Who Knows Where the Time Goes

Some of them never sang again after the 1970s, as far as anyone can determine, and some have retreated into areas unknown. One is an artist who specializes in painted hubcaps, one is an opera singer, and one is dead. Two of them—Caroline Peyton and Ellen Warshaw—live and work in Nashville. Not one of them ever sold more than 5,000 copies of any recording. But the 14 female folksingers whose work is represented on Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies From the Canyon shared an aesthetic that valued self-expression over worldly success, and created music that obsessively combined artlessness and artiness. The conceit of Wayfaring Strangers is that the work of obscure, early-’70s performers like Warshaw, Peyton, Collie Ryan, Carla Sciaky and Mary Perrin represented a homegrown response to the challenge Joni Mitchell set forth in her pioneering albums Ladies of the Canyon and For the Roses. As compilers Rob Sevier and Ken Shipley write in the collection’s liner notes, “The title track [of Ladies of the Canyon] reads like a call to arms, resonating with every lonely teenage girl who stared doe-eyed into the gatefold.” For these young women, Sevier and Shipley imply, the eccentricity and glamour of Mitchell’s music opened up landscapes of “poignant desolation”—Joni Mitchell’s music could be imitated, but her personal autonomy was another matter entirely. So, if Caroline Peyton’s “Engram” is the uncanniest evocation of Mitchell on Wayfaring Strangers (Peyton has the phrasing and the swoops down pat, and if anything her voice is richer than Mitchell’s), the song itself was the product of a countercultural twilight. “I was dumb, because there’s no reason to imitate Joni,” Peyton says. Today, she’s a successful singer who has a résumé that includes roles in Broadway musicals and animated movies like Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas. But in the early ’70s, she’d quit Northwestern University to live in a Bloomington, Ind. commune, and recorded an album, Mock Up, with songwriter and producer Mark Bingham. “I didn’t know what I wanted, and I needed to find my own voice,” Peyton says. “Mock Up was my first recording. My father paid for it, even though I had dropped out of Northwestern. My frustration with Mark [Bingham] was that he was so anti-establishment. I don’t think he ever re-wrote anything—it was all stream-of-consciousness. People ask me what ‘Engram’ means and I say, ‘I don’t know what it means now, and I didn’t know when I was singing it, and I’ll never know what it meant.’ ” “Engram” is too mannered for its own good, but Peyton’s big, precise voice is intensely pleasurable, and there’s art in the way the melody fights against and reinforces lines like, “White walls with your pictures hanging in me / There’s a noose, and if you turned it loose on you / We’d go back in time.” The rest of Mock Up is similarly convoluted in the manner of the era, with the influence of The Band and Leon Russell as prominent as that of Mitchell. Peyton looks back on the ’70s with both regret and pride. “I was riding that wave, and I’m not particularly proud of those days,” she says. “This stuff coming back at me now makes me realize that Mark Bingham’s writing was ahead of its time, and what we were doing was ahead of its time.” Original copies of Mock Up bring decent prices these days, and there’s even a Japanese CD edition. Peyton and Bingham collaborated on one more album, 1977’s Intuition, which sounds like Joni Mitchell with a Bloomington pick-up band who can’t quite reconcile fusion-jazz with disco, folk-rock with selling out. Still, Peyton was lucky, even if she never became the next Joni, or a household name. Bingham and Peyton missed a chance to sign with Clive Davis’ Columbia label in 1972. “We got flown to New York to audition for Davis,” Peyton laughs. “We didn’t get picked up [by Columbia], and the next day I was back on my pallet on the floor in Indiana when the A&R guy called me and said if I ever got in front of a band, I could eclipse Janis Joplin.” That never happened either, and Peyton went on to try her hand as a folk-rock singer in Los Angeles before she made her Broadway debut in 1983 as Mary Arena in Galt MacDermot’s The Human Comedy. Since then, she’s worked steadily as a singer and as a singing coach, and says she enjoys her life in Nashville. “I know what it’s like to be famous, having coached famous people in their homes, and seen what a three-ring circus a typical day is. I have two daughters, and that means more to me than anything. I have a great life.” Peyton found fulfillment as a professional who proved herself endlessly adaptable; folkiedom was but a stop along the way. Ellen Warshaw, whose cover of Jagger-Richards-Faithfull’s “Sister Morphine” closes Wayfaring Strangers, was 13 when she was discovered in her hometown of Merrick, Long Island. She was 15 when she recorded Ellen Warshaw for Vanguard, making her the only performer on the compilation who did business with an established label. “The reason I didn’t like the album,” Warshaw says, “I was 15 when I recorded it, and I had to have my parents’ permission for the contracts. I was manipulated by everybody, and I had no voice. I was being handled by a manager who was happy to get his foot in the door with me.” Recorded in 1970 and released two years later, Ellen Warshaw is divided into a side of cover tunes cut with a band that included guitarist Eric Weissberg, and a side of Warshaw’s originals done with her voice and guitar. Warshaw sings Eric Von Schmidt’s “Champagne Don’t Hurt Me, Baby” with something approaching adult awareness, tears into “Sister Morphine,” and writes one called “We Can Make a Rainbow” that contains lines like, “Hey, people of this time and place / Let’s all show the human race / We’ll live together, work and sing and dance.” Today, Warshaw runs a thriving East Nashville bed-and-breakfast, The Big Bungalow, and recalls the early ’70s with a slightly aggrieved affection similar to Peyton’s. “Just prior to meeting my manager, I was gigging around Merrick,” she recalls. “When I got signed, I was able to do gigs at New York clubs like Folk City, and got reviewed in Variety. I played with Peter Yarrow and Steve Goodman, and opened for Tim Hardin. But I suspect Vanguard was trying to make me into a little-girl folksinger like Buffy Saint-Marie, so the record wasn’t a representation of what I was feeling at the time.” The record did no business (“I got a $20 check once,” Warshaw says); after a brief stint in college, Warshaw spent the next decade singing in rock and disco bands with names like Lovelace and Zipperfoot. She visited Nashville for a songwriters’ conference, liked it, and moved here in 1995, supporting herself as a massage therapist while writing songs. About three years ago, she had an epiphany: “I woke up one day, and it dawned on me that I was not going to make it. I was not going to have any financial success, and the gigging days were gone. It was a very hard day.” Wayfaring Strangers makes us reconsider a heroic era of popular music. If Warshaw and Peyton never became successful in the way singer-songwriters were supposed to, writing all their own material and controlling every aspect of their careers, at least they didn’t vanish into obscurity like Linda Rich of Wichita, whose “Sunlight Shadow” is one of the most haunting moments on Wayfaring. These unknown singer-songwriters often achieve effects that elude more professional performers. Collie Ryan’s reverb-drenched “Cricket” is a breathless, naive and spooky piece of American nature mysticism, while the other great Joni sound-alike on Wayfaring Strangers, Priscilla Quinby, is revealed as an inspired melodist on “With All Hands,” a gorgeous song that’s narrated from the viewpoint of the ocean. Because we, as listeners, live in a late era of pop culture, we can perceive a Wayfaring track like Shira Small’s 1974 “Eternal Life” in several ways. Recorded as part of a senior project for a Quaker boarding school, it’s goofy: her voice breaks, she insists on pronouncing “realization” as “re-al-i-zation,” and how silly are lines like, “Ruled by human logic / We sometimes confine ourselves / To one plane of the universe”? But “Eternal Life” is also prophetic, since the gospel-jazz piano and meandering rhythms certainly anticipate, say, the work of Antony & the Johnsons. And in the end, it’s profoundly moving, as only lost and ambiguous things can be.