The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, Judy Collins -A Reflection On The 1960s Folk Minute

 

 

Funny how trends get started, how one person, or a few start something and it seems like the whole world follows, or the part of the world that hears about the new dispensation anyway. Maybe it was when guys in the 1950s (Mad Men, okay) started to lock-step in gray flannel suits, maybe it was when one kid threw a hard plastic circle thing around his or her waist and every kid from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon had to have one, maybe it was after Elvis exploded onto the scene  and every guy from twelve to two hundred in the world had to, whether they looked right with it or not,  wear their sideburns just a little longer, and maybe it was, noting the photograph above, when some girls, probably college girls (now young women but then still girls, go figure) having seen Joan Baez (or perhaps her sister Mimi) on the cover of Time got out the ironing board at home or in her dorm and tried to iron their own hair whatever condition it was into long and straight strands. (Surely as strong as the folk minute was just then say 1962, 63, 64, they did not see the photo of Joan on some grainy Arise and Sing folk magazine cover).            

My old friend Sam Lowell told me a funny story one time about our friend Julie Peters who shared our love of folk music back then (and later too as we joined a few others in the folk aficionado world after the heyday of the folk minute got lost in the storm of the British invasion) who when he first met her in Harvard Square one night at the Café Blanc and they had a coffee together had her hair kind of, oh he didn’t  know what they called it but he thought something like beehive or flip or something which highlighted and enhanced her long face. Sam thought she looked fine. Then one night she startled him when he picked her up at her dorm at Boston University to go over the Club Blue in the Square to see Dave Van Ronk hold forth and she met him at the door with the mandatory long-stranded hair which frankly made her face even longer. When Sam asked her why the change, and after making a serious mistake of asking if she had it done at the beauty parlor or something and she looked at him with burning hate eyes since no self-respecting folkie college girl would go to such a place where her mother would go, she declared that she could not possibly go to Harvard Square looking like somebody from some suburban high school not after seeing her idol Joan Baez (and later Judy Collins too) with that great long hair which seemed very exotic. So she joined the crowd, Sam got used to it and after a while she did begin to look like a folkie girl (and started wearing the inevitable peasant blouses instead of those cashmere sweaters or starched shirt things she used to wear).    

By the way let’s be clear on that Julie thing with Sam back the early 1960s. She and Sam went “dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. Sam and Julie were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other but folk music was their bond and despite persistent Julie BU dorm roommate rumors what with Sam hanging around all the time they had never been lovers. A few years later she mentioned that Club Blue night to Sam as they waited to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with me and my companion, Laura Talbot, to if he remembered Van Ronk’s performance and while he thought he remembered he was not sure. He asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.

As for the long-ironed haired women in the photograph their work speaks for itself. Joan Baez worked the Bob Dylan anointed “king and queen” of the folkies routine for a while for the time the folk minute lasted. Mimi (now passed on) teamed up with her husband, Richard Farina, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash in the mid-1960s, to write and sing some of the most haunting ballads of those new folk time (think Birmingham Sunday). Julie Collins, now coiffured like that mother Julie was beauty parlor running away from and that is okay, still produces beautiful sounds on her concert tours. But everyone should remember, every woman from that time, that burnt hair, and other sorrows, and know exactly who to blame. Yeah, we have the photo.