FOLK MUSIC • QUILTING • WOMEN’S VOICES

Each quilt image is a portal to the music that inspired it. 

Sung in 1982 in Hope, New Jersey by my Great Aunt Virginia. This is the only recording in the Song Quilts project I did not make myself, but I have many memories of Aunt Virginia singing this song. Virginia Bartow was a semi-professional light opera singer who spent decades of her life in a long relationship with Russian composer and arranger Andrei Salama. After coming to America with La Chauve-Souris, a Russian theater revue forced out of Moscow after the revolution, Salama bought a "dacha" above the Delaware Water Gap and named it Salamovka. In the summers it would fill with dancers, composers, painters, costume designers, actors, and singers. In his ailing years, Virginia kept Salamovka going, and after his death, she received all of his papers, stacks of handwritten folk songs from his youth, original songs, and arrangements from the days of the Chauve-Souris. I now have those papers. They are treasures. 
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This Song Quilt is an exact transcription of how she sang Katyusha. The "root" color of this song is a brilliant red inspired by traditional Muscovite dresses. The quilting design is based on the weaving patterns found in those same dresses. It was quilted on my home machine. The backing fabric is a Kaffe Fasset rose pattern, inspired by how often I saw rose fabric on the chest pieces of those same dresses. 

Sung by Vernyce Dannells of Philadelphia in 2018. Vernyce is a quilter, artist, writer, poet, and story teller. I spent an afternoon in her West Philadelphia home, just blocks from my own childhood home, where she shared many songs and stories. I chose to make a quilt from the hobo song A Little Stream of Honey because it tells so much about the woman who sings it. Born to immigrant parents of West Indian and Uzbek descent, her family was forced from their undiscovered squatters’ encampment in Seattle by the government in the early 1960s. From there, her mother, took Vernyce and her twin brother on a train to Milwaukee to live with an "aunt."  That long journey and the generosity of the porters is a memory that shaped her. As a teenager facing the weight of a racist society, Vernyce found solace in the Baha'i community, early allies in the Civil Rights Movement, and her Baha'i faith and community remains a central part of her life. She first learned the song A Little Stream of Whiskey when she was working as a nationally contributing NPR producer working from Missoula, Montana. As a Baha'i, Vernyce does not drink, so she changed the historic lyric from “whiskey” to “honey.”
This Song Quilt is a transcription of how Vernyce sang A Little Stream of Honey. You'll notice the grid breaks down in the last two lines as she freely sings a coda. I picked a regal purple as the root color, because Vernyce shines purple in my eyes--and we both like purple shoes! The backing fabric and quilting are honeycombs, for obvious reasons. The quilt pattern is an Urban Elementz design that I used with the Innova auto-pilot. But I messed it up, so ended up using a ruler to quilt the bottom half. Life is all about improvisation. 

Sung by Marcella “Sally” Woerman of Oakland, Nebraska in 2016.  I visited Sally at her farm in rural Nebraska. A farmer's daughter and wife, she fondly remembers her late husband telling her at breakfast each morning, "Now Sally, I'm going out to the field. You take care of things." She thinks of that each day as she continues, now in her nineties, to care for their property.  As a child, her father bought her a $3 guitar off of a traveling cowboy, and later she was gifted her Uncle's violin, which he had bought off of some farmers who offered him shelter as he bivouacked across Italy in World War I. Over the years, Sally learned to play the piano, mandolin, button accordion, ukelin, and autoharp. She mostly learned songs off the radio, and music has been a constant source of joy for her, as well as her 7 children, and her many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In her youth, Sally often played around town, at the local Farmer's Union meetings (which her father was president of) and in the 1930s on the West Point Radio station. When I visited, she played some classics, and some old songs I had never heard before, including Cowboy Jack, which was a popular Western song when she was young.
This Song Quilt is a transcription of how Sally sang Cowboy Jack. The "root" color of this song is a pale blue sky, like the one that hung over the farm when I visited. The backing fabric is a vintage sheet in browns and golds that match the color palette of her home. When I sat with her, Sally had a gorgeous Double Wedding Ring quilt on her couch, so I used that as the inspiration for the quilting. I used the Sweet Dream Quilting Studio DWR pattern on the Innova auto-pilot.

MYTHOLOGY • LITERATURE • VISIONARY

Paul Zolbrod taught humanities at the Crownpoint, New Mexico Campus of Diné College–the Navajo Nation Tribal College–and Native American Mythology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. The latter is where I met him. I was a wide-eyed graduate student, hanging onto every word as he recounted the story of Changing Woman and her lover, the Sun. I was thrilled to catch up with him for a feature in ORIGINS and to chat about Diné Bahane’, the Navajo creation story. Paul’s translation of the work (his most popular book to date) provides the most complete English version of the epic. It celebrates the oral tradition through the written word and offers a vibrant introduction to Diné culture.


Recently, Paul released a 300-page, full-color hardcover treasure at www.pleiadesbooks.com. His new work: Paradise Revisited, Lines from Milton's Paradise Lost and the Navajo Creation Story is celebrated as "the only work in the mythological and English literary disciplines ever to compare and contrast the Judeo-Christian creation story and the Navajo emergent-worlds myth—and only Dr. Zolbrod could have written it." Paul has been honored as "the only academician worldwide with so deep a knowledge of both myths that he can see their similarities and differences with such crystalline clarity." 

For the Winter 24/25 issue of Soul Artist Journal, ORIGINS, Paul described his journey to discover the common threads that weave these two literary epics. One clarion theme kept rising through our conversation: the value of the oral recitation of story. Creative impulse led us to organize a small except from Paul's Paradise Revisited, into a dramatic reading. I am thrilled to share "No Harmony in the Universe Without Harmony Between the Two of Us: Dialogues from Diné Bahane’ & Paradise Lost," by Paul Zolbrod. 

• Paul Zolbrod: Jóhonaa’éí (the Sun) and Adam
• Spring Condoyan: Asdzáán nadleehé (Changing Woman) and Eve
• Will Talvo: John Milton
• R.R. Shakti: Narrator

PHOTOGRAPHY • WOMEN • COURAGE

Natalie Karpushenko has a morning routine. She jumps up and down for lymphatic stimulation, then she does her "mirror work." She looks in her right eye. She looks in her left eye and she says, "I am Natalie Karpushenko, I am a known photographer..." Her affirmation is working. Her vision of being a widely known photographer is coming true. We know her. And we are obsessed. Gretchen connects with the Photo Artist responsible for our ORIGINS cover to chat about the inspiration behind her work. 

• Creative Presence
• The Courage of Women
• Morning Ritual
• Love over Fear
• The Language of Animals
• Swimming with Orcas
• Intuitive Wisdom​​

Find the full interview in the ORIGINS issue of Soul Artist Journal, to be released digitally on December 21 and in print on January 1.