Artist: Carolyn Hillyer
Genre(s):
New Age
Discography:
Cave Of Elders
Year: 2002
Tracks: 7
Grandmother Turtle
Year: 2001
Tracks: 13
House Of The Weavers
Year: 1992
Tracks: 12
Although Carolyn Hester's talent was tenuous, she was an important, if marginal, figure of the early '60s folk revivification, singing traditional corporeal with a high voice in the manner of Joan Baez and Judy Collins (though with less bid). She is likewise remembered for brief musical associations with Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, and Richard Farina, as well as having her early albums produced by music legends Norman Petty (world Health Organization had produced Holly), Tom Clancy, John Hammond, and John Simon. Some of her early and mid-1960s work points, if simply of all time so slenderly, in directions that would lead to folk-rock. Hester herself was unable to make it as a folk-rocker disdain a brief try, and erratically went into psychedelic music for a mates of albums earlier mostly drifting out of the occupation in the 1970s and eighties. In the '80s, she was a wise man for budding talent Nanci Griffith (whose vocals have got been compared to Hester's), and appeared on Griffith's Other Voices, Other Rooms album.
Innate in Texas, Hester touched to New York in 1955 to get into music and playing. However, she would number one record for Norman Petty at his studios in Clovis, New Mexico, non far from Lubbock, Texas, where her parents were living in the late 1950s. Her number one album, Scarlet Ribbons, was produced by Petty in 1957, and plant expiration on Coral Records. In 1958, she did an unissued sitting in Clovis with Holly, Jerry Allison of the Crickets, and George Atwood that would be captivating to hear if it e'er emerges, as it was rare for family line and rock musicians of the period to collaborate. She was a friend of Holly's as good, although his influence on her subsequent music is not also audible, other than on her multiple versions of his "Solitary Tears."
In 1960 she made her instant album, Carolyn Hester, for Tradition, the label run by the Clancy Brothers. This cast her very much in the thick of the family line revival, including such standards of the apparent motion as "The House of the Rising Sun" and "She Moves Through the Fair, " song dynasty in her high, almost wobbly and girlish part. In the early 1960s she was in brief married to writer and folk music singer-songwriter Richard Farina, wHO became well-disposed with Bob Dylan shortly after Dylan's arrival in New York. While transcription her third album (too, bewilderingly, coroneted Carolyn Hester) for Columbia and producer John Hammond in September 1961, she invited Dylan, then well-nigh unidentified, to dally harp on a few cuts. His play on the album helped bring him to the attention of Hammond, wHO sign-language Dylan to Columbia as a solo creative person shortly subsequently.
Spell other performers of the early-1960s folk revival made great strides fore in gross sales and influence--including Dylan, Baez, and Collins--Hester remained comparatively obscure. She sour down a fortune to manikin a family line trio with Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey, offered by manager Albert Grossman; that position went to Mary Travers, and the triplet found stardom as Peter, Paul & Mary. In hindsight her two Columbia albums may have opened ears up to the possibilities of phratry musicians recording with bands, as they included contributions by Bill Lee on bass, future Dylan sideman Bruce Langhorne on guitar, and level light drums on a cover of Buddy Holly's "Lonesome Tears" (non released until 1995). However, in projecting only to traditional material, preferably than application songs by contemporary writers or writing anything herself, Hester was falling behind the folk curve.
Subsequently her irregular record album, Hester touched to Dot, and began transcription over again with Petty in Clovis. These 1964-65 recordings, with a lot including George Tomsco of the Fireballs on guitar, inched a little toward folk-rock without actually acquiring there, also including some covers of material by electric current phratry singer-songwriters like Tom Paxton and Mark Spoelstra. Through his friend Hester, some other Petty transcription creative person, Jimmy Gilmer (wHO recorded with the Fireballs and had a #1 rack up in 1963 with "Gelt Shack"), met Paxton and was influenced to record some of Paxton's songs on his 1965 Folkbeat album. (The Fireballs got their net big strike with a cover of Paxton's "Nursing bottle of Wine" in 1968.) However, the Tex-Mex folk-rock effectual, as produced by Norman Petty and performed by Gilmer, the Fireballs, and Carolyn Hester, never did form a substantive encroachment.
In 1966, Hester was re-signed to Columbia by John Hammond. Although she made a good act of recordings at that place with producer John Simon (known for his work with the Band, Big Brother & the Holding Company, and others), simply deuce singles were released. One of these, "Other Morning, " was a clean good commercial-grade art object of pop-folk-rock, just Hester didn't seem terribly well-suited to galvanic medicine. Other Columbia recordings, near of which were not released until 1995 on the Good Companion anthology, show her casting around for management, operative through and through material by Tim Hardin, Jackson Frank, and Cat Stevens; pickings a pang at the Beatles' "Penny Lane"; and even doing an odd cover of Ravi Shankar's "Majhires" that verged on psychedelic music.
In the late 1960s, Hester made the unexpected actuate to psychedelic music as share of the Carolyn Hester Coalition, world Health Organization recorded a mates of little-known albums for Metromedia. These were erratic merely non half-bad, interspersing updates of traditional corporeal like "East Virginia" and Ed McCurdy's "Net Night I Had the Strangest Dream" with moody and fuzzed folk-rockers. Hester too did some recording for Decca, RCA, and Capitol, and formed the Outpost judge with her husband, jazz David Blume. With Blume, she ran an ethnical dance golf-club in Los Angeles, and she continues to record and tour at times. She was seen dueting with Nanci Griffith on Bob Dylan's "Boots of Spanish Leather" on a nationally air tribute to Dylan at Madison Square Garden in the nineties.
