The best way to describe Kate Wolf is the bearer of a torch that few rose to carry. Both her music and herself personally embodied the spirit of the 60’s in California. Bright, colorful, free, and above all, creative. Her music was released in the mid 70’s to early 80’s, with her own tragic passing in 1986 after a battle with leukemia. Having been born in San Francisco in 1942, her youth saw the rise of the folk movement in America that established the genre in music as we know it today. San Francisco was of course the epicenter of all of this rapid change, musically, culturally, and even politically. Thus her young adult years would have been spent looking at what was going on all around her, as she graduated high school in Berkeley. She quickly married and had two children during the 60’s, therefore altering her date of entry into the world of music. With her first album Back Roads being released in 1976, she entered the folk scene at the end of the revival.
The music of Kate Wolf, I believe, is best displayed by her album Close To You which was released in 1981. While ABBA, Phil Collins, and Journey were topping the charts, Kate held firmly onto the torch of California folk music. It can be argued that after Kate, there has been no female folk artist out of California to release work in this same tradition. Therefore she can be thought of as the last of a kind, displaying a type of person who was once abundant in the state, but soon disappeared with the free flowing trends.
Below is attached her song Unfinished Life which is my particular favorite, as it is truly haunting and gives a prime example of her voice and style. While this particular song is deeply melancholic in its sound, her music could be characterized by its signature cinematic slow pace.
A further example of her soft, folk driven music is her most popular song Across the Great Divide which also incorporates elements of country and western Americana. Further, her song Here in California offers a time capsule of the California that she knew, in sharp contrast with the state it is in today.
So what is the cultural significance of Kate Wolf? Her work extends an era of the old Californian culture into the early 1980’s. Listening to her music today, one would imagine that her recordings are from the early to mid 1960’s, rather than their release timeframe. Further, with only 30 thousand monthly listeners on Spotify as of writing, she is massively under appreciated . For those who remember the old days of California, her work is something to hold and treasure. For new generations who have been fortunate enough to find her work, it inspires people to work towards making California into a special place that people want to return to once again. It was once the golden land of opportunity, artistic creativity, natural beauty, and free thinking. Now, the state is in a condition practically unimaginable to the people featured in this image below. The memory of Kate Wolf inspires not only nostalgia about the past of California, but offers an invaluable cultural treasure that rallies people to act to better the situation that the state currently is in. Not only this, but Kate’s music also should inspire and encourage people to once again take up the cause of not only folk music, but grassroots American culture in general. There was a time when it wasn’t this way.
“Here in California
The fruit hangs heavy on the vine
There’s no gold, I thought I’d warn ya
And the hills turn brown in the summertime”– Kate Wolf (Here in California)
(Kids On Car Image) Ric Manning, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons