Hester enrolled in the American Theatre Wing to further her career in the arts, but that was mainly to appease her mother, now living back in Texas. It was like that when I moved to New York in 1955.' And it's a very lonely occupation, a daunting experience to go to a new town where basically you're it. But I carried guitars many a mile, to towns I played. I think that one got stolen when my apartment got broken into in New York. 'I had an old Silvertone my dad got at Sears. After hearing Susan, I became interested in folk instruments, and I started playing guitar. It was the first time I'd heard a woman in folk music, and she was playing her own instruments вЂ“ zither, I think. ' brought me an album of Susan's, and I took it home and listened to it. A choir scholarship paid for singing lessons, and during a Dallas high school production, Hester's performance of 'The Kerry Dance' impressed a PE teacher, who introduced the aspiring vocalist to the music of folksinger Susan Reed. Waco was her birthplace, yet her music-loving parents moved more than once during her childhood. In 1937, The Hobbit first appeared in print, the Hindenburg exploded, Amelia Earhart vanished, the Marijuana Tax Act became law, and Robert Johnson recorded his last songs. 'I was born in 1937, so this recession feels familiar,' begins Carolyn Hester, chuckling on the telephone from her home outside Los Angeles. It was the last time Hester would record on her own until Texas Songbird in 1996. Hester married composer-musician David Blume in 1969, and four years later, she released her third self-titled LP, this time for RCA.

The British were coming, and times were a-changing. The music of Hester's generation flourished in the mid-1960s, morphing into folk rock when Dylan plugged in at Newport in 1965, dear old-school Seeger trying to pull the plug. In 1964, the Saturday Evening Post put her on the cover. Her third LP appeared on the prestigious Columbia Records label, produced by the estimable John Hammond, who took note of Hester's harmonica player and soon signed the young Bob Dylan. There she befriended an ambitious local teen by the name of Buddy Holly and was pleased when he accompanied her on some of the recordings. Hester quickly became the Texan sweetheart of the folk rodeo, and by 1958, she'd recorded Scarlet Ribbons with Norman Petty at his famous Clovis, N.M., studio. Finding her true voice in singing, she fell in with a crowd that admired the Weavers and the king and queen of folk, Pete Seeger and the late Odetta. She arrived in New York City in 1955, ready to study theatre, because it pleased her mother to 'know where I was at least part of the time.' Instead, she tumbled into the nascent 1960s folk movement. All elements flow over and under one another with organic grace in the mandala's remarkable marriage of mathematics and art.Д«y mere association, Hester resides in a golden aura. Within its intricate design, the past is thick with threads of ancient ballads and long-forgotten tunes worked into the modern consciousness.

Buddy was royalty, and I felt like she was my connection to it, to the rock-and-roll music that I'd played earlier, to that spirit.' вЂ“ Bob Dylan, ChroniclesД¬arolyn Hester's life resembles a great woven mandala, the Sanskrit word for circle, never-ending and overlapping music with life and people. That she had known and worked with Buddy Holly left no small impression on me and I liked being around her. Carolyn was eye catching, down-home and double barrel beautiful. She was going places and it didn't surprise me.

Carolyn was a Texan guitar-playing singer who I knew and played with around town. John had first seen and heard me at Carolyn Hester's apartment. 'The events which led up to were very unexpected. 29, 1961: (l-r) Bruce Langhorne, Carolyn Hester, Bob Dylan, Bill Lee (Photo courtesy of Carolyn Hester)

Scarlet letter album muse