BY KAREN BOSSICK
Rosalie Sorrels, one of Idaho’s most gifted folk singers, died on Sunday—13 days short of what would have been her 84th birthday.
A memorial service will be held in Boise, with her ashes scattered at her cabin on Grimes Creek near Idaho City.
Sorrels grew up in Boise to a family steeped in Idaho history.
Her grandfather was an Episcopalian minister who preached to Native Americans in Idaho and Montana. For awhile, he ministered at Hailey’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church, snowshoeing or skiing 12 miles to the north once a month during winter to preach in the white clapboard church that eventually became the site of the Leadville Espresso House and Louie’s Pizza.
Her mother Nancy Stringfellow ran The Book Shop on Main Street. And her father Walter, an engineer for the Idaho Transportation Department, built the road over Galena Summit.
“I have a picture of him and my grandfather in the Stanley Basin when there was no one else for 500 miles in any direction,” she once recounted.
Sorrels married at 19, moving to Salt Lake City. In the 1960s she divorced and began performing across the country, her five children in tow.
Her widespread performances, from the Newport Folk Festival to the Smithsonian, earned her the moniker “The Traveling Lady.”
She played with the likes of Jerry Garcia, Utah Phillips, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, The Lovin' Spoonful, Howlin' Wolf and The Clancy Brothers. She hobnobbed with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson and Ken Kesey of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” fame.
Sorrels recorded a couple dozen albums and wrote three books. She received two Grammy nominations and the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
And, sometimes it seemed, Sorrels told twice as many stories as the songs she sang, often serving up rambling social commentaries.
When she tired of the road, Rosalie returned home to the family log cabin on Grimes Creek that her father had built. “Notorious Stranger Returns,” the Idaho Daily Statesman reported of her return.
But she didn’t put down her guitar.
The singer was a mainstay at the Northern Rockies Folk Festival in Hailey in its early days, attracting children and adults alike as she sang about “Waltzing with Bears” or “She’ll Never Be Mine,” a song she wrote about her great-grandmother’s Irish garden.
On the other side of the spectrum was her “Six Plated, Pearl Handled, Golden Leg, Boy Scout Knife,” a song about a woman trying to stave off growing old.
Sorrels performed fairly regularly in Ketchum—at the Leadville Espresso House where her grandfather had preached, Iconoclast Books and the Sun Valley/Ketchum Ski and Heritage Museum.
And in 2005 Idaho Public TV filmed a live concert featuring Sorrels titled “Way Out in Idaho” at the 1938-Liberty Theatre in Hailey. The 90-minute show was interspersed with interviews from such performers as Pete Seeger and Nanci Griffith.
Sorrels picked the setting herself—she had seen beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti perform there and thought it was “a neat setting.”
Rosalie outlived an aneurysm that she suffered in 1988, and she survived breast cancer in 1998. She battled dementia in the final months of her life.
Boise journalist Robert Speer once said that Sorrels has come to embody and give voice to what he feels is the soul of Idaho: “Anyone who loves Idaho and has not heard her perform doesn’t fully know the state.”