Music: The Folk-Girls

It is not absolutely essential to have hair hanging to the waist—but it helps.

Other aids: no lipstick, flat shoes, a guitar.

So equipped, almost any enterprising girl can begin a career as a folk singer.

Enough already have to make them a fixture of current U.S. college life—like the “A” student and the Goldwater button. What most of the singers have in common is their age (early 20s) and their scorn of the “commercial.” What separates them is the quality of their talent.

The best rank among the world’s top folk singers; the worst are singers by courtesy only. But the audience for folk singing of both varieties is large and stubbornly loyal—as the record companies have happily begun to realize.

It Depends on Intent. The most gifted of the newcomers is New York-born Joan Baez, 21, who has sold more records than any other girl folk singer in history, and who last week had two albums perched high on the pop charts. Songstress Baez (pronounced buy-ezz) boasts a pure, purling soprano voice, an impeccable sense of dynamics and phrasing, and an uncanny ability to dream her way into the emotional heart of a song. Her materials—which she claims people simply send to her in the mail and on which she does no research—are mostly Anglo-American ballads, mixed with some Negro songs and Southern mountain music. The sentiments are darkling, as in almost all folk songs—laments for death, loneliness and unrequited love. One of Joan’s most popular, All My Trials, opens on an all-blue theme:

Hush, little baby, don’t you cry,

You know your mama was born to die,

All my trials, Lord,

Soon be over.

Joan learned her techniques mostly by herself. Of Mexican-Irish parentage (her father is a physicist with UNESCO in Paris), she had scarcely sung until four years ago, when she took a few informal lessons while attending Boston University. She developed her repertory and style performing for Harvardmen, who flocked to a coffeehouse two blocks from Harvard Square to listen to every Baez syllable with furious concentration. Joan’s response to commercial success was to turn down $100,000 worth of concert dates in a single year. “Folk music,” says she. “depends on intent. If someone desires to make money, I don’t call it folk music.” To ensure that she does not make too much, she tours only two months a year, mostly on college campuses.

Despite her impressive drawing power (her recent, scantily advertised Carnegie Hall concert was sold out two months in advance), she shies away from television, has turned down offers from Hollywood and a lead role in a Broadway musical.

At home—a hideout near Carmel, Calif.—she wanders about in burlap blouse and worn blue shorts, tending a menagerie that includes several dogs, cats and lizards. There, she hopes she can “avoid what I think is stupid” by remaining “as close to the earth as possible.” Other newcomers:

>Bonnie Dobson, 21, sounds nearer to Baez than any of the other new folk-girls, although her voice and delivery are lighter and the impact of her performances is different: for Joan’s tragic, gypsy quality, Bonnie substitutes a fresh, willowy charm that never deserts her in even the darkest laments. She mixes American and French-Canadian songs, and she has a more antic taste than most of her contemporaries: On the wedding night, When he came to bed with me, He bit me on my shoulder And nearly broke my knee.

Canadian-born, the daughter of a machinist, Bonnie did her apprenticeship in U.S. coffeehouses and Canadian lumber camps.

> Judy Collins, 23, has a robust alto that she wields with strong dramatic sense, supported by a shrewd selection of material. Both help make up for a voice less handsome than either Baez’ or Dobson’s.

Many of Judy’s songs are Scottish, English or Irish, and some of them—The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Bonnie Ship the Diamond—are not often heard in folk circles. If Baez has a tragic sense and Dobson an antic one, Collins has an intense, Holy Roller quality. Colorado-born, she is married to a teacher of English at the University of Connecticut.

> Carolyn Hester, 25, represents a triumph of personality over performance.

The voice is not pretty and the technique is sketchy, but Songstress Hester has looks and a gift for appearing as if she were delivering the Truth every time she steps up to a microphone. “Songs which connote your beliefs and your dislikes and the things you love,” says she, “”are the songs that make up folk music. ” Texas-born, Carolyn studied at the American Theater Wing before turning to folk singing, includes Spanish songs and Southern blues, sung flat-out in a mewing Texas twang that sounds just right for the likes of I will Fly Away: One bright maw’nin When this world is over, Ah’ll fly away To that land On God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away, fly away.