Song Quilts

FOLK MUSIC • QUILTING • WOMEN’S VOICES

THE WORK OF ELIZA HARDY JONES

Eliza Hardy Jones is a musician, singer/songwriter, vocal coach and quilter.
She came up in the Philadelphia music scene in the early 2000s with her band Buried Beds, but has gone on to work with a number of artists. She has been a touring member of many bands including Grace Potter and Iron & Wine before joining The War on Drugs in 2021.
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After releasing her first solo album “Because Become” (2016), Eliza focused on a large multidisciplinary art project interviewing women in the US and Russia, recording folk songs, and turning those songs into a series of quilts which are now part of the permanent collection of the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln Nebraska. 

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

КАТЮША
​KATYUSHA

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. 

Listen to Katyusha

A Little Stream of Honey

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. 

Listen to A Little Stream of Honey

​COWBOY JACK

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.

Listen to Cowboy Jack