“It was funded by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and the Idaho Centennial Commission,” she says. “Everybody kept telling me I’d never find anything, that there wasn’t anything like that here. And I said, ‘It’s everywhere.’ I went all over the state. I played in grange halls and small theaters and old-folks homes, sometimes bars, a couple of churches, wherever there was a place where people could gather.”
Whether it was because she’d returned home after so many years, or simply that she was now approaching her seventh decade of life, Rosalie’s recorded output seemed to take an increasingly autumnal turn in the ’90s. Borderline Heart, from 1995, showed plenty of the old fire (in the title song, Rosalie kisses off a ruined relationship by telling her ex, “Keep the heart — the damn thing’s broken anyway”). But there was also her moody, blues-inflected reprise of “If I Could Be The Rain”, the Bruce Phillips song that had served as the title tune of that long-ago Folk Legacy LP, with its signature lyric: “If I could hide the way I feel, I’d never sing again.” And there was “Hitchhiker In The Rain”, its haunting imagery of David’s suicide interwoven with Rosalie’s lament for a kinder, more optimistic America, buoyed by Nina Gerber’s wafting, almost sacramental guitar leads.
Then there was the elegiac “My Last Go Round”, in which Rosalie, steadfast in her faith that the unfettered human spirit can still find redemption (“I have stumbled lost and wild/On to sacred ground”), looks back over a life defined — and sometimes buffeted unmercifully — by her relentless hunger for both intimacy and independence, and declares that it’s been good: “We drank the rivers, we rode the twisters, we tumbled to the ground…All my long-lost friends and lovers, once again they will be found/I’ll kiss all their shining faces/On my last go round.”
That title, taken from a Ken Kesey novel, also served as the title for the disc Rosalie recorded live in Boston in 2002. It was billed as a farewell concert; the lineup included musical friends and companions from throughout her career. A farewell it wasn’t — she’s continued to tour, although these days she picks her spots carefully — but a career highlight it definitely was.
“I didn’t think anybody would come. And it sold out!” she marvels. “[Concert organizer Ellen Friedman] took me out and had my hair fixed. I looked like a princess — I looked fucking fantastic! And I did a hell of a concert. I don’t know that anything could ever be better than that. It might be as good, but not better.”
In yet another of those ineffable ironies that have punctuated Rosalie’s life, she learned of that album’s Grammy nomination on one of the darkest days she’d endured since David’s suicide. Kevin, who had been home and doing well for quite a while, had again run afoul of the law — not a serious charge, but enough to violate his parole — and was sentenced to five more years in prison.
“I was devastated,” Rosalie says. “It was just a horrible day. Shelley, my daughter, was with me. We went out and got in the car, and I picked up my phone because it was beeping, and five different people had called me up to tell me that I’d been nominated. Shelley said my face turned absolutely dead white, and my jaw dropped. She thought somebody died. ‘What’s the matter!?’ ‘I’ve been nominated for a Grammy!’ I didn’t even know how to process it for about two or three days.”
By this time, though, Rosalie was already planning her next project — a concert, scheduled for September 2005 at the Liberty Theater in Hailey, Idaho, that will be filmed and shown on Idaho Public Television and also recorded for a CD. Although she jokes that “I’m old; I’d better hurry up, or I’ll die and I won’t get it done,” it’s clear that despite health setbacks she’s suffered in recent years (a brain aneurysm in 1988, and a mastectomy ten years later, followed by a grueling chemotherapy regimen), Rosalie is not about to hang up her guitar anytime soon.
“There’s something about certain times in my life, when I’ve known I’ve sung better than I ever sang,” she muses. “I get outside of myself and I can see myself doing it. You’re like a medium, almost; everything you know and everyone that came before is all coming through you. If you even get it once, you’re lucky. I’ve gotten it a few times, and I really know when it happens. When I sing, what I aspire to…I call it the ‘heart-felt tone.’ Billie had it; Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Edith Piaf, Sam Cooke — all those people who sing from that spot inside of them, the spot that makes everyone feel as though you’re singing their own personal life story, human voices that spill from heart to mouth. I’m not a consummate artist yet, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been.
“I can’t think of many people who have gotten to do all the things I’ve done, known all the people I’ve known. Every record I’ve made has been my idea, and a realization of something I wanted to do. And I keep making them.”
A brief pause — an upbeat — then the coda:
“Mehitabel says: ‘Archie! I have been trodden upon by life, Archie. I have been trampled upon by it! But I never lost my appetite for it. And whatever happens, Archie, death and I will coquette.’
“My favorite.”
