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Wolf began her musical career in the early seventies as a front person for the Wildwood Flower, a quartet that also featured then-husband Don Coffin on mandolin, harmonica, and vocals. Wolf was active in other aspects of the music business, working as a disc jockey and organizing and booking country-folk concerts. Folk singer Utah Phillips was one of her early inspirations.
"Kate was a go-getter; taught herself to play the guitar," said Phillips. "She wanted to meet me. I couldn't figure out why; I was pretty new at the game myself. She had left the home she was living in and loaded everything she owned into a '57 Chevrolet station wagon to work in the roadhouses and learn her skills. She had heard an album called If I Could Be the Rain that Rosalie Sorrels had made for Folk Legacy right after leaving Utah that had six of my songs on it. Kate listened to the album, said `I can do that,' and started doing it. She had started the Santa Rosa Folk Festival and invited me up to sing."
Wolf had a determination and drive that allowed her to persist and flourish through her tenure as a fledgling musician seeking recognition. Phillips remarked on how focused she was, even early on. "She was very disciplined. She produced her own records, formed her own record company, wasn't going to wait around to be hired at a folk festival, but started one. She was a self starter, and with a self-disciplined sternness that I guess you wouldn't encounter socially. She seemed very vulnerable, and her music suggested that, because it demanded intimacy. Behind that was very stern stuff."
In the early days of the Wildwood Flower, a chance meeting led to another enduring musical partnership, this one with bass player Bill Griffin, who went on to be musical director and co-producer of most of Wolf's albums. "It was the summer of '74," said Griffin, "and my band the Cache Valley Drifters came up north from Santa Barbara to hang out for the summer. A friend of ours had given us a cabin to stay in for the summer on the Russian River, and we were looking around for gigs. People kept telling us to talk to this woman Kate Wolf, because she knew all the places to play. We went and met her at this job she was playing in Santa Rosa one night. Someone in her band had just dropped out for this gig she was doing the next morning, opening the Santa Rosa County Fair, so I hitchhiked into town at six in the morning and did this job with her the second day I knew her. Kate and I continued to work together for the next 11 years."
An illuminating view of Wolf as a neophyte performer is provided by the newly released Looking Back at You. Recorded mostly solo from 1977 through 1979, this set reveals the performers who influenced her early in her career.
Wolf released her first two albums on her own Owl Records. Back Roads was a Wildwood Flower band project, although Wolf wrote most of the songs and sang lead vocals. It has a few rough edges, but it includes the original versions of some of the most enduring songs in her repertoire, including George Schroder's "Red Tail Hawk," bandmates David West's and Cyrus Clarke's "Telluride," and Wolf's "Emma Rose." Wolf's rich, languid, friendly voice and portraits of rural life and strong, independent women were an anomaly for the mid-1970s, but she quickly became a favorite on homegrown radio stations like Gilroy's KFAT and Santa Rosa's KVRE, and was able to tour regularly throughout Northern California.
Lines on the Paper again featured the Wildwood Flower, augmented by members of the Cache Valley Drifters and other musicians. It was a much more personal record than Back Roads, and seemed to mark the point where Wolf really came into her own as a songwriter. "On the second record, there was a song called `The Heart.' When I heard that song, I heard a side of Kate I hadn't seen before," said Griffin. "All of her songs up to that point had been about life in rural Santa Rosa, friends, riding in the country, and so on. `The Heart' got into a new area that was almost a dark side, and I don't mean that in a bad way. All of a sudden, I started to see a lot of depth that told of things to come. `She Rises Like a Dolphin' comes from the same place, `The Medicine Wheel,' and all these things that were to come later."
Wolf's career started to take off, and she found herself needing more time to follow her muse. She established another important working relationship, with Tom Diamant and his fledgling Berkeley record label, Kaleidoscope.
"We started distributing Kate's first two albums, which were on her own Owl records, when she decided that she wanted to spend more time being a musician than running a record company," said Diamant. "Those early records sold very well, mostly in California, and we thought they would sell well around the rest of the country."
An early Wildwood Flower performance greatly influenced another young west coast musician. Nina Gerber, who went on to become Wolf's guitarist for most of her career, cites Wolf as a major influence. "I think it's probably safe to say that she was the reason I got into music," said Gerber. "I had played guitar for a little while, but it was when I saw her performing one night in a pizza parlor in Sebastopol that something just hit me and said `Hey, this is what I want to do'."
When Wolf and the Wildwood Flower parted ways, she apprenticed Gerber, still in high school, as her accompanist. "I started taking mandolin lessons from Don Coffin, who was in her band and married to her at the time," said Gerber, "so I started hanging out and eventually sitting in with them. I went to any gig in Northern California that my parents would let me drive to. I started filling in for Don in 1977 when he was unavailable and I got the job when they split up the next year."
In 1979, Wolf released her first true solo album. Safe At Anchor, a collection of love songs, demonstrating that Wolf was maturing rapidly as a songwriter, with vivid word pieces like "Early Morning Melody" and the impressionistic "She Rises Like the Dolphin" alongside the comforting title tune. Although Gerber and the Cache Valley Drifters were the main instrumentalists on the record, it also featured string players, Celtic harpist Christopher Caswell, and members of labelmate David Grisman's band, Darol Anger and bassist Bill Amatneek. This was also the first recording which Griffin co-produced and arranged.
"It changed as time went on," said Griffin. "It started with me just sort of helping and I sort of grew into the role of musical director. I did the studio records and not too many live things because I lived in Santa Barbara the whole time. About every two years Kate would call me and say `It's time to make another record,' so I would end up living in San Francisco for six months while we were doing it. For the last several records she would just send me a tape of herself playing these songs she had written on a boom box in the living room and my job was to turn it into what you hear on the record. She and I had an understanding that my job was to crawl inside her songs and flesh them out. It was always a labor of love first, because Kate and I had a connection that made it work really easily."
Close to You may be Wolf's masterpiece, with pieces like "Across the Great Divide" and "Like a River" mining the timeless new/ old territory that Robbie Robertson's best work with the Band explored. "Eyes of a Painter," a remembrance of Wolf's grandfather, is one of her most evocative songs, as is the sadly prophetic "Unfinished Life." This was the first album that Wolf recorded with what became her steady touring unit: Gerber and bassist Ford James, augmented by Griffin and a raft of Bay Area folks like Tony Rice and pedal steel player Peter Siegel. Production was by Griffin and Tom Diamant.
"She had very strong opinions about how she wanted things to sound in the studio," said Diamant. "She often said things like `I want the guitar to sound more magical' rather than using more technical jargon. She was also unafraid to try things. She suggested that Norton Buffalo should add a harmonica part to a particular song. Norton was doing very well at the time, but Kate wasn't shy about calling him up, and he agreed to do it for whatever the other musicians were getting."
Wolf began to tour nationally, at the urging of Utah Phillips. "I decided that I really wanted people I'd been playing for for a long time in the east to hear her. We booked a two month tour, driving it. I wanted her to play at Cafe Lena, the Town Crier, Holstein's in Chicago. The people just loved her presence, her music, her attention to detail."
Wolf also used this time on the road to prod Phillips to court his own songwriting muse. "She'd find stories in my notebook and demand that I make them into songs `Nevada Jane' is one of those, `Ashes on the Sea' is another one. She'd say, `You're sitting in the back seat, you're gonna write that song, and you're gonna sing it tonight at the Town Crier in Hopewell Junction.' I got a lot done when Kate was around."
During these early national tours, Washington DC-based guitarist Pete Kennedy fell into the job of being Wolf's East Coast guitarist. "The Birchmere in D.C. was maybe her second gig on the tour," said Kennedy. "I don't think she could really afford to bring a whole band at that time, just Bill Griffin. She was coming into the Birchmere and Gary Oelze, the club's owner, called up Mike Auldridge (Dobro player for the Seldom Scene) and he called me to ask me if I wanted to play with Kate Wolf at a gig that night.
"Everything just clicked immediately it was Bill on bass, Mike on Dobro, and me on guitar, and we just instantly fell in love with her songs."
Kennedy was also impressed by Wolf's command of the audience. "We knew that she had good stage presence, but we didn't really see it until that night, when the whole crowd was in. The place was packed, even though it was her first gig in the area. Everyone knew her song `Friend of Mine' because it had been played on the radio a lot. She had this very strong charisma, a connection with the crowd right from the very first note."
As Phillips remembered, she was never shy about trying out untested material onstage. "We were playing in Washington, D.C. and there was a big rally right behind the White House by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' Union about Karen Silkwood. At the rally, I sang and other people spoke, and she came out and said, `Can I sing?' and the organizers said, `Okay,' and she got up and sang `Links on the Chain' (an unrecorded Wolf composition), which she had written in the car on the way down. It's a great song, and one of the first times that Kate stepped completely outside of herself as a songwriter."
"I don't know where she got that stuff, but it kept coming," said Griffin. "She could show up at a gig with another song and she'd go `Kick it off!'. We'd never even heard it, and it would turn out to be something incredible like `Seashore Mountain Lady'."
Give Yourself to Love, a double length compilation of live recordings made in Northern California in '82-'83, featured Wolf, Gerber, and James augmented by cellist Sharon O'Connor and violinist David Balakrishnan. The uplifting title tune has probably become Wolf's best known song. Also featured was the inspired coupling of Robin Williamson's airy "Pacheco" with "Red Tail Hawk," which became a mainstay of her live shows.
Around this time, Wolf became involved with a series of benefits put together by social activist and '60s icon Wavy Gravy, who came to rely on her input and judgement: "She was always the first person I would call to do stuff, she was solid like a rock that way, and trusted my feel for what good causes were. My shows tended to be a mix of folk musicians and rock and rollers who would cross over and play acoustically. I remember the Santa Monica Civic show had Jackson Browne and Graham Nash. There was a photographer for Rolling Stone and they wouldn't shoot it without Kate in the picture. They all became very enamored with her poetry and her beautiful voice."
1984's Poet's Heart proved to be Wolf's last studio album. Recorded at Griffin's studio in Santa Barbara, many of Wolf's colleagues regard this album as her most complete artistic statement. A sense of melancholy pervades the record, and songs like the title piece and "Brother Warrior" find Wolf assessing the roles that others had in her own artistic and personal development.
By 1985, Kate Wolf had a secure national reputation in the folk world, and seemed poised for a breakout. She was tapped to perform on the prestigious Austin City Limits television show in what was to be her single best remembered engagement. An Evening In Austin is an audio recording of Wolf's complete performance on that show. This confident, complete performance found Wolf at the peak of her powers as a live performer, and also featured some unusual covers like Dino Valenti's "Get Together" and Utah Phillips' "Clearing in the Forest."
In the next several months, Wolf experienced a notable drop in her usual energy level and was eventually diagnosed with leukemia. To suddenly go from the apparent picture of health to being diagnosed with a terminal illness was a shock to both Wolf and the people she cared about. She was slated to perform at Wavy Gravy's 50th birthday party, another all-star benefit.
Despite her illness, Wolf did manage, from her hospital bed, to compose and perform a song in honor of the occasion. "The Wind Blows Wild" (found on the posthumous album of the same name) is one of her most elegant, stately songs, and the last piece of music she recorded. She also made time to select tracks and artwork for Gold in California, a two-CD retrospective of her career. Although everything but a cover of Alice Stuart's "Full Time Woman" is available on her other albums, it serves its purpose well, and particularly showcases her breadth as a songwriter.
Despite her illness, Wolf had a large sense of responsibility for those around her. "She called me up when I was in Spokane," said Phillips, "And she told me she had leukemia, and then asked me if I would take her engagements. She had started working with Jim Fleming of Fleming and Associates at that time, and Jim had just lost Stan Rogers in that plane crash. That was quite a blow and Kate felt bad about that. I had stopped performing, because I couldn't fingerpick the guitar anymore, and so I hired an accompanist, Mark Moss from Butte, Montana, and went out and took her engagements. She came to the concert at the Freight in Berkeley, and we had dinner that night. She had kind of been in remission, and was wearing a big babushka because her hair was all gone because of the chemotherapy. She was sitting off to the side at the old Freight and Salvage when it was in the little room. Of course, everybody loved Kate, and the place was jammed. I came out on stage and someone asked `How's Kate?' and I said `Don't ask me, there she is.' Then she came up and sold all my records at intermission, every last one of them. But we had dinner, and she told me that I had to go back to performing, because I was singing and talking about things that no one else was. I said `But I can't play the guitar,' and she said `Well, nobody came to listen to you play the guitar anyway.' So I went back at it."
Wolf experienced a temporary remission through the chemotherapy, and was optimistic about returning to performing again. However, she took another turn for the worse after an ineffective marrow transplant, and refusing further surgery, she started planning for the end.
Through the years since her passing, Wolf's significance in folk music history has become increasingly apparent. Diamant feels that, had she lived, Wolf would have attained mass popularity. "With all of the folk influences appearing among female country singers, I think that Kate would have been a big star on country radio."
In her songs, Wolf left an important body of work that people continue to discover. One person who was instrumental in bringing that legacy to light was Nanci Griffith, who led off her 1993 tribute to songwriting influences, Other Voices, Other Rooms, with "Across the Great Divide." Pete Kennedy also played guitar on several of Griffith's tours. "We used to talk about Kate a lot on the bus and I found out after I'd been in the band awhile that Nanci was a big Kate Wolf fan, so we used to sit up drinking coffee and talking about Kate. About that time Nanci had struck up a conversation with Emmylou [Harris] and found that she was a big fan too, which led to their doing the duet on Other Voices.
Kennedy continued: "It was so great for me, having played `Across the Great Divide' with Kate so many times, to actually get to record it with Nanci. It was like getting to do something for Kate. To be able to travel across the U.S. and Europe and have that be one of the featured songs on the show was like finally finding a way to give something back."
Phillips summed up her place in musical history. "She had a turbulent and in many ways painful life and she was able to reach into her own heart of darkness and come out with songs of enormous forgiveness, which is as heroic as I can imagine. I can't imagine anyone using their art more heroically and gently. That music deserves to continue and do its work, and it's the music's work now, of course, Kate's not here."
"It was Jean Louis Borgias who said that every time you utter a line of William Shakespeare you become Shakespeare for that moment," said Wavy Gravy. "We still have Kate and her legacy, and you always have the opportunity to turn into Kate if you have a mind to."
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