indeed a time. Music critics called it the Renaissance of Sonoma County folk music, which I always found puzzling since I don't think we ever had a music of our own before. But Kate was the Renaissance Woman. The Den Mother of Sonoma County Music, I called her. And I wasn't kidding. She looked like a teenager but she had the dedication of a church choirmaster and the energy of a rock band.

* * *

NO, I DON'T want to write about Kate Wolf dead. I want to keep writing about her alive. About the day she met Emma Rose, the woman she put in a song because she liked the sound of her name on a mailbox along a west county roadside. It was at a record signing for Kate's first album called "Back Roads," which was recorded in a marathon session at Katie and Dale Iversen's beach house at Goat Rock. The party was held at Pete Wiseman's Texaco Station on Farmers Lane. Pete, a fine musician in his own right, had played bass on the album and Kate loved the incongruity of a record party around the lube racks.

I want to hear her sing about the red tailed hawk that "writes songs against the sky," about the homely pleasures of Sonoma County's rural community like going to the dump on a Sunday morning over a bumpy country road. I want to talk to her about the notes I saved for her about the hoboes who passed through here in the Depression days and the song she wants to write about them.

I want to write about the folk festival she put together at SRJC in '75. I went around with her at the end of the first day, from Rose Maddox to U. Utah Phillips, from an old sailor singing sea chanties to a banjoist teaching kids to play the spoons. She was a middle aged kid in a candy shop, surrounded by her idols and better than all of them.

* * *

I WANT to write about the day she came to SRJC to sing a noon concert, to sing about Agent Orange long after Vietnam was ended and bring tears to the eyes of a new generation of students who were too young to remember but old enough to know this woman sang the truth.

I want to write about her standing in mid stage in her faded; denim patchwork skirt and boots, tapping her foot, strumming her guitar and calling all her musical friends around her--her former husband Don Coffin, her staunch friend Nina Gerber who started with Kate as a teenager and became her main accompanist, Hugh Shacklett and John Brandeburg, Michael Beargrease, Bob Ward of the Cigar Band, and Tommy Thompson and the others--leading them in one last chorus of "May the Circle be Unbroken."

Last night, the National Public Radio broadcast of "All Things Considered" closed with Kate singing "Give Yourself to Love."

And a lot of people around these parts cried.

Kate Wolf: She Gives Herself To Love
Marja Eloheimo, The Fax, A weekly newspaper of the San Geronimo Valley, October 1984

When the morning breaks

and the sunlight warms my soul

In the east the eagle flies

and the Redtail proudly soars

I'm on my way

to the place of the spirit one

Grandfather hear me now I am on fire.

Let the sundance guide my feet

to your desire

Give me visions for my eyes

and words like gold

that shimmer in the sun.

You can't forget the beauty and magic and mystery of life when you're around Kate Wolf. She speaks of it, sings of it, and surrounds herself with its lightness--living as openly as she can, like a room without walls.

Her voice burrows then tickles. Her eyes twinkle then demand. Her life brings her gifts that she wraps in music and ties with guitar strings that sound softer than silk. Then she gives them away and the present is always her heart.

Kate Wolf is the singer and Kate Wolf is the song.

In the morning coolness of her studio in Forest Knolls, Kate welcomes me with hot tea and a warm heart, given freely once again. But she says, "I don't feel exposed. What I sing about is really common to us all. It's nothing secret."

Indeed, Kate was influenced greatly by the "very direct" tradition of country music, listening to the original Jimmy Rogers and the Carter family. "It doesn't beat around the bush," she says, "It deals with every day life. And it endures."

In the early '60s, though painfully shy, Kate sang in coffeehouses and played guitar. When she dropped out of San Francisco State to marry and raise a family, she stopped playing. But one day, when her daughter was only a year old (she’s seventeen now), her babysitter brought Kate a record of Rosalie Sorrels playing Utah Phillips. Kate had never heard of either but their music awoke her inspiration. She sat down immediately to learn the whole record.

Then and there, without expecting or even recognizing it, the seed of Kate's future was planted. ("It's amazing the little things people drop in your way.") And in the sixteen years that have followed, that seed has grown, enduring droughts and winters that lent strength to the vine and sweetness to rich harvests of fruit. Kate's songs are ripe with the taste of experience. And as a symbol of her maturity, Kate today shares the stage with Utah Phillips. They have become close friends.

Every Sunday on KPFA radio, Kate's clear voice rings out the theme to the folk music program ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE. Recently I attended a concert where Kate asked her audience to join in singing this song and, to her surprise, they knew not only the chorus but the verses, too. People who know Kate Wolf, listen.

At the concert, her audience felt like family and the comfort felt like home. It was fitting: with the warmth only true friends can bring, Kate was welcomed back to the stage after a year long sabbatical. With a big smile she said, "It's really nice to take a year off to discover that what you want to do is what you've been doing all along."

What Kate has been doing is writing and performing, hosting radio shows and, since 1976, recording. With her first album, BACK ROADS, which was made and financed by the local people of Sonoma County where she then lived, Kate began to be appreciated by ever widening circles.

By 1981, with the arrival of her fourth of five albums, Bob Young, Program Director of San Francisco's KSAN radio had written--

"...I listen to a lot of music. After a while most of it starts to sound the same. That's why I'm a fan of Kate Wolf. Her music isn't like everyone else's. It's real. Maybe it's like baking a cake. You can follow directions right off the box or you can bake it right from scratch. Kate sings from scratch.."

Kate's songs often hold a sadness that's like clear water in cupped hands. Indeed, she says that one reason she started singing as a child was to touch that sadness. Today people send letters to say they have been taken by her songs through their sadness. They've been taken to the other side.

The finest hour, that I have seen,

is the one that comes between

The edge of night and the break of day,

When the darkness rolls away.

And what's on the other side?

I didn't ask but my guess is Kate would say-- a little bit of humor. In her concerts she brings a smile after every sad song--and even sometimes in the middle. When a sleeping child caught her eye and the lyrics slipped her mind, Kate quipped, "You look at a kid and forget all you know." She brought laughter but, more than that, she shared the beauty that had moved her. By stroking the moment delicately she had given both lightness and something deep.

Kate is now forty two. In the last four years she has gone through what she calls, symbolically, a "shake down" and an "emptying out" as well as a vision quest, a marriage, and a move to Marin. Now she feels on the brink of something new and, because she risks to follow where her heart and instincts lead, Kate is open to the road ahead though she can't see 'round the bend.

It's an unfinished life

that I find lies before me

an open-ended dream

and I don't want to wake.

I've crossed so many rivers

in search of crystal fountains;

I've found the truest paths

always lead through mountains.

I've seen water on the sky,

and fire burning on the lake.

Today Kate is very excited about what she feels is happening in the world and in herself. "Something is getting healthy" both within and without. Of herself she says, "'I've slowed down. I've let go of a lot of the sadness and fear in my life and have started to really enjoy where I've been and what I'm getting into." And in speaking of the world she points to a fabric of individuals who are working to make the land healthy “not in an abstract sense, but out there stomping around."

A few weeks ago Kate joined Gary Snyder-- a poet, farmer and spokesperson for bioregionalism; Lee Swenson--"an extraordinary human being," says Kate, who was Director of the Institute for Non violence and is involved with the Farallone's Institute; and Mark DuBois of Friends of the River--for an all-day symposium on "The Recovery of the Commons."

Though Kate felt she had more to learn than to say at the event she was moved to sing:

Finding work that is your own

may take some time to find

You've got to ask yourself some questions

You've got to draw the line

You've got to start all over

if your heart says it's not right

You can make your own way peaceful

or you may have to fight.

What may be coming for Kate is a blending of her voice in song with the voices of others who--though speaking in different forms--like her, care to heal the ways of people and the wounds of the earth. Recognizing the very special role music can have in this work she says, "I can never remember poems but I can remember songs. There's something about when you put a melody to words that engages the heart...."

And there's something about when you put Kate Wolf behind a guitar that engages the heart, too.

Love is born in fire;

it's planted like a seed

Love can't give you everything

But it gives you what you need

Love comes when you are ready,

love comes when you're afraid

it will be your greatest teacher,

the best friend you have made.

So give yourself to love

if love is what you're after

Open up your heart

to the tears and laughter

and give yourself to love,

give yourself to love.

Kate Wolf: "She Owns Herself"
Jim Rigby, Hartford Advocate, Hartford, Connecticut, September 28, 1977

Western singer Utah Phillips once introduced Kate Wolf to an audience, saying, "I'd like you to meet Kate Wolf. She owns herself."

The off-handed description could hardly be more appropriate for the country/folk singer who recently made an appearance at The Sounding Board in Hartford. Kate is one of the growing number of artists who are producing their own recordings, without the financial and promotional backing and hang-ups of large record companies.

Kate started singing in the late '50s in California coffee houses, but marriage and two children put the brakes on her performing career. It was not until 1971 that she began to seriously work at a music career again, when she put her talents to work for other artists as the producer and host of a live radio show called Uncommon Country, spotlighting small record labels and local artists rarely heard on commercial radio.

Her own career as a performer took a leap in 1976 with the release of first album, Back Roads. Kate chose to retain total control over the album, and released it on her own label, Owl Records. Money to finance the release was raised by fans in Kate's home town of Santa Rosa, Calif.

Such a production is not unusual for a performer like Kate. What makes it unique is that the album sold 8,000 copies in one year and had to be re-issued twice. Although 8,000 albums is peanuts to an industry that relegates records that sell less than 100,000 copies to the cut-out rack, it is a phenomenal sales figure for an artist-produced record with only word-of-mouth promotion behind it.

"The only way an artist can get a fair shake from the industry is to do it yourself first," Kate said following the concert. "You set a track record and then you can deal with the music industry. There's a whole thing with small labels today and it's going to change the music business."

Kate isn't discounting the possibility of signing with a major record company, but indicates that she would be wary of such a contract. "I would get a good lawyer and do it on my terms. I would strive to retain as much control as possible over my music."

Hartford was the last stop for Kate and her husband accompanist Don Coffin on a leisurely three-month East Coast tour. Although relatively well-known in the West, Kate is a newcomer here and the tour held several surprises.

"We had to bring our audience out of the woodwork in California. Here people are hungry for music and appreciative," she said. Don added that "when you go out to California, you have to spend the first year or more just introducing yourself. It's very hard for a performer to make it out there both emotionally and financially."

Both performers were delighted in the warm reception they had received at most stops on the tour. "You sing a line of chorus, and they sing it back at you in five-part harmony," Kate said bemusedly about the Hartford audience.

Kate's repertoire mingles her own compositions with those of country performers from Jimmy Rodgers to Townes Van Zandt.. There is a grace about her performing style, a smoothness that is easy to listen to without relying on the sweetness that many performers in this genre evoke. Her own songs range from the crying-in-the-beer-on-a-Saturday-night "Tequila and Me" to a modern-day unaccompanied Childe ballad called "The Lilac Bush and the Apple Tree." On stage at the Sounding Board, she and Don had fun with the blatantly sexist country hit "I Didn't Know God Made Honky-Tonk Angels," and a reply song recorded by Kitty Wells. Some fast banter between the two singers added to the parody of country-music mores.

The sexist orientation of much of country music doesn't seem to bother Kate. "I think there's a lot of the population that takes comfort from that kind of music," she said, "because that's the situation they live in." Don concurred, "Loretta Lynn and several other country singers have come out with a reaction to that whole mentality, but for a while it just came out of life." Judging from the performance Kate and Don take care to avoid the sexist mentality that pervades so many country repertoires , using it only to satirize the idealized lifestyle portrayed in the music. Don noted, however, that The Sounding Board was the only place on the tour where more people sang along and sang more fervently on the sexist chorus of "Honky Tonk Angels" than on the chorus of the Kitty Wells answer song.

Kate and Don stayed around after the concert to autograph albums and talk to new friends. There's little question that the same word-of-mouth promotion that sold 8,000 albums in California has been quietly started here.

Looking Back At The Country
By James Kelton, San Francisco Examiner, January 24, 1977

Country-folk singer Kate Wolf brought her Sonora Country song to The City Over the weekend

Kate Wolf, Sonoma County's mellifluous contribution to the good side of country music, worries about her acceptance back East, where she intends soon to take her rigorously unpretentious and contemplative music.

"They say we won't know just how California our music is until we get back there," she said Saturday night at the Other Cafe, where she and her husband Don Coffin and fiddler Paul Ellis entertained a crowd that overflowed from the tables to standing single-file along the walls.

That simple awareness of California's differentness should be enough to ward off any artistic catastrophes and it typifies what is best about her plentifully unique songs as well:

A genuine and honest concern with human reality.

As a songwriter she attaches as much importance to kitchen conversations as to the honky-tonk learning and storytelling narratives she uses to flesh out her performances. She and Coffin (who sings harmonies and Hank Williams standards and plays harp, mandolin and guitar) utilize everything from Wolf's own compelling compositions to an interwoven rendition of the country-classic "Wild Side of Life" – about a beleaguered man's woman-gone-wrong – and the female's answer – to create one of the most pleasing evenings of folk-style entertainment Northern California has to offer. It fits perfectly with blues great Leadbelly's admonition, "relax your mind!"

Wolf plays nothing fancy on her guitar and Coffin struggles through the rangier Hank Williams lyrics with what can only be described as heartfelt enthusiasm. But fiddler Paul Ellis is exquisitely timely in his accompaniment and the combination of his airs and Coffin's harp or mandolin and Wolf's earthy, intelligent singing conjure up a moodily seductive backwoods feeling.

Saturday, they concentrated their first set on songs from a forthcoming (as they implied) homespun record and their second on the fine numbers from their first Owl Records LP, "Back Roads." They sang of tequila, spending your life in one spot, the toll of personal change, drinking-as-a-solution and growing old with dignity . . . all the things city life casts asunder.

On her best songs – "Telluride," "Emma Rose" and "Back Roads" – Kate wolf is a storyteller in the truest sense. She doesn't get in the way of the tales and she obviously respects the events' effects. It's plain old complicated living she's most enamored of.

To hear her in such a receptive environment as the specifically personable Other Cafe is a rare treat. She honors her audiences as if they were her guests and they give her the attention she deserves. She may be taking her music to the East Coast but she's California In the best sense. She's embraced the values of a lost culture – Southern, rural, country, whatever – without losing her own sense of herself.

She knows how California she is and she's proud of it. But not too proud to recognize that her roots are as much in popular music itself as in any one place.

Her closing number for her second set was Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released," not the most woodsy of songs, but she did it beautifully.

They'll like that back East.

The Musical 'Back Roads' of Kate Wolf
Chris Samson, The Petaluma Argus-Courier, Petaluma, California, March 20, 1976

Is there something special about the music being created by Sonoma County musicians?

Kate Wolf thinks so. "We have something unique up here," she said, "a kind of regional music all our own. We're different-not funky Berkeley or slick Los Angeles. We're Sonoma County."

Whatever is happening out here in the country, Kate seems to be right in the middle of it. As a singer and leader of the group Kate Wolf and the Wildwood Flower, as well as a songwriter, radio personality and folk-festival organizer, she is at the forefront of the area music scene.

Kate and her group are not only one of the most popular performing bands in the area, but they are also perhaps the best example of what the music of Sonoma County is all about. They have built up a wide following with their brand of acoustic folk music, playing frequently at clubs in the area (including the Eggery in Petaluma, where they will perform Easter Sunday).

In the last few months, Kate Wolf and the Wildwood Flower have come into their own, and have begun to draw notice from outside the area. This has been largely on the strength of their recently released first album, "Back Roads," which Kate describes as a chronicle of different people and places in Sonoma County in the last few years.

As the album picks up momentum, so is the group. Kate and the band have agreed to perform at two major out-of-the-area concerts next month. The first will be an April 6 date at the Boarding House in San Francisco with U. Utah Phillips and Rosalie Sorrells, to be followed by an appearance at the San Diego Folk Festival.

There are 12 songs on the "Back Roads" album, eight of them written by Kate and the others by musician friends. All of the songs are related to personal experiences and Kate feels the lyrics give the music the "regional feeling." Lyrics are very important in her songs. Listening to the words, Kate's soothing voice and the acoustic instrumental backing, one can soon understand what this "regional music" is about.

Songs like "Emma Rose," "The Redtail Hawk," "Riding in the Country" and the title song are specifically about this area.

"Emma Rose," according, is about a real Sebastopol woman whose name caught her eye on a roadside mailbox one day. Although she had not met the woman when she wrote the song, she used her name to dramatize the threat of subdividers moving into the apple orchards.

There are many older women like her whose husbands died and who now are having trouble running their farm, making ends meet and contending with the developers moving in, according to Kate. A few months ago, Kate received a phone call from the real Emma Rose, who suggested that they meet. "She turned out to be a delightful 81-year-old lady," Kate said, not too much unlike the one the song was about.. Emma Rose recently came to a promotional party for the album and wound up autographing copies of the record.

"Back Roads" perhaps best sums up the feeling of the album. Kate said she hadn't originally intended for it to be the title song, and wasn't even sure at first if she would include it on the album. But she considers it "one of the most lyrically satisfying" of her songs.

Kate wrote "Back Roads" one day after driving back up Highway 101 to her Santa Rosa home. "I just got tired of driving on the freeway and turned off on Roblar Road and took back roads the rest of the way home," she explained.

The record was recorded during a five-day period in a house on the Sonoma County coastline near Goat Rock. Although it was recorded "live," without re-mixing or overdubbing, the album has a clear, rich, professional sound like any studio record.

Kate gives much of the credit for the successful sound of the record to producer and engineer Dan Dugan, who she said handled his recording equipment like it was another musical instrument.

The musicians themselves, of course, received much praise from Kate. Wildwood Flower, Kate said, is basically a "floating band," with herself, husband Don Coffin and fiddler Paul Ellis forming the nucleus. Also performing on the album were Will Siegel, Pete Wiseman and David West, who co-authored two of the songs.

Kate involved herself with a lot more than just the music in preparing the album. She formed her own music publishing company and record company in setting up the album. "It was a real learning experience," she said. The album is the first release on her label, Owl Records, and she hopes more albums will be forthcoming in future years, from other artists as well as her group.

Kate plays guitar and does most of the singing in the group, while Don alternated on guitar, mandolin, harmonica and sing harmony. Paul plays the violin and mandolin and a bass player, sometimes Wiseman, usually completes their group.

Unlike many professional musicians, Kate and Don, who live in a rambling country house on Santa Rosa's outskirts, differ from many professional musicians in that they have successfully integrated their music with their lifestyle. They feel it is important that they have settled down and found a sense of place from which to grow as musicians.

"I think we're fortunate not to be young and trying to make it as musicians on a commercial, competitive basis," said Kate, who is 33 and has a son and daughter aged 11 and 8. "Don and I have become entrenched in the community as people, not just as musicians."

Indeed, Don (a fourth generation Sonoma County resident who was born and raised in Petaluma) has continued his job as a mailman in Sebastopol despite the growing success of their musical career.

Although they say they have some national aspirations, Kate and Don also point out that their songs are not aimed at a commercial market. That is why they wanted to retain artistic control of their music through their own record company.

The competitiveness and commercialism which pervades most of the music industry is not as apparent in Sonoma County, Kate added. She has noticed "a real sense of community among the musicians here which you don't find in many places." There is a lack of the intense competition found elsewhere and this lack of pressure has a lot to do with the special feel of the music.

"It's a really relaxed sound," she said, "with a naturalism that frustrated people who would want to try and market it.."

Although the first printing of 1,000 copies of "Back Roads" is quickly selling in the area and a second printing is soon due, Kate feels that a record must sell itself and not rely on "hype" or promotion.

Sonoma County residents who enjoy the area and who like the music should not pass up "Back Roads." Kate Wolf sings of a philosophy and a sense of place and time that for many will hit close to home:

I'll take the back roads home through the open countryside

Letting things slip by in drawn out time

I'll take the long way home on the back roads of this life

Taking time to see what goes by.

Coming and going, there's no dividing line

What you're headed for, someone left behind

And the shortest road ain't always the best

Sometime let a back road take you home.