My brother and I would check out albums from the library all during my childhood and play them in the pink and gray tweed record player. We would get big band, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Glen Miller but my favorites were the folk artists, especially from the Dust Bowl Era, Woody Gutherie, and the 1940’s Pete Seeger.
Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten was my inspiration for joining the Seattle Folklore Society.
I soon started going to these mini concerts in hotel rooms in the university district, where she and other folk artists were playing to only a handful of people. I never felt anything but love and acceptance from the other folk fans, who were mostly around forty years older than me.
This graduated into going to concerts every weekend at Eagles Auditorium after my eye-opening experience, seeing the Grateful Dead playing on the beach at Golden Gardens. It was a couple years of pure magical transformation. This little Babushuka threw off her corduroy skirt and donned a fringed vest, bleached the long, curly hair hacked off my jeans into cut-offs and off she went to full scale hipification! I was now 14 and my poor mother lost all control over me and was sure I was on drugs. She once found hollyhock seeds in my pants pocket and took them to the druggist across the street from our house to have them analyzed. I had picked them from a friend’s bush because I liked the flowers - definitely not hallucinogenic. Was I smoking weed? Definitely but had not gotten into acid and I still held on to my virginity, a gemstone not to be given away lightly - this was a little before free love/sex and birth control in 1966 - and I was 14 after all.