Rosalie Sorrels
–Redd Foxx
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The dreamy young bohemian found herself sidetracked, however, by a combination of personal misfortune and the puritanical ferocity of Eisenhower-era America. She en-dured a gruesome illegal abortion at 16; a year later she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she gave up for adoption. In the process she lost the four-year drama scholarship she’d earned in high school as well as, by her own account, “my desire to be an actress, my self-respect.”
She married at 19 and moved to Salt Lake City with her husband. “He did a real job of convincing me that I was damaged goods, that I could never leave him and do anything on my own. I had five kids by him; he made it very clear that he didn’t want me to have those kids, but he waited until I had ’em to tell me.”
She did, however, have a gift for making friends. Malvina Reynolds, composer of “Little Boxes” and one of the most venerated figures in folk, introduced her around town and encouraged her with a kindly, tough-minded ethic of survival: “I used to go to her when I was troubled. She’d find someone who was more troubled than me and tell me to go help that one. Pretty soon I’d begin to see that my troubles were little and not very interesting.”
Today, with over 20 albums to her credit, Sorrels concedes that her single-minded ways (“my eccentricities”) have probably cost her, at least as far as career security is concerned (“[a friend] tried to manage me one time, but I’m unmanageable”). Remembering her confrontation with the owners of a label she claims misappropriated her publishing rights, she growls: “They had two cars and their kids went to private school. I lived in my car and my kid went to jail. I don’t want to hear about it.”
Sorrels followed “I Think of You” with “Eddie’s Song,” Phillips’s eulogy for the late Ed Balchowsky, a pianist and artist who lost his right arm fighting the fascists in the Spanish civil war and was a living legend to several generations of Chicago hipsters. Phillips actually wrote the song prematurely, in response to a rumor that Balchowsky had died–in her introduction Sorrels remembered the fun she’d had singing Balchowsky’s own epitaph to him over the phone. Characteristically, it’s both a tribute to a noble soul and a lament for a time of strong idealism and faith.
