The Ballad Of Carolyn Hester

Four Decades After Stardom Passed Her By, She's Singing Her Heart Out

Carolyn Hester and husband David Blume last week in Cambridge: After the near-glory years, she's back on the road. (Laurie Swope For The Washington Post)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

Close your eyes and you're not in 2005 any more.

You're in a coffeehouse within harmonica range of Harvard Square. There's a guitar being strummed, a beautiful young woman singing. You're back in 1961, with the great American folk boom approaching its peak. Perhaps it's the night the scraggly kid shows up from New York. He's hoping the beautiful young woman can get him a gig, or at least bring him up for a song or two.

John F. Kennedy is president. There are Freedom Riders in Mississippi. The kid, Bob Dylan, will soon record his first album. And Carolyn Hester, Queen of the New York Folk Singers, is playing at Club 47.

Open your eyes and she's still singing, high cheekbones framed by a mane of white hair, high notes still hit in a sweet soprano voice:

Well, if somehow you could pack up your sorrows,

And give them all to me.

Well, you would lose them, I know how to use them,

Give 'em all to me.

The song could bring tears if the melody weren't such a catchy one -- and if Hester, on this frozen January night, weren't smiling so widely as she sings.

Carolyn Hester is the proud protagonist of a classic American tale. Call it "How a Star Was Almost Born." It's a story about ambition, talent, competition and the hottest musical trend of the day. You could tell it about hip-hop or punk rock or even classical opera, but in this case it's set amidst the intense, short-lived romance with traditional folk music that swept the nation from the late 1950s until the Beatles invaded in 1964.

In a winner-take-all culture, the biggest names crowd out other talent. There can be just one King at a time, or one Boss, or, in the case of the '60s folk revival, one Joan Baez, who was anointed on a Time cover in November 1962. Baez remains the female folk icon (with apologies to Judy Collins) whose name non-folkies are most likely to know.

Yet the pecking order is always clearer in retrospect, and there was a time when a lot of people thought Carolyn Hester would be The One.

"At the beginning, she was the queen of folk music -- long before Baez and Collins came along," says DJ Dick Cerri, a moving force behind the Washington-based World Folk Music Association. Last year the group gave Hester its lifetime achievement award. Saturday she'll play the Birchmere as part of WFMA's 20th annual benefit concert. Tonight she's in Annapolis at 49 West.