Need

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to perform. As a kid, my love of horses took me to rodeos and horse shows, and maybe because I was female and females had pretty limited career paths in the middle of the last century, I aspired to be a trick-rider in the rodeo. (When Ringling Brothers came to town I also wondered how I might become the bareback rider in the circus).

I painted and drew pictures too, almost always of horses and cowboys, and early in my grade-school years was recommended for Saturday art lessons at the city art museum, but my parents and I both decided that Saturday’s hours were better spent outdoors. My classmate who did attend the museum classes became a successful painter.

My mother thought to correct my pigeon-toes – and maybe derail my tom-boy leanings – by enrolling me in dancing lessons. I took tap, ballet, “modern jazz”, and acrobatic for years, and they put me on the stage for the first time. The excitement of costumes, bright lights and applause fanned the fire deep within me.

Cowboys played guitars, so I managed to get one on loan and talked my mother into paying for lessons, then convinced my dancing teacher to let me perform a couple of numbers during the intermission of a dance recital. I was probably the oldest dancer in the recital that night, and although I still enjoyed tapping around the stage, the singing was what I would remember. The songs I chose were “Tall Paul” (which had been a hit by every girl’s favorite Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello) and a G-Em-C-D7 tune (you musicians recognize that as the chord progression used in about half of all early rock’n’roll “hits”) called “Hand in Hand.” No doubt I was awful, but I sang and played my heart out...and people applauded.

There was another music genre rising in the 1950s. The Kingston Trio took “folk” music in a new direction, their acoustic instruments and voices speaking to me in a more meaningful way than the dance music that was rock’n’roll or the traditional (and boring) subject matter of “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” or “Frog Went a-Courting” (everyone’s first guitar songs), then one Saturday morning in 1962 a friend came to my house with an album entitled “Peter, Paul & Mary.” The hair on my arms rose as I listened, and on that day, unrecognized passions stored deep within me found a voice. By the next day I had learned every song on the record, and although I never thought about it, my rodeo or bareback riding career was a thing of the past. I have been a “folksinger” ever since.

So many things I’ve done have been for an audience of one kind or another: acting in a play or musical, displaying a photograph, doing a dramatic public reading of one of my husband’s poems; and now I’m blogging.

The need to create is a driving passion, an often urgent, aching need to express thoughts and emotions. It is a longing for connection, for the sharing of these passions with another human being. For me it is undoubtedly wrapped in complex, insecure egocentricity. My words, my photographs, the songs I sing and the roles I play give expression to an internal energy that aches to be released and recognized. I don’t fully understand why, and I have no choice: I am an artist.