A Life in Song

Abstract

Rosalie Sorrels was born in Idaho seventy-five years ago, and lives there now in a log cabin her father built thirty miles outside of Boise. She has traveled this country, usually driving herself, for half a century, and wherever she has stopped she has made lifelong friends. She began her career as a folklorist in the 1950s, and has amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the folk idiom, ranging from the English ballads to Mormon songs to the work of contemporary songwriters. She has studied not just the songs but also the tradition from which they are derived. Her original songs and stories serve to create and preserve the oral tradition. Rosalie has recorded twenty-five albums, the most recent of which is Strangers in Another Country, a compilation of songs by Bruce "Utah" Phillips, which was nominated for a Grammy Award. She has also written three books, including Way Out in Idaho, a monumental collection of songs, stories, pictures, and recipes gathered in the course of three years spent traveling around her home state and listening to its people, and published in honor of the Idaho centenary. In this lecture, Rosalie Sorrels will offer her recollections of an eventful career as both a folklorist and a performer, and will sing songs she has collected and written over the years.