Lately I’ve been thinking about Kate Wolf (1942-1986), a singer and songwriter from this part of the country who was just beginning to draw national attention when leukemia took her at the age of 44. Growing up, she listened to Dylan, The Weavers, The Carter Family, and Merle Haggard (1). Her poetic lyrics celebrated backroads and small towns and her music wove the “high lonesome” sound of bluegrass into landscape of northern California.
Once I loaned a friend one of Kate’s albums. When she returned it she mentioned that her 10 year old son listened to several songs and said, “Wow, that music is really sad.” Pothos comes to mind, a Greek word I have used here before, that signifies a restlessness, an unrequited and unrequitable longing for what lies beyond the horizon. Pothos is the affliction of dreamers and it’s woven as a minor chord through much of this music, even when it seems most concrete:
Here in California fruit hangs heavy on the vines,
But there’s no gold, I thought I’d warn you,
And the hills turn brown in the summertime.
– from “Here in California” by Kate Wolf
In April, 1986, Kate was diagnosed with leukemia. After chemotherapy, she went into full remission, started work on a retrospective album, and scheduled another tour. The disease returned in the fall, however, and we lost her on December 10. Her long time friend and touring partner, Utah Phillips covered the remaining shows she’d booked, including one in Placerville Mary and I had tickets for.
He led the crowd in singing her songs and said something I’ve never forgotten. “At the end of her life, Kate told me she knew why she’d gotten cancer. She took in people’s pain, the pain of living. It was the source of her art, but she realized too late that she never learned to let it go.” Phillips warned everyone to beware of clinging to grief and reminded us of the threads of hope and joy we also find in her music.
Kate’s music has been covered by musicians like Emmy Lou Harris, Nanci Griffith, and Peter Rowan. You can sample her songs on katewolf.com, a website her family maintains, as well as on iTunes. Once you listen, these songs find a home in your head and heart, for as Kate Wolf put it in “Brother Warrior:”
We are crying for a vision
That all living things can share
And those who care
Are with us everywhere.
The First Gates 
I have quite a few friends in the Pacific NW bluegrass community, and one in particular, still plays and sings Kate Wolf songs.
Lovely! Thank you Morgan 🙂
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At the time, I sought out Blue Grass events more frequently. There was always a big festival in the summer in Grass Valley. But this is very special music that really reaches beyond its genre.
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Thanks for telling me about Kate Wolf. I’m sending your link along to my daughter Maggie. It’s her kind of music. I liked this very much. What a loss.
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From listening to her recordings, I’m sure Maggie will like it. Glad you did too.
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Thanks for bringing back memories. She was special.
I hadn’t thought of Utah Phillips in years. I saw him at the old Shire Road Pub when it was in Old Fair Oaks back in the mid 70’s.
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I remember seeing him more recently, in the 90’s I think, at the Sierra Storytelling Festival which is held near Nevada City. I remember he certainly had the gift of gab. I can’t quite remember what reminded me of Kate Wolf at this time, but I’m glad something did.
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wow. seems like she was taken too early but she still made and left a mark.
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Very true. There is still an annual music festival in her name.
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Kate and Utah did not quite get it. It is not that someone failed to let it go; it is that the ‘someone’ is only resistance, which appears substantial only subsequent to a contraction against a feeling/thought. Contracting against a pain, we find ourselves attracted to such pains ‘out there’ as we intuitively seek the medicine to return us home to eternity, which it will if we only drink deep, allowing it to wash the drinker away. Such is the paradox of the journey to the far shore. After Leonard Cohen gave a performance for his Zen master, the master called him over and whispered, “You should sing sadder songs”. The deepest pain that every “I” is always dancing around, is one which “I” has vowed to never feel. The heroes journey amounts to feeling through that vow.
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If we’re talking of ultimate things, the most profound teaching I have heard is that the greatest good is compassion for those who “do not quite get it” – which includes everyone, with the exception of a few masters wandering around among us. As T.S. Eliot put it, “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation.”
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One correction to your story about Kate Wolf is that the leukemia never returned in the Fall.
At the end of summer ‘86 she had no detectable leukemia cells but went in for a bone marrow transplant to attempt to prevent the leukemia from returning. Unfortunately it was the failed transplant that took her life not the leukemia
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One correction to your story about Kate Wolf is that the leukemia never returned in the Fall.
At the end of summer ‘86 she had no detectable leukemia cells but went in for a bone marrow transplant to attempt to prevent the leukemia from returning. Unfortunately it was the failed transplant that took her life not the returning of the leukemia cells
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One correction to your story about Kate Wolf is that the leukemia never returned in the Fall.
At the end of summer ‘86 she had no detectable leukemia cells but went in for a bone marrow transplant to attempt to prevent the leukemia from returning. Unfortunately it was the failed transplant that took her life not the returning of the leukemia cells
The main doctor felt early on that trauma in life can cause cancer. Kate certainly had her share of trauma in her life and as body workers come to know & feel is the deep seated trauma of life that resides in the deepest layers of our existence that can cause an imbalance
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Thanks for the clarification.
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