An Interview with Kate Wolf

Where and when were you born?
I was born January 27, 1942 in San Francisco.

Who were your parents?
My mother was a school teacher all my life. At the time she was just in school. My dad was in the Merchant Marine and left our family when I was pretty young. Curiously enough, when my son was five months old, they remarried after twenty-two years. So he's around.
They were both Oregonians. Their parents had gone to Oregon and worked in different occupations. My mother's father was a lumberman and a stagecoach driver and my dad's mom was a schoolteacher in Nebraska who married for companionship and ended up having three kids. It was one of those typical Western American families.

Brothers and sisters?
I have one full brother who is just eighteen months younger than I and then a half sister and two half brothers who are about ten years younger.

And influential others? I'm thinking of the song "Eyes of a Painter."
I only met him briefly but I had a relationship with his son for almost ten years. We went down to Oklahoma together at Thanksgiving time and I met him. He just struck a chord. I thought he was an incredible human being. He was quite elderly and quite ill. He had run the grocery store in town, this little bitty town, for years and fed everyone during the Depression. Here he was at the end of his life with lung cancer and I remember saying to him, "I'm going out for a ride, Les, what do I look for?" and he just fixed me with these steely eyes and said, "Look for? You don't look for nothing, you watch the light." I just thought, here's this man, he dropped out of school in the eighth grade, and had a hard life and had a lot of love in him and he just had "the eyes of a painter, heart of a maker of songs" and so I wrote that song for him when I got home. In the Indian way, your grandfathers are your grandfathers whether they're blood or not and sometimes you run across people who you know you're just connected to.
I had another older woman who was a big influence on my life when my kids were small. She's in her nineties now. She just really influenced me in lots of ways. Her name was Isabel Boccles. She grew up in Nebraska and decided she wasn't going to get married like all her other girlfriends were so she went off to teacher's college which was at the turn of the century. Then she took her girlfriend and went all over the West on a train, came back and worked as a nurse and met this miner in Colorado who was there because he had measles. She knew if he asked her to marry him she'd say yes, so she went back to New York and worked in the settlement houses for twelve years. He came back to New York and he asked her and she said yes and they ended up in a gold mine town in Sierra County which is sort of my spiritual home here in California. She was the only woman up there in the mining camps. They had their one and only child when he was 54 and she was 47 or something like that. She was an amazing woman, just an amazing woman and she taught me a lot about staying alive and staying creative in your life, working with resources. I learned to can, very practical things from her, but she also had this mind and this spirit that just hasn't even quit.

How did you meet this person?
I met her son, actually, when I lived in Berkeley, when I was just out of high school. He moved in next door to me. In those days it was just the post-Beatnik era, right in there, and he was padding around in a Japanese kimono and playing the guitar. I didn't know anything about the guitar and he taught me "The Wildwood Flower". That was the big song that I learned which I later named my band after. He was a family friend for several years and then he became quite ill and he's now institutionalized. But in that time he really opened up a world to me, meeting his family, getting up there in the mountains and seeing these people. Her husband was the son of German immigrants. He used to walk to school through the mountains, through the Chinese gold camps. It was very recent history. And it feeds a part of me. I love being close to Nature and in the mountains. I like those sturdy people. People who are just creative and resourceful and clear.

You went to school in Berkeley?
I went to school from about fifth grade through high school, first year of college right here in the Bay Area. And then moved to San Francisco and went to about a year and a half of college and then got married to an architect. I was married to an architect for over seven years. We had two children.

What was his name?
Saul Wolf. That's where I picked up the "Wolf". A good name is worth keeping. My kids are now twenty-one and eighteen. We have a really good relationship. We had joint custody of the kids. In those days it was unusual for a lot of the arrangements that we did. I moved up to the country in Sonoma County. He stayed in the city and the kids went back and forth. They're both into music and they're both into being alive. He's an architect still.
I had grown up as a kid playing music on the piano. I always wanted to sing but my mother would never give me voice lessons. Piano was it. But I had a grandmother who taught me to play when I was about four. She was a big influence on me musically and we lived with her in Oregon for a while. So I played piano until I was about 16 and then I just stopped. The folk music craze came along in the late Fifties and I played in high school a little bit. I was really shy and self-conscious so I played at Hoot Spit in San Francisco and then just kind of dropped out.
Then when I was about 26, 27, I met some people who lived down in Big Sur on the coast of California, and they were playing music in their living rooms. Through a long series of events, they ended up staying at my house a few times because I had a friend who had a friend and their car broke down. They began to have me come down there and play music with them. I saw these people writing songs and it just seemed like something that was a natural to try. I had this good friend George Schroder who at the time was very active in those circles and he said to me "Anyone can write a song. Just sit down and sing your conversations." And George, of course, is the person who wrote "The Redtail Hawk" which is almost my signature song now. He was a big, big influence. He just got me in with this whole thing and feeling like I could do it.
I started writing songs and within six months I know I was going to be leaving San Francisco. I didn't know exactly where or how or what. I knew that my husband didn't want to be married to a musician. He told me that. So we had an amiable parting but structured in that the kids were a real fine line for us. So I moved up to Sonoma County in my car for six months. And became a weekend mother which was real interesting space in 1971. Women didn't do that very much. I really understand single fathers. You hang out on weekends in the park and you try to find things to do when you don't have a house, or if you're visiting from out of town and you try to do things.
But within six months I had a place and I was working at a newspaper which I had never done. I did that and I still didn't quite know what was happening except I had this once a week job at this little bar and I was playing music and writing a little bit.

This was about what time?
1971. A really jumping off time. I would have been about 28, 29, right in there. And I didn't really start writing until I was about that age. I meet a lot of young mothers who say "How'd you find time to play and do all that stuff?" Well, I didn't. And I'm glad I didn't. I mean, I would be embarrassed if I had stuff I'd written early. I think you have to wait until a point in your life when you have something to say and it begins to come out. I do a song on my new record called "See Here She Said" which is "Look at your dreams, children grow and lovers sleep." And it's about not letting go of your dreams because you just don't know when they're finally going to come to fruit. So those years were pretty amazing.
I moved up to Sonoma County and my kids came up to live with me shortly after that. I was involved in schools and doing music once or twice a week in this little restaurant. We did that for a couple of years and finally just magical things began to happen. I continued to write and lived with the mandolin player in my band, Don Coffin. We later got married. We ended up doing all kinds of community music stuff, playing for everything in the world and I ended up being on the radio. One of the local stations asked me to do a show and we put together an interview show for the local rock station so I was on the rock station and the country station and then someone in town came up to me and said "Here's four thousand dollars, make us a record." So we made Back Roads for the people in our community.
When I made Back Roads, I didn't know if I'd ever make another record, but I made a record that I wanted to put out that had songs that I felt should be out there, so on that record are included "Legend In His Own Time" and "Telluride" and "Redtail Hawk", "It Ain't In The Wine", songs by people that I knew that I felt should be recorded. There I was with Owl Records.

That was your company?
That was my company. My model at that point was that I had grown up in Berkeley and knew Malvina Reynolds and had heard of Richard Deyerbennet so I know people who put out records. There weren't nearly the independent record labels there are now at that time. I called up a couple of people, my distributor, also a man named Ed Denson who had been Country Joe and The Fish's manager. He'd started a small record company. And because I was a disc jockey, I knew about the independent record labels, so I called these people and asked for advice. I got a lot of advice and put out that first record and the next thing I knew the next year we were doing another one which was Lines On The Paper. Then I took my first tour out of California in 1977. Once the records came out, the audiences started coming to hear the music. It was an amazing feeling.
A big shift occurred where people wanted to hear my songs. It was amazing. It just kind of made its own way. The records dragged us out of Sonoma County down into the Bay Area and then they got airplay and we started traveling further and further. Finally my friend Utah Phillips sat down with me and helped me plan a tour back East. I went back East for two months, played festivals and little concerts and things, came home and went back again in 1978 and again in 1980. By then we had done Safe At Anchor. It was the first studio album.
The transition in there was that my distributors had formed a record company, Kaleidoscope Records. They put out David Grisman's first album and they were looking for something else. They had been working with me and came to me and asked if they could lease the first two and we could make another one which was Safe At Anchor. So that took off. And I've been with them as a record company since 1978, so this is seven years now. And three years before that they were distributing me. The whole progression, which has excited me, is that the music has kind of made its own way. The songs go from people to people, people give each other the records, the records generate more records, and it sort of keeps going like that.
It just has been a kind of a progression. So all that kind of wrapped up about 1980. My life started to stabilize. I went through a divorce and then an annulment, so it was kind of a rough time, and finally just sort of settled down in Berkeley determined to hold still, not be in any relationships. I lived in Berkeley, actually Oakland, for a couple years and it was a little bit up and down as things go. I didn't like being in the city at all. But during that time I made Close To You. That was a collaboration with my friend Bill Griffin who's been involved in my work for years. Then I ended up going through some profound things and a lot of crises and then finally decided just to let go and move out of Oakland and live in my car if I had to. By this time my kids were teenagers.
But as it happened, I ended up going with a group down to the desert in California for a vision quest. This came out of a series of associations where I had been pointed in this direction by people I loved and I loved being out there. Terry went on the trip, my husband, and he'd been kind of following me around for a couple of years. I didn't know who he was, I just thought he was a real nice person. He got me out in the desert and was very quiet and sat me down and just started talking to me about what his feelings were. I was terrified. I didn't want to have any more relationships. I said no, I can't do this. And then I thought, well, there might be something here that just doesn't look familiar, maybe you should sit down and look at it. So I ended up moving back here to Marin with him and six months later we got married. So that was almost four years ago.
The healing started, just kind of holding still. They say that you spend the first 35 years of your life reliving your parents' lives, and then the years between 35 and 42 you kind of shake down. So I'd say the big shakedown happened and now it's starting to level out. You can chronicle everything I'm telling you in my songs. It's all there. So here I find myself, I'm 43, and I have a great relationship with my kids, they're good people, and I'm in a good stable relationship and getting ready to go forward. I have a real exciting feeling about this next decade.
I took some time out, took a sabbatical. Kind of laid back from performing, reached a point where I didn't know if what I was singing about had that much to do with my life any more. I needed to stop. I needed to recharge. So I took a time off and discovered how much I really love what I do. You have to do that sometimes. And my audience has been super. Since I've come back, it's just been phenomenal.

I'm interested in your musical influences.
I have to say that it probably started with the Weavers and led into Rosemary Clooney. I started out with singers that you could hear the words. That's been the big influence. Then I got into writers. Dylan is a big influence and of course the Beatles happened and folk music was always kind of there in the background. I got interested in folk music out of the Kingston Trio stuff and the Weavers. I wanted to know more about it. Once I got interested in folk music and started going to libraries I started finding out about country music. Then I discovered the Carter Family. Then when I got into country music radio, by then I was starting to discover Merle Haggard and Lefty Frizel and people like that. I used to listen to Hank Williams as a kid. So it's kind of been a progression through honest songs and honest singers, that kind of clarity. I love Buffy St. Marie's work. I love listening to people like Stevie Winwood. I guess it's that heart that's out there.

Poets?
Poets that I read? Well, I always liked ... I never wrote poetry as a kid or anything but I used to read Whitman and then I got into Garcia Lorca when I was in my "Spanish period." I read contemporary poetry if it's the poem that gets me. I'm into imagery. I'm really a frustrated painter. It really isn't so much a question of whose work it is as what kind of pictures it paints and what kind of things it says. If you looked at my bookshelf you'd probably find things. I like Gary Snyder's work. I like Robert Bly's work. Alice Walker. Those are all pretty contemporary. Looking back over the years ... like I said there was this sort of a numb period when I wasn't really doing much except making dinner parties and sewing clothes and baking bread so I can't remember really a lot about poetry. At that time I was mostly listening to Sixties radio which was just filled with poets. Everybody and their brother practically. Probably this will all occur to me later.
But as far as writing goes, the structure of how I write, I never thought about it being poetry too much. I just sort of followed the models of the folk and country stuff. I write a lot from visual imagery. I write a lot from stimulation and reading other people's things.

You have that striking visual quality in a number of your own songs.
It's very visual, very visual. There's a writer named Nancy Wood, who is an amazing woman, who has taken Indian poetry and rephrased it and written it out. It depends on who it is. It always comes down to visual images pretty much.
A lot of time when I write I won't know really until I perform it if a song is true and connecting. I'll get feedback from people. For instance the song "The Redtail Hawk" has got this line in it "There are just some things that need a man's hand" which I've always been very comfortable with, but I've gotten increasingly a lot of letters from women who have been working farms with other women for years and very nicely put just "It's hard for us to sit here and listen to that because we don't feel that way." So sometimes I'll change things. I've had so much interesting feedback about that. Men come up and say "I really like the old way better." I say, "Well, the original line was 'There's just some things that need a woman's hand'," and I put that in the record so it would be there. Most of my songs are written specifically so that either sex can sing. Or you can change the lyric enough to change it. Like if you look at the lyrics of "I Don't Know Why" I think it says "You're not the sweetest one I ever knew . . . ."

How is an artist different than another person?
You never have any time off. You spend a lot of time observing, seeing, thinking about things. It's your full life. It's not like you just go to a job. I balk a little bit because I think all of us have artistry in us but I think to live a creative life, to live a life for creativity, is the source. You have to pay attention every waking and dreaming moment of your life. And it tends to affect everything. It affects your relationships, it affects your sense of yourself. I think you live on an edge and I think that's why a lot of artists struggle with addictions because you are so finely tuned all the time that sometimes you need something to bring you down to the ground. I tend to eat when I have to bring myself down. Everybody has something that they have to use. It's quite a ride, I think. It's like living with your eyes and ears, your senses wide open all the time. That's why quiet is so important and that's why it does affect your relationships. Sometimes you just need to go off by yourself or to ground yourself out in ways that aren't always constructive. Once you get into the flow, where you're in relationship to the world and people around you and yourself in a proper way, I think it's really wonderful. It's really nourishing, it's an exciting way to be alive. But that's what you learn. It takes a while.

Do you hear music at odd times?
I hear lyrics at odd times and I usually carry a pencil and paper with me but sometimes I'll edit myself right out of taking it seriously, I'll be somewhere and this line will come to me and I'll think "Oh, great! I should find a piece of paper. Oh, that's not such a great line. I'll think about it again some other way." But what I'm missing out on is that if I had taken that line and gone outside or something and just played with the free association of it, there was probably a lot more going on in my mind that I had given it credit for.

So songwriting is all the time for you?
Yeah. I know that there is more about my craft I could learn and the way my life is I'm starting to have to really work at it that way because I don't have the freedom anymore to be quite so all the time with it, to take the observations and to note them, but to schedule a time to work. I need to learn the actual craft so that I can sit down and put it into a structure. That's just a part of the process. It doesn't mean I'm losing anything but more that I've reached a point where I have to organize myself better. That's my next task.

In the song "Looking Back At You" there are two lines I was interested in: "I never wrote a song for you / that touched me like you do." How is art important, is it important, when you look at the actual relationships as compared to writing about the relationships?
In other words hands-on as opposed to talking or writing about it. I think it's important to have the beauty around the actual act of living. In that line the "touch me like you do" I was talking more about being touched inside, although it came out the other way too - which is okay, there's a lot of times those things come out when you write and you don't know they're going to happen and then you have both meanings. There is something about the expansiveness of creative writing. It's not quite so dry. I started writing and singing because I was real uncomfortable talking in front of people, for instance. It's easier for me to sing than it is to talk. Now I talk a lot. And to write to this person I had a hard time expressing myself in a daily sense, of being direct, but when I finally sat down to write this song I was able to say what I couldn't say in an everyday sense that he could hear.
In that sense I think art is very important. I think that people hang pictures and write songs and listen to music because it expands their capacity to express themselves. Whether or not you create it yourself or not, if you use that to expand that expression. That's why I have colors around me, things on the walls, and things like that. I hope that answers your question.

And your songs help expand other people's expression?
I've heard people say that. People will say to me "Boy, you say just what I would say if I could figure out how to say it that way." And I've had that feeling about other people's work too, which is why sometimes I do other people's songs. Woody Guthrie has a great quote about this: "Let me be known as the person who told you what you already knew." Sometimes we just can't find the words but we all have those same feelings. You feel these things and you don't feel like it's okay to say them or you can't quite get the words and then it comes and it's just this breaking loose, you have a way to say it. I can remember that. I used to learn more of other people's songs, that I could say things that I wouldn't have the courage or the organization in myself to say or bring to words. So I think the creative arts are very important in that way.
You've had the experience when you see a painting, you walk into a room and there's this color and this explosion of image and you just go ... something inside of you just goes "Oh. . . ." It expresses something in yourself that your eyes can't verbalize. I think the arts are very important.

What gets in the way of love? Why don't things connect?
A lot of things get in the way of love. Trust, lack of trust, lack of forgiveness, expectations, fear. Fear gets in the way probably overall more than anything. Lack of time is wrapped up in other things.

Fear? How does that work?
Being afraid of being too close. Being afraid of saying what you really feel. Being afraid of loving someone that is going to love you in a right way. Being afraid of looking at what you really need and taking the risk to do it, of knowing yourself. It all comes back, I think, to going inside and really learning who you are and what you need and how you can love and how you can be loved. We all grow up being afraid that we're not really loved. All of us to varying degrees depending on our situation take shorter or longer times to get through that one. When you find someone who loves you, sometimes you project onto them that they love you in a certain way when in fact they love you in another way. So you have to weed all that out. It's just a journey. What gives love its most beautiful quality is the other side of it too. It's a polarity. I really think that the blissed out state of love can get pretty boring. It's like too much sugar. You have to have the dynamics of it so that it has its ups and downs, and highs and lows.
But I think what gets in the way of love is just maybe not loving yourself first of all. Once you can love yourself, and love other people, from that know that other people love you. To me nature is so healing because you realize how much love there is in nature and how much everything else. You can go out and observe it. It all kind of ties together.

How do you survive unfulfilled love?
You take time. I think for me surviving unfulfilled love you look for the gifts in what you do have from it. You're talking of a specific situation or a feeling of wanting to be loved?

Could be either. Some people go through life feeling unfulfilled.
Never having loved. To survive that almost implies just to sort of grit your teeth and say 'Well, it's never going to happen to me therefore I'm going to move on to something else." I don't think you have to do that. I think if you're wanting to be loved sometimes you just have to relax and not think about it and it comes. But one of the things that for me has really been true is you get to the point where nothing is working and you finally just let go and try something completely different. Something will come along and just go into experiencing your life and you will run into the other emotions as well. Whether it's changing jobs, or taking a cruise.
There's a line in the I Ching that kind of always struck me about love and it really isn't about love but it's a lot of things. It says "To rule is to serve" and I have found when you give yourself away you get what you need. If you try to take in, take in, it doesn't work but if you're feeling stuck and feeling unfulfilled, to give your love away is like the mirror we're talking about. It creates a circle and it comes back to you. Maybe in ways you didn't believe it would, or maybe in ways that don't look right at first or aren't what you had in mind. But if you just open yourself up and realize what's there, a lot of times more is there than you ever thought there would be. That's been my experience.
If you're thinking you're unfulfilled it's just kind of being stuck. There's really a lot there: it's just because of circumstances and situations. Instead of giving away, you're trying to take in when in fact you're full and you need to let some of it out. It's not a real graceful way to say it, but I think that that's really true. If you look especially at people who live long lives, how they love and how they give away love and how they give away compassion and caring - they never ask themselves "What's coming to me?" They probably did when they were younger. The best lovers are the ones that had to learn the hard way. That's my feeling about that.

Are you connected with any kind of New Age feeling? Do you think there is a New Age thing going on in our culture?
I think there's something going on in terms of people kind of coming out of the Seventies and getting ready for a coming together again. I think because my process is probably in the same place I'm connected in that sense. My lyrics and what I'm writing about come out of more my spiritual evolution now than so much my struggles although struggles are always there. I learned a lot from older people that way that things come in cycles. And so at this time right now I think for me and a lot of people I know there seems to be a hopefulness and a pulling together, and people coming back out of the woods in a lot of ways and getting ready to join together and experience joy together in the sense of being alive in society. So I feel like I'm very much a part of my time. Very definitely.
As a matter of fact, I speculate sometimes what it would be like if you were to look back and see where the zenith was. I just feel like I'm on this process that just keeps going over there, over there, over there and I hope I never stop being alive that way or connected to my time. I definitely feel like I'm part of whatever's going on right now. For me I feel a groundswelling of just wonderful energy, really good energy but a little more grounded in reality than say the Sixties were.

In the same respect you seem to be connecting into an old way, a very old way with the Indian themes.
I am feeling really connected with the old ways. I grew up as a small child in Michigan and I was very much into Indian connectedness to the Earth. I was fascinated by it but at that time I had nothing around me to really explain that. It's probably just an old part of me that is in all of us. I am most happy when I am most connected to the natural world. And the Indian spirituality which is connected to a sense of a Creator and the rightness of relationship in all living things to me is the most important work ahead of us. I mean it's come down to that now we have the capacity to destroy this whole planet, and for me the most comfortable way to work with that is to work on reestablishing connectedness and to write about it and to talk about it because it's something we can all tap into. It doesn't matter what language we speak or anything.
Those of us who live in high-rise apartments or condominiums and don't have any garden space, don't have any feel for the earth anymore, who maybe for a couple of generations lost touch with cycles, lose touch with their own cycles. You don't see very far ahead. You see from paycheck to paycheck or how come I'm not happy. There's such a nourishment in the natural world and it's important to keep it together. So that's increasingly what made me turn back toward that avenue of experiencing that.
I don't think there's anything magical in the Indianness in the sense that the Indian society has been so affected by our world as everything has. But there are pockets of Indian people practicing this, who have never lost touch with that so it's an accessible route. For me, again, I feel there's just something old in me that's real comfortable and has probably always been there and I try to step lightly. I don't want to run around feeling like I'm posturing. It's like the guru movement of the Sixties. Everybody wanted to go to India and study with a guru. Well, everybody wants to go to the reservation and study with a medicine man. When in fact we have our own medicine inside us and it's important to be true to yourself. Whatever amalgam you were put in on this Earth, it's important to take that and use it. Don't go running off. Sure, consult with teachers, but trust your own instincts. Start experiencing yourself.
I've never been much of a joiner. I've gone to a few workshops and gone here and there but I always end up back on my own little path again. You know, weaving in among all these people and there's always reasons but it comes right back down to realizing we all have these resources inside us and that we all grew up as little kids being fascinated by the green growing things and the crawling things. And you watch all that and you learn enormous amounts about yourself. You love your neighbors, you love people, you love life. That's the glue that's going to hold this world together. So that's why I'm increasingly more drawn to it. It's a necessary process for me too.
As it happens, what it's doing is that by writing all these things it's putting me in touch with more Native American peoples. Which is alright, you know. They are feeling connected to the music too which is very exciting to me. There's a wonderful quote from Buffy St. Marie that I will use sometime on an album cover. I think it's "You think I have visions because I'm an Indian, but I have visions because there at visions to be seen." And I think that's just important to keep in mind.
The Indian peoples that I have been in touch with peripherally, not my close friends but some that I've seen have always been angry that the white man is trying to take the red man's road. But we're all trying to take the green road, you know, as far as I'm concerned, and it's simply a matter of everybody learning to trust that that's the common ground. And if we need to get information from the Native Americans who have stayed more in touch with that, then that's what we need to do. And if they need to understand us a little better, that's what will happen. But there's a middle ground. I'm a great one for middle grounds.

Is there anything you especially live for or by in your life?
Anything I especially live for or by? Well I would say that I live for a sense of a feeling of purposefulness in this world, you know, that I could stop my life at any point and feel that my life has been worthwhile, that the people I've loved and my children have all reached a point where their lives are now going to come to fruit. I feel that that's real important. And that as far as something I live by it's to try to be as alive as possible and feel free to make my mistakes and "to be as honest as I can with myself which is always a process. Beyond that it all kind of blurs together. You get up in the morning and you feel like life is something that needs to be taken care of.
It's increasingly become true that I'm trying to be as consistent as I can in every aspect of my life so everything relates to everything else and that's a very exciting feeling. We talked about that earlier, about being on stage and being one person and getting off and being somebody else. The people I admire most are people whose lives are reflected in their work and their work is reflected into their lives, there is no separation. To be a person of integrity and consciousness and love and be aware of your limitations and not try to be what other people think you should be, but try to grow and be open to that. I guess it sounds very New Agey but I think it's occurred everywhere, in all societies, it's just a process of maturing and entering the next stage of your life.