Despite the wine and song, the lifelong friendships, and the memories Rosalie cherishes from those years, the everyday grind of keeping her family together under such unsettled conditions could be endlessly wearying. “People can’t even imagine it,” she says now. “They really can’t. ‘Aren’t you afraid to drive by yourself?’ ‘If I don’t drive by myself, I won’t get there!’ ‘What do you do with your children?’ ‘You don’t wanna know!’
“They were mad a lot. People would tell them they were ‘poor little things’ because I was gone so much. Actually, I was home more than a lot of people with straight day gigs, but they had a horrible time. I tried to always have a place for them to live, and keep them in school, but it did affect their education. They would run away; they didn’t like it. It was really hard on me and all the kids. And it was just extreme in a lot of ways.”
It was not, however, something most of her listeners were probably aware of. (“I’m sure I did my very level best not to let anybody in on any of that,” she admits today.) “Once it was aprons and dustpans and such/Now I’m a travelin’ lady,” she proudly proclaimed in the title tune to 1971’s Travelin’ Lady; meanwhile, the difficult realities behind that persona and lifestyle were usually only hinted at between the lines, and often couched in her universalist stance as spokeswoman for struggling moms everywhere.
On Always A Lady, from 1976, she reprised Toni Brown’s “Hey Little Girl”, in which “daddy” is “drinking his whiskey ’till it makes him feel tough” and “mama” ends up “going to the city — going to the street” to survive. That same album included Rosalie’s own “Apple Of My Eye”, which she wrote for daughter Shelley during a tumultuous period in their relationship (“I know my love must seem a distant thing to you/For there’s so many I must give it to”). It also included “Song For David”, an ode to both loving and letting go (“Where you goin’ to, bird?”) that reflected, even celebrated, the tension between the bonds of affection and the demands of independence (and survival) that characterized even her most intimate relationships during those years.
The strain was hardest on her sons. Kevin, her youngest, who has spent much of his life in correctional institutions, had already begun to get into trouble by the mid-’70s, before he turned 15. Then in July 1976, less than a month after her 43rd birthday, Rosalie was in Brattleboro, Vermont, working on the LP Moments Of Happiness for Philo, when she received the news that David, 22, had committed suicide in Bolinas, California.
At that point, her world pretty much fell apart. “I don’t remember it very well,” she acknowledges. “It made me really, really crazy. Four years I don’t remember at all — I was mad as a hatter the whole time. I remember things that happened, but I don’t remember them in order, or the circumstances.
“He went to a great deal of trouble to let me know that it had nothing to do with me. He wrote me a letter; he said that it was not directed at me. But I wasn’t there, so…” Her voice trails off as she recalls how, in a moment of anguished rage, she destroyed that letter — an act that’s haunted her ever since. “I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it. But I had to. I had four other kids to take care of.”
Rosalie’s far-flung extended family continued to take her in as she slowly nursed herself back to health. Some wrote songs and poems in memory of David (Gino Sky’s “Kid Shooting Way” is in the liner notes to her 1991 CD Be Careful There’s A Baby In The House on Green Linnet). She poured her own grief into songs such as “Delia Rose” on Then Came The Children, recorded live in Canada in the early ’80s; “Sing Like The Rain (Last Song For David)” on Be Careful There’s A Baby In The House; and “Hitchhiker In The Rain” from 1995’s Borderline Heart.
Along with her almost nonstop touring, Rosalie continued to record, and at least in public maintained the rugged, hard-bitten, joyful front she’d cultivated since the beginning. It wasn’t entirely an act; when audiences saw her onstage, her face crinkled into a careworn smile, sipping a drink and spinning tales of tough traveling and survival, they were witnessing “the only thing I had, like therapy, to medicate myself,” she suggests. Even when times were darkest, her joy during those moments was real.
By the early ’80s she had more or less regained her equilibrium, and in the process had become something of an elder stateswoman of folk music. Then, in ’83, yet another personal tragedy, combined with her growing concern for her mother’s health, led her to a fateful decision: it was time to defy the advice of one of her own songs, and go home again.
“My mother always said we were Antaeus people; my grandfather said that, too. Antaeus was the giant who wrestled Hercules; every time Hercules wrestled him to the ground, it would give him strength, and he’d get back up stronger than ever.”
The ground from which Rosalie and her family garner their strength lies beneath a cabin Walter Stringfellow built by hand between the late 1940s and mid-1960s alongside Grimes Greek near Twin Falls, Idaho. “My grandfather bought the property when he moved to Boise, around 1914,” Rosalie explains. “He built the house they lived in. That house was destroyed in a flood. My father decided to build this house at the other end of the flat. He made the bricks, poured the concrete floor, he cut all the logs himself. He wasn’t a carpenter; he was an engineer. But he knew what he was doing.”
Rosalie’s mother named it Querencia — “the place that holds your heart” — and even as she became frail in her later years, she remained determined to live out her life there. “I wanted to help her stay,” Rosalie says. “I had moved to Delaware Water Gap; I was really in love with somebody, and he was murdered. I realized I couldn’t maintain my life under those circumstances. Then my mother got really sick, and I came back to see her. I thought she was going to die, so I just decided to [move] back here. And she lived another eleven years.”
Rosalie didn’t quit the road — as late as 1996, by her own account, she was still logging upwards of 20,000 miles in less than six months — but she needed a steady source of income close to home. Tapping into her rich lode of western lore and history, she found one in 1990 — a project to gather songs and stories that were still sung and told in Idaho. The result was the book Way Out In Idaho, which included over 170 entries, including not only the usual pioneer and cowboy material but also offerings from ethnic traditions — Native, Basque, Chinese, Japanese, African-American, Czech — as well as women’s songs, recipes, children’s songs, labor anthems, and more.
