High Desert Journal: Interview with Katie Lee

contributors JJ Clark, Ellen Waterston, Charles Finn, Rebecca Miles, Katie Lee, Kyle Boogs. Simmons B. Buntin

Interview with Katie Lee

Interview

by Kyle Boogs | 0 Comments

Boggs: What if they never built the dam, never flooded the Glen Canyon? Do you think it would remain the beautiful, mysterious, love affair you write about?

Lee: If the Glen were like it was then today, it would be trampled to death. I’m afraid it would. Unless according to the way I put it in my afterward to Glen Canyon Betrayed, it was made into a special place. It should be a sanctuary. Because it is very important for what happens downstream. There are only a few places along the river where the nurseries happen. And Glen was one of those. It fed the whole rest of the river until the next nursery. The nurseries are gone and it’s killing the Grand Canyon.

Boggs: I read some of John Wesley Powell’s journals from his expedition in 1869. As a surveyor, his initial impression of Glen Canyon caught my attention because he described that place so eloquently.

Lee: It was different than any other writing in all of his journals wasn’t it?

Boggs: Yes it was. From his detailed descriptions of the carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments, it was obvious that it wasn’t just a bunch of rocks to him. How do you think he would react to knowing that reservoir was named after him?

Lee: (Laughing) He would roll over in his grave. He would absolutely be snot-flying mad. That would just destroy him. That was the first thing I thought about when I heard they were gonna name it “Res Fowell,” I mean “Res Powell.” Oh God, there are so many more appropriate names, like “Utah’s Piss Urinal,” “Fowell the Fjord” and umm, never mind.

Boggs: At last summer’s Coconino County Fair, up at Fort Tuthill in Flagstaff, the Department of Natural Resources tent gave me a temporary tattoo that said, “Save the Humpback Chub” and contained an image of the fish. I asked them what the number one threat is to the survival of the humpback chub? They replied immediately, “Glen Canyon Dam,” to which I responded, “Well, this seems like a pretty open and shut case, doesn’t it? When is the dam coming down?” They explained to me that they were seeking “realistic options.”

Lee: There isn’t a compromise about a fish. You can’t catch all the fish and bring them to the warm water [on the other side of the dam]. You can’t do that. The only way you can do that is to let the river flow. And you don’t have to get rid of the dam to do that. I don’t care if it stays there for 25 thousand centuries, as a monument to Dominy’s (Floyd Dominy) stupidity and the “Wreck-the-Nation-Bureau.” That would be fine with me. But the river’s gonna work its way around that. I mean the sandstone is so terribly porous. The river will make its way through one of these days.

Boggs: I’ve heard that the dam is pretty weak.

Lee: It’s terribly weak. They pushed caulk and steel rods into the sandstone to hold it on the right side of the dam. They were told never to build it there; the sandstone is too porous. They didn’t care. Do what they want to do. And I don’t think there is going to be too many more big dams built, period.

Boggs: In your film, Love Song to Glen Canyon, you said that the Glen “deluded your ego to its proper consistency.” What does this mean?

Lee: Well that means exactly what I said. I came from Hollywood and in Hollywood, there’s nothing but egos floating around in the air, underground, through the ether, morning noon and night. It’s an ego town. And if you don’t have a certain amount of that, you just get trampled under food, that’s all. So when I hit Glen Canyon and did my first two or three trips down there and especially when the three of us started going, all that just fell off.

I was still working at coffee houses and clubs for ten years; the years I spent in the Glen were the years I worked, and a few more after that. But you don’t need that kind of a pushy ego in the canyon. I was not the pushy type, never have been, but at least I knew how to stand my ground. After the Glen Canyon, I just didn’t need that. It’s like a brick wall or (pauses)…

Boggs: …or a dam?

Lee: Yes, a barrier that you put up to keep yourself safe – all kinds of influences, all kinds of personal influences, influences from other people, influences from things like booze, drugs, and other stuff like that. You just put up a wall to keep yourself safe. That wall can be a detriment to you if you’re going to go into a canyon, like the Glen. You don’t want that wall there. You want everything knocked down so that everything can get to you so that you can respond to it.

Boggs: I wanted to ask you more about this “double life” that you recall constantly in your work: “Tinsel Town” and the natural world. Is there something about longing for a place that intensifies your affinity toward it?

Lee: Oh, absolutely! As a matter of fact, between Frank and a few other river people, we would exchange tapes. I would give anything to see those tapes again. Frank had most of them and he destroyed them, the good Mormon that he is. And I guess all mine got taped over or whatever, but I don’t have them anymore. I had this old Concertone that I carried around with me everywhere in the back of my T-bird. It went everywhere with me. I recorded stuff that I was trying to work on. I recorded new songs and stuff that other people were singing at the time. Those tapes would transform be back home. It was so imprinted on my brain, on my eyes, it never got wiped out, but the correspondence did intensify it and it did make it more real, leaving me more anxious to get back out there.

Boggs: In a ‘96 interview I listened to from the Grand Canyon River Guide’s Oral History Collection, one of the very last things Lewis Steiger asked you were about your thoughts on the future—to which you responded, “Forget it, you’re doomed.”

Lee: Did I say doomed? That’s probably what I felt for sure…doomed. What are my thoughts for the future? Future of what? Me or the world or what?

Boggs: What do you think about our ability to transform our culture into a sane and sustainable one, with equal access to clean air, and clean water, and…

Lee: (Laughing) Yeah, you’re pretty doomed at this point, unless things turn around mighty damn fast. Last year at the film festival in Telluride, it was all about water. There were figures explaining that nearly half of the world’s population does not currently have access to potable water that’s clean enough to drink. The theme for this year is on food, and I said, you know, if you do not get off it and get onto population—this is one film festival that can deal with that. I mean, would somebody tell me how food and water are not connected to population?

Boggs: I talk about this stuff all the time with my friends, my roommates—we’ve come to call it our “end-of-the-world roundtable discussions.” The conversation always comes back to the issue of population. And it’s the one thing completely excluded from mainstream discourse.

Lee: No, nobody wants to talk about it. We’re doomed unless we cut our population. That’s what the bottom line is and nobody wants to pay any attention to the fact that we are the beasts that are overpopulating this planet and it won’t hold that many more of us without killing us off like rats in a cage…and I think that is a good idea. I’d like to see about half of us gone. And that’s all right for me to say because I’ve had a great wonderful life and I don’t care if I go tomorrow.

Boggs: I wanted to ask you about your music career. How and when did you first learn to play the guitar?

Lee: I used to sing a lot with my buddies in riverbeds when we’d go hunting when we’d camp. Someone else always played the guitar and so it never entered my mind, really. But when one of my buddy’s George went off to war, he left his guitar with me. I had played the ukulele down in Manhattan Beach where I used to spend summers. I thought, well if I can play the ukulele, I guess I can play the guitar, so I started learning. I wasn’t very interested in it because it was a steel stringed guitar and I kept taking the bass strings off, turning it into a ukulele. George found that out one day and he took my ukulele and slammed it over my head. He sat me down and made me learn C, D, and E. I played those chords for two or three hours until my fingers were bleeding and that’s when I really learned to play it (laughing)

And then I went to Mexico and got interested in the rhythms and how the strokes were done. And I lived in Mexico for about 6 months, traveling through the country – that was in the 40’s. Suddenly when I came back, I was really into it. I happened to get a hold of, and I don’t remember how, some Burl Ives records and I began to play along with them. And I didn’t realize, of course they were folk songs, I knew that. But for some reason, I never put cowboy songs into that category. It never entered my mind. I had heard cowboy songs all my life and I thought they were the corniest things in the world because I was singing pop music. You couldn’t have paid me to sing cowboy music. (laughing). In Hollywood I practiced and played guitar and sang folk songs on the set when I worked on pictures. Word got around and I got three big jobs on NBC singing folk songs with Gordon McCray on the Railroad Hour and with Ronald Coleman and Benita Coleman on their show, The Halls of Ivy. And all of these featured me singing folksongs.

Boggs: Was this before you met Burl?

Lee: I met Burl during the last couple years I was in Hollywood. He would come and go, doing pictures and radio shows. When I finally did get to know him, he’s the one that sat me down and said, “You gotta get outta here. These people don’t understand what’s going on with you.” And that was when the coffee house circuits were big. There was the Hungry Eye in San Francisco and the Blue Angel in New York – you know, folk clubs were popping up all over the country. And so I just took my guitar in 1954 and I left. The other reason why I left was because I decided I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days in Hollywood, in the theater, in movies, or anywhere else like that.

Boggs: You just decided it wasn’t for you?

Lee: It wasn’t for me because by that time, in ’53, was the first time I hit the river. And the river just said “get the hell out of there, (laughing) and get back, you know, to your roots.” And I did just that. And I traveled for 10 years all over the country; even before The Weavers and other big ones became known. I was still a fringe performer. I dressed too fancily; I had too many years in the theater. I wasn’t going to look like a floozy, a dirty-sandaled folk singer. And so, they couldn’t put me in a box and label me – and so I never, you know, became “famous,” but I worked constantly and that’s how I made my living for 15 years.

Boggs: Can you tell me how important was Burl Ives to your career as a musician and mentor?

Lee: I certainly can because, in the first place, I didn’t know what a folk song was until I listened to his records. I just heard them and I loved the voice and I loved the message that each one of them had. You know, they were just great little songs with a story. The music really didn’t matter a whole hell of a lot; it was the words that mattered most. And that’s really what folk music is all about. Somebody gets an interest in what’s going on or they want to write a song or tell a story to their kids. And so they write little rhymes and put it to music. So when Burl came out with those albums, I thought, oh, these are lovely. And I learned many of them and played my guitar while listening. I just got better and better at both things, singing them and playing them.

Boggs: In your book, Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle, a book about cowboy songs, you mentioned how much Burl loved your interpretation of a song called “Old Delores.” How did Burl help you find your own sound as a folk singer?

Lee: Well he helped me learn to interpret songs. Pretty soon, what used to be his interpretation of the songs became my interpretation of them. Because if they don’t do that, you’re not going anywhere. That is one of the bitches I have with singers. Many don’t know where their songs come from. All they do is copy the other singer they heard, and pretty soon they don’t advance, they don’t go anywhere and nothing happens to those songs. You’re supposed to interpret the song. If you don’t do that, you don’t bring it anything, you don’t give it anything. If you don’t know anything about it, you can’t give it anything. I used to research all my songs, trying to figure out where they came from, who wrote it – if that was even possible. Some of these old cowboy songs or Irish folk songs, you wouldn’t have a clue who wrote them. But I had to find out why they were written: either they were political songs, love songs; maybe somebody wanted to tell a funny story to their kids. Whatever the story, it changes the way you sing it.

It took me years to find out all about the Old Delores song. When I found out, you can tell right off that I had interpreted the song. I mean I’ve heard people who sang “Old Delores” and got it from me. Whoever sings it today, you can be damn sure they got it from me because I got it from the author. I went and saw him and got to know him and he became a friend of mine. He told me where and when and why he wrote it.

Boggs: Who’s song was it?

Lee: That was James Graften Rodgers song, and he was no cowboy. He was Assistant Secretary of State during the Hoover administration. He might be the last person in the world you’d expect to ever write a little ghost town song. It wouldn’t enter your mind.

When Burl heard me play the song, you know, I told him that he aught to record it, because it needed to get out, it was such a great song. He said, “nah, Katie that song’s yours. And I never thought of songs like that being mine just because I happen to love them more than anyone and know more about them. I don’t consider them mine. Some singers do feel this or that song belongs to them. I don’t know how to say it. It’s my song, but it doesn’t belong to me. When James heard it, he told me, “that’s the way it ought to be.” Since then, I’ve heard some pretty sorry recordings of it, and I’ve heard some darn good ones too.

Boggs: You’ve written that Burl Ives referred to you as a “bitch,” but that he meant it as a compliment. Can you explain?

Lee: He said bitches have spirit, bitches have ball, bitches are somebody that does something. I said, “oh, well that doesn’t sound like much of a compliment to me.” You know to me, a bitch is an insult, so I learned from him that bitch isn’t always a bad word, but I watch who I call a bitch.

Boggs: When you moved to Chicago, you became good friends with Josh White…

Lee: Oh Joshua

Boggs: You say he was not only a good friend but that he also taught a lot about playing guitar. Can you tell me about that?

I did take lessons from him; I tried to learn blues. And I did learn several good strokes from Josh. I moved because of him. I was living in the Lincoln Park West and they wouldn’t let him come up to my room because he was black. So I took my guitar and said, “Okay, I’m outta here.”

Josh and his brother Billy took me around. I remember we drove all over the neighborhood and found a rooming house that had a bunch of other artists living in it. Within a week, I moved everything over there. Josh came over often to teach me guitar.

Boggs: What was the most important thing you learned from him?

Lee: He watched me play a lot no matter the club I was playing. At the time, I was working at Mr. Kelly’s Inn or the Gated Horn. Josh told me not to watch my hand, to watch the audience. I said, “I have to see what I’m doing.” He said, “you do not, now go in that closet and practice.” So I did. And I didn’t look at my hand anymore.

Boggs: Tell me more about Josh.

Josh was such a gentle, gentle soul. Every time I got low, he used to send me telegrams that say, “good luck,” He was just a sweetheart of a man. We kept in touch over the years. Often we would be playing in the same town in different clubs. And I remember I was up in Toronto at some big meeting, everyone was there, Pete Seeger, Josh, the Weavers, the whole gang. I think Ramblin Jack was there and Sonny, Terry, Brownie McGee, Big Bill Brunsie, my friends from Chicago….

Anyway, I was really low. I had been working at a club in Toronto. Wasn’t getting any feeling out of my songs, I was just mouthing the words, I wasn’t back in the place where the song was happening, which I always am or I don’t sing it, and I was just feeling this dead air. No empathy, no bouncing back and forth between the audience and me. And I cried on his shoulders and said, “what is the matter? What am I doing wrong, what is happening?” And he looked at me and said “you’re tired baby, just tired. Take a rest. That’s the only thing that will cure it. Just take a rest for a little while. And he said, maybe when you practice, take everything slow like burl told you. Slow down and get every word. Just go over every song again and again. But take it slow. Put yourself where those people are.” He never used bad language; he always spoke straight English. No southern drawl or nothing.

So I went back to the ranch in Tucson, went out to Sebino Canyon, in the desert and got back to nature. I went back to the river. And that’s all it took, really.

Boggs: At first, you didn’t sing political songs. You sang pop songs, right?.

Lee: Oh yeah, I didn’t sing a political song at all until I went to the river. And then when they built this goddam dam and started ruining my haven, that’s when I decided, hey I can write folk songs. It just came to me one night. I had written a song for my boatmen – you immediately fall in love with your first boatman, that’s what you’re supposed to do. After that, I decided, hey, they’re going to dam this river and I can sing and I’m going to do something about it. From then on, I wrote protest songs about my river.

Boggs: What was the first one?

Lee: The first one, I think, was either “Muddy River” or “The Wreck-the-Nation-Bureau.” I wrote “Poor Colorady” while I was in Chicago and that had to be 1954, the first year I went on the road. Then, I wrote Tale of the Taker-boo, which wasn’t my lyrics, but my music.

Boggs: Do you remember the circumstances that prompted you to write “The Wreck-the-Nation-Bureau”?

Lee: Well I gave them that name because that’s what they do: they wreck the nation.

Boggs: I love that song by the way.

Lee: (laughing) I just sat down one day and sang “Three jeers for the Wreck-the-Nation Bureau!” This is what they are, freeloaders, people who had never seen the place and were tearing it to pieces without asking anyone what they thought about it. So I just went at them the best I knew how. I figured I’m not a politician. I’m not into politics, but you know, people listen to a song before they’re going to listen to words and especially my words ‘cause I get so mad, I start telling everybody off. That’s why Ed (Abbey) used to say, “Katie, shut up and sing.

So I just sat down and I tried to make the song humorous as well because people listen to a story before they listen to any argument. And if that story, you know, has an argument with it, sometimes they don’t even know it. You can sneak it by.

Boggs: What is a “hootenanny?”

Lee: What’s a hootenanny? Oh my goodness sonny! Jesus! A hootenanny is where all the folksingers got together at a party, at a picnic, whatever, and traded songs, sang all night long, drank a lot of beer if they felt like it or whatever. I don’t remember people being drunk. I just remember music being the thing that was most important. That’s where I learned a lot of my songs for god’s sake, songs I’d never heard before. I’d learn them from another folk singer. I mean they didn’t come out of a book. That’s where I met Woody (Guthrie). I sang a lot of his songs after I knew him. That’s what a hootenanny is.

Boggs: Tell me more.

Lee: Well, they were all over the place. Sickle Houston would come up and say, “there’s a hoot up in Laurel Canyon tonight, y’all should go on up.” Part of the Easy Rider group—some of them—like Pete Seeger were said to belong to the Communist Party and all that horseshit, but these people were primarily interested in the music. These were peaceful people. They were writing political songs. They didn’t want war. I mean, they didn’t want war, what a big sin that is! You must love war, or it seemed you’re a Communist. Anyway, I would go to these hootenannies. And like I said that’s where I learned a lot of my music. And then I heard that my friends were being called up on the carpet, you know, Josh, Ted, and Burl said watch out for those people. I thought, what the hell, you know? I didn’t write political songs.

Boggs: You mean the FBI contacted them?

Lee: Yeah. Josh had even been called up. That was the McCarthy era. That McCarthy had made everybody paranoid. The government was just certain that we were all spies. Anybody who sang folk songs, he had it figured out we were Communists.

Boggs: It was because of what they were singing about. If you sang about peace that means you’re anti-American?

Lee: Yeah. It got that bad. I guess, but I wasn’t singing political songs at the time and I wanted them to know that. So I called the FBI up and told them. I said, Look, I go up there to hootenannies to learn my music. That’s where I get a lot of my songs. When they called me back asking me to inform them about who was planning on going to the next hoot, I told them, “Up yours buddy, I’m not an informer.” I called before to let them know I’m not politically oriented. I was there to make a living in this town singing and acting…

Boggs: Did that play a role in your change to more politically conscious lyrics?

Lee: Not really, not until the river. This was all two or three years before the river. At the time, to be honest, political songs kinda bored me. I was so apolitical; I didn’t go to hoots to learn that kinda song. I went and learned, you know, “Froggie went a courtin,’ he did ride mmmhmmmm.”

Boggs: What does writing and singing music do for you?

Lee: I can tell you what it does for me now, but it’s not too pretty. If I wake up and sing two words that are in a song, that song is with me the whole day. And I cannot get it out of my head. And I realize, because I’ve talked to my musician friends, that that happens to all of us when we get older. We’ve spent out lives memorizing these songs and they will not go away. They’re engraved on our brain and they stay there. All day long I can hear it, like a broken record, over and over and over again. That’s the bad part of it.

I never considered myself a good lyricist, unless I was pissed and had something really important to say. Then it comes out much easier. If I sit down and just try to write a song…eh? (shrugs)… you know, about what? I can’t do that. There has to be a pull, a reason behind it. The river just did it for me. I had something definitely that I wanted to put out there, to explain to people what a gorgeous place this was and what was happening to it and (pauses) maybe they would listen and not let it happen to some place that they cared for.

Boggs: Have you heard of anyone inspired by your work?

Lee: Well, all I have is a stack of letters, probably about 4 inches thick now, of people who have written to me, and said that in somehow, some manner, I’ve changed their direction, changed their life. I always question this, I figure they had just read something of mine or heard me sing and it turned them on and they just felt the urge to write to me and let me know. But whether they ever followed through with that, I will never know. But it’s good enough for me to know that at least they were awakened for a time and I do know that a percentage of those people went on to be activists, not a big percentage, but some did. And if I’ve even partially inspired anyone, I’ve done my job on this earth. I’m not getting out of here without having made a mark.

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Interview with Katie Lee

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