Dick Nolan born 4 February 1939

 

Dick Nolan (February 4, 1939 – December 13, 2005) was a Canadian singer, songwriter and guitarist who was one of Newfoundland’s most prominent music ambassadors, known for performing Newfoundland folk music in Toronto night clubs. During his 50-year career he released more than 40 albums and recorded over 300 tracks. He is particularly known for his song "Aunt Martha's Sheep". 

Richard Francis Nolan was born in Corner Brook. As a teenager, he performed in a local band, the Blue Valley Boys, and sang on a Corner Brook radio show. Priscilla Boutcher, the former Mayor of Corner Brook, was Nolan's sister. In the 1950s, Nolan moved to Toronto, where he played with local bands and worked at several jobs. He began to record albums of the music of Johnny Cash and other country songs, earning him the nickname "The Johnny Cash of Newfoundland". 

His Blue Valley Boys, which included Corner Brook native Roy Penney, performed regularly at the Horseshoe Tavern in the early 1960s, where they backed such US country stars as Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare and Charley Pride. Nolan switched his focus to traditional Newfoundland music and released many albums. Between 1959 and 1969, Nolan made 14 LPs for Arc Records, including two albums of songs by Johnny Cash. Nolan’s Arc recordings featured “truck driving” country material, as well as Newfoundland, Maritime and Christmas songs. 

                                   

He released one album with the Blue Valley Boys, one in duet with his daughter, Bonnie Lou Nolan, and two with Marlene Beaudry. He began to enjoy some success in the mid-1960s; his cover of Hank Snow’s “Golden Rocket” reached No. 2 on RPM’s Country Chart in 1965 and “The Fool” hit No. 8 in 1967. Nolan returned to Corner Brook in 1968. In the early 1970s, he performed on his own weekly television program on CJON-TV, as well as at nightclubs throughout the province. In 1972, he began to record for RCA. 

His first LP, Fisherman's Boy,  included the song “Aunt Martha's Sheep,” composed by fellow Newfoundlander Ellis Coles. Written in a traditional ballad style, but with contemporary Newfoundland references in its lyrics, the comical and folksy song reached No. 35 on the RPM Country Chart and received a BMI Certificate of Honour for song writing. It became Nolan’s signature tune, driving sales of Fisherman’s Boy to more than 50,000 copies. It was followed by the hits “Home Again This Year,” which peaked at No. 9 on the Country Chart in 1972, and “Me and Brother Bill” in 1973. 

Nolan returned to Toronto in 1973, and performed in restaurants and nightclubs catering to Newfoundlanders. He appeared on CBC TV’s The Tommy Hunter Show, Elwood Glover’s Luncheon Date and Stompin’ Tom’s Canada, as well as in Nashville at the Grand Ole Opry. He released 41 LPs in total through Arc, RCA, Pickwick and Boot Records, including Fisherman's Boy (1972), Home Again This Year (1972) and Happy Newfoundlanders (1973), which each sold more than 50,000 copies; however, they pre-dated Music Canada’s sales certifications system and were not officially certified as gold records. In 1975, he received a Juno Award nomination for Country Male Vocalist of the Year. 

In 1992, Nolan performed on the album Singers for Fishermen, a musical response to the closure of the Newfoundland cod fishery. His later recordings included the gospel album Family Bible (1994), as well as Pretty Girls of Newfoundland (1996), Down By the Sea (1998), Christmas Morn in Newfoundland (with Eddie Coffey, 1998) and Newfoundland Good Times (1999). 

Nolan returned to Newfoundland in 2004 and lived his final days on Bell Island. In November 2005, shortly before his death a month later, Nolan was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Music Industry Association of Newfoundland and Labrador. He died December 13, 2005 due to complications from a stroke, in Carbonear (aged 66). He was writing his memoir and had been planning to release a CD of all his albums recorded with RCA in the 1970s. 

A retrospective compilation entitled The Best of Dick Nolan was released in 2006. In 2009, he was posthumously awarded the Dr. Helen Creighton Lifetime Achievement Award at the East Coast Music Awards.  

(Edited from the Canadian Encyclopedia, Wikipedia & CBC News)

Here’s a clip of Dick Nolan Live at the Sergents Mess , Moncton N.B. Aug 5 1995..With the Happy Go Lucky Band. Dick starts his set 14 minutes from the start of video.

Gene MacLellan born 2 February 1938

Gene MacLellan (February 2, 1938 – January 19, 1995) was a Canadian singer-songwriter from Prince Edward Island. Among his compositions were "Snowbird", made famous by Anne Murray, "Put Your Hand in the Hand", "The Call", "Pages of Time", and "Thorn in My Shoe". Elvis Presley, Lynn Anderson, Loretta Lynn, Joan Baez, and Bing Crosby were among the many artists who recorded MacLellan's songs. 

Born in Val-d'Or, Quebec and raised in Toronto in a church-going family, the shy but talented Gene MacLellan suffered polio and other medical conditions in childhood. He began playing guitar at age 10 and writing songs in his early teens. After joining Toronto’s nascent rock ‘n’ roll scene, MacLellan dropped out of high school and played with local rock bands as a guitarist and singer. In 1956, he co-founded the popular rock band The Consuls (later known as Little Caesar and the Consuls) which opened for Ronnie Hawkins, a powerful figure in Toronto’s early rock scene. 

MacLellan’sperforming career was slowed by a 1963 car accident that claimed the life of his father and left Gene with several injuries, including facial scarring and an injured left eye. MacLellan left Toronto to travel through Canada and the United States, working temporary jobs before settling in Prince Edward Island in 1964, where he lived with his aunt and worked as a farm labourer and  a psychiatric hospital attendant. 

                                    

MacLellan continued to compose songs during this period, and his songwriting took on a folk-country-gospel sound. He sent a demo tape to the Charlottetown Festival and the popular CBC TV program Don Messer’s Jubilee, which was taped in Halifax. His break came when he appeared on the show, first as a guest and then regularly in 1966, introducing his original songs to a national audience. It was here that MacLellan met Anne Murray, which proved to be a turning point in both their careers. He then toured with Hal “Lone Pine” Breau (father of noted jazz guitarist Lenny Breau), and was briefly a regular on CBC Halifax TV’s Singalong Jubilee (ca. 1970). 

Gene with Anne Murray

The success of MacLellan’s songs “Snowbird,” and “Put Your Hand in the Hand” brought him to national attention as a songwriter. Over 100 performers, including Elvis Presley, Joan Baez, and Bing Crosby have recorded "Put Your Hand in the Hand".  In 1970, MacLellan released his own self-titled LP which was also released as Street Corner Preacher in the United States. Recorded in Nashville, the album produced the modest country hits “The Call” (a Top 20 hit on the RPM chart) and “Thorn in My Shoe.” The same year, he also performed weekly with Anne Murray on the CBC Radio show After Noon. MacLellan made concert appearances in 1971 and 1972, was a headliner at Toronto’s Riverboat club in 1972 and 1973, and gave a concert at Massey Hall with The Bells as part of a 1972 cross-Canada tour. 

Tiring of the demands of the music business and turning to Christianity, he left music for five years. He gave away his money and possessions and moved to Europe to perform missionary work, but by 1977 he was back in the recording studio and released a second album, If It's Alright with You, which included “Shilo Song,” a popular country duet with Anne Murray. 

In 1979, he recorded Gene and Marty, an album of gospel songs, with his fellow Prince Edward Islander Marty Reno. Devoted to his Christian faith, he performed gospel and inspirational music only in small noncommercial venues such as churches, prisons and nursing homes from 1980 until his death. He was also active in "Cons for Christ", a Christian organization dedicated to the rehabilitation of prison inmates in Canada. 

MacLellan suffered depression throughout his life and during his later years, his condition worsened, leading to hospitalization at Prince County Hospital in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. Shortly after his release from the hospital, MacLellan commited  suicide by hanging at his home in Summerside, on January 19, 1995. He was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame that year and in 1996 he was given the East Coast Music Association's Dr. Helen Creighton Lifetime Achievement Award. 

In 2017, MacLellan's daughter Catherine MacLellan presented a show titled If It's Alright with You – The Life and Music of My Father, Gene MacLellan that was described as "part theatre, part Island music history lesson, and part mental-health awareness campaign". Her album If It's Alright with You: The Songs of Gene MacLellan was released on June 30, 2017, by True North Records 

(Edited from The Canadian Encyclopedia, Wikipedia & Knocking on Heavens Door) 

Joe Sample born 1 February 1939

Joseph Leslie Sample (February 1, 1939 – September 12, 2014) was an American jazz keyboardist and composer. He was one of the founding members of The Jazz Crusaders in 1960, whose name was shortened to "The Crusaders" in 1971. He remained a part of the group until its final album in 1991, and also the 2003 reunion album Rural Renewal. 

He was born in Houston, Texas, the fourth of five siblings, including an older brother who was to play in a band led by the blues saxophonist Earl Bostic. Joe took up the piano at the age of five, and in high school joined a trio called the Swingsters, which included the saxophonist Wilton Felder and was led by the drummer Nesbert "Stix" Hooper. At Texas Southern University, Sample discovered the trombonist Wayne Henderson, the bassist Henry Wilson and the flautist Hubert Laws, and the now six-strong group worked modestly around Houston in the mid-50s under the name of the Modern Jazz Sextet. 

It was a move by four of the members to Los Angeles at the end of that decade that changed their fortunes, and – now calling themselves the Jazz Crusaders – they recorded their debut album, Freedom Sound, for the jazz label Pacific in 1961. Mainly playing in the punchy, soul-inflected hard-bop style popular at the time (the state-of-the-art practitioners were Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, who inspired their name), the group added their own kind of blues-rooted funkiness that many fans identified as a particularly Texan ingredient. Catchy melodies played in sax/trombone unison and a coolly understated rhythm-section touch also became their signature qualities. 

Sometimes featuring a guitarist, they performed regularly on the west coast and released several successful albums for Pacific. But then they reduced their live schedule and concentrated on recording from 1968, when Sample, Hooper and Felder began developing lucrative careers as session musicians and Henderson became a producer. 

Sample's session activity in those years included work for pop stars such as Diana Ross and the Jackson Five, and he also appeared for the classy west coast hard-bop quintet led by the saxophonist Harold Land and the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. He toured with Joni Mitchell as a member of LA Express (1973-74) and contributed to hits by Marvin Gaye, Tina Turner, Steely Dan and BB King.

                                     

The rise of progressive rock in the 70s severely dented the commercial appeal of conventional acoustic jazz, but the Crusaders' already dance-friendly sound made them better suited to the change than most of the era's jazz artists. Some canny modifications followed, notably with the arrival of a gifted electric guitarist, Larry Carlton, in 1970. The lineup also adapted to include electric bass and keyboards, and with the repertoire widening to include Beatles hits, they sharply expanded their audience, not always to the delight of the jazz cognoscenti. 

Soon they had dropped the word "jazz" from their name, and the 1971 album Crusaders 1, with four Sample compositions on its tracklist, was noticeable for a more explicitly hard-hitting rock approach. The high point of this Crusaders period was the 1979 single Street Life, written by Sample and a fellow Texan songwriter, Will Jennings, as a vocal for the singer Randy Crawford. It was a chart hit in the US and UK and still receives considerable radio airplay.

The Crusaders' lineup changed periodically following Henderson's departure to pursue a career in production in 1975. Sample and Felder remained co-leaders, as well as sustaining busy freelance lives in the studios – with Sample developing an increasingly personal sound on electric instruments, as he tellingly displayed on Clavinet with the soul-saxist Ronnie Laws on the 1975 club hit Always There. 

Sample and Felder disagreed artistically and wound up the band in 1988, and Sample then concentrated on the ideas he had been nurturing since his leadership of the 1969 Fancy Dance session, a gospelly, bop-blues trio he set up with the bassist Red Mitchell and the drummer JC Moses. This had led to Carmel (1979) and several strings-accompanied early 80s albums under his name, confirming that he remained a subtle refiner of familiar musical materials and a piano soloist of percussive punch and delicate melodic concision.

There were occasional Crusaders reunions, and in 2004 Sample surprised his long-time fans with another solo album, Soul Shadows, in which he revealed just how profound his jazz sensibility remained. In 2014, Joe Sample was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer.  He sought treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where he had relocated years earlier to be closer to his roots and family. 

Throughout his career, Sample maintained privacy regarding his health challenges, including prior heart attacks in 1994 and 2009, focusing instead on his music without public disclosure of personal medical details. He died in Houston, Texas, on September 12, 2014 at the age of 75. At the time of his death, Sample had been working on a project, "Quadroon," with singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke.

(Edited from John Fordham Obit @ The Guardian & Wikipedia)

 

Buddy Thompson born 31 January 1933

Buddy Thompson (born 31 January 1933) was a country and rockabilly singer. 

Buddy Thompson was primarily a country singer, but he made at least one one excellent rock 'n' roll record. Born in Kentucky, Thompson was raised in Tampa, Florida. He served in the Air Force during the Korean War. Back in Florida, he hung out with songwriter and manager Buck Peddy, who brought him to Nashville. Thompson was signed to a major label, RCA, probably through Peddy's connection with Jim Denny at Cedarwood Music. The Cedarwood connection is evident in Thompson's choice of songwriters on his RCA singles (Webb Pierce, Danny Dill, Johnny Hicks, Dee Mullins, etc.)

During 1955-56, Thompson had six singles released on RCA (produced by Chet Atkins), including the original version of Don Gibson's "Sweet Dreams" (a big country hit for Faron Young, Gibson himself, Patsy Cline and Emmylou Harris). However, Thompson's version (RCA 6485) went unnoticed at the time, being tucked away on the B-side of "Stuff Like That There", an up-tempo number that comes closest to rockabilly of all Thompson's RCA recordings. 

                                  

Buddy appeared on the Grand Old Opry and on several other radio barn dances before Peddy landed him a deal with the Opry's major competitor, the Louisiana Hayride. Thompson stayed in Shreveport for two years, supplementing his income with deejay work at KCIG. After his RCA contract ran out, Thompson was signed to Atlantic's subsidiary Atco Records by Herb Abramson, in the same week that Abramson also signed Bobby Darin. 

Buddy recorded his first and only Atco single (6095) on May 10, 1957, in New Orleans, backed by members of Cosimo Matassa's studio band. One side, "I've Got A Good Thing Going", was written by Merle Kilgore, while the reverse, "This Is the Night", is better known in a later version by Bob Luman, who performed it in the movie "Carnival Rock". A third track from this N.O. session, "What A Pity", has never been issued. Thompson's next stop was at Hal Webman's Greenwich Records in New York City, where he had one release in 1958 : "Sweet Love"/ "When My Ship Comes A Sailin'"(Greenwich 409). He returned to Nashville in 1959 and then moved to California where he joined the small Foothill label and performed country music in night clubs after which his trail goes cold in the mid sixties. 

However according to sources named below, by 2008 he was residing in Dade City, Florida and continued to perform in the Tampa area now and then. If he is still alive then he is 93 years old today. 

(Sourced Rockabilly Hall of Fame & Colin Escott) 

NB. There are some suggestions that Thompson recorded for Crown Records before he joined RCA. However, this is a different person with the same name.

Dorothy Love Coates born 30 January 1923

Dorothy Love Coates (January 30, 1928 – April 9, 2002) was an American gospel singer, composer and songwriter, and a civil rights activist. 

Dorothy McGriff was born on January 30, 1928, in Birmingham, Alabama, as one of seven children. Her early years were hard (she later described them as "the same old thing"). Her father, Lillar McGriff, a minister, left the family when she was six, divorcing her mother thereafter. Dorothy began playing piano in the Baptist Church at age ten, then joined her sisters and brother in the McGriff Singers, who had a weekly live radio broadcast slot on WJLD radio station.

Dorothy quit high school after 10th grade to work "all the standard Negro jobs" available in Birmingham in the 1940s: scrubbing floors and working behind the counter in laundries and dry cleaners. She began singing with the Gospel Harmonettes, then known as the Gospel Harmoneers, in the early 1940s. She said of this time: "on weekdays I worked for the white man. On weekends I sang for the people." 

On September 9, 1944, she married Willie Love of The Fairfield Four, one of the most popular quartets of the early years of gospel, but divorced him shortly thereafter. On September 24, 1959, she married Carl Coates, bassist and guitarist of the Sensational Nightingales. This marriage lasted until his death in 1999. Coates rose to stardom in the 1950s as a member of The Original Gospel Harmonettes. With her "raggedy", "raspy" and "rough" voice and preacher's fire, Coates could out-sing the most powerful, hard male gospel singers of the era. She helped the group become a powerhouse. Coates was also a notable composer, writing songs such as "You Can't Hurry God (He's Right On Time)", "99 and a Half Won't Do", and "That's Enough". 

                                    

The Gospel Harmonettes (later renamed the Original Gospel Harmonettes) had achieved some fame in an early appearance when the National Baptist Convention came to Birmingham in 1940. Led by Evelyn Starks, a pianist whose style of playing was much imitated, its lead singer was Mildred Madison Miller, a mezzo-soprano who had a down-home sound that came to be a symbol of the group. The group included Odessa Edwards, Vera Conner Kolb, and Willie Mae Newberry Garth. The group had a regular half-hour radio show sponsored by A.G. Gaston, a local businessman and community leader. 

The group first recorded for RCA in 1949, but without Love, after appearing on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts television program. Those recordings, while not particularly memorable, are considered a rare jewel nowadays and include the songs "In the Upper Room" and "Move on Up a little Higher". Their first sides for Specialty Records, “I’m Sealed" and "Get Away Jordan," recorded with Love in 1951 were far more successful. The group recorded a series of hits in the years that followed before disbanding in 1958. 

Dorothy was the driving force behind the group's success, both on record and in person, singing with such spirit that the other members of the group would occasionally have to lead her back to the stage—a device that James Brown copied and made part of his act in the 1960s, but which was wholly genuine in Love's case. She also took over the role, particularly after Odessa Edwards' retirement, of preacher/narrator, directing pointed criticisms from the stage of the evils she saw in the church and in the world at large. 

During the years of her retirement from music, from 1959 to 1961, (then) Dorothy Love became active in the civil rights movement, working with Martin Luther King Jr. She worked at voter registration drives, was present at the so-called Newark Riots in 1967, and was arrested and imprisoned for a time in Birmingham Jail for her campaigning. 

She re-formed the Harmonettes in 1961, and when that group disbanded later in the decade, she continued touring with a group known as the Dorothy Love Coates Singers, featuring her sister Lillian McGriff. In her song "The Hymn," released in 1964, she sang: "When the president was assassinated, the nation said, 'Where is God?' When the little children lost their lives in the church bombing, the nation cried, 'Where is God?' I got the answer for you today: God is still on the throne." 

Coates recorded, both individually and with her group, on Savoy Records, Vee-Jay Records and Columbia Records in the 1960s and made occasional appearances, but no recordings, after 1980. She appeared in the films The Long Walk Home and Beloved, leading a chorus of formerly enslaved singers, at the end of her career. 

Coates died in a hospital in her native Birmingham, Alabama on April 9, 2002, of heart disease, at the age of 74.  

(Edited from Wikipedia)

Geater Davis born 29 January 1946

Vernon "Geater" Davis (January 29, 1946 – September 29, 1984) was an American soul singer and songwriter. He has been described as "one of the South's great lost soul singers, an impassioned stylist whose voice was a combination of sweetness and sandpaper grit."

Comparable to the blues-drenched likes of Johnnie Taylor or, especially, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Davis wound up even more of a cult artist than deep soul peers like James Carr or O.V. Wright, having recorded mostly for small local labels during his prime. 

Davis was born in Kountze, Texas, the youngest of five children born to the late DeWitt and Cornella Davis (1908–1996). In the late 1960s he was heard performing, along with Reuben Bell, by record producer Allen Orange. Orange arranged for them to record in Birmingham, Alabama, and started his own House of Orange label to release their output. Geater's first release, "Sweet Woman's Love", in 1970, reached # 45 on the Billboard R&B chart. 

                                    

His follow-up singles on the House of Orange label, including "I Can Hold My Own" and "Best Of Luck To You", were less commercially successful, but his cover of Jerry Butler & the Impressions' "For Your Precious Love" later became a favorite among British soul collectors. Davis recorded an album, Sweet Woman's Love, which is now considered a classic of the deep soul genre. He often wrote or co-wrote his own material. 

After Orange closed his label in 1972, Davis recorded for the Luna label, and then for John Richbourg's 77 label, where several of his recordings such as "I'm Gonna Change" and "A Whole Lot Of Man" were made at the FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals. His 1973 single, "Your Heart Is So Cold" reached # 64 on the R&B chart. During his career, Davis was often compared to fellow blues singer, and good friend, Bobby Blue Bland, because of their similar voice and vocal styling, but Davis' vocals were heavier and darker in tone. Also, Davis played guitar in the studio, as well as live, something Bland did not do. However, Davis' records did not generally sell well, despite heavy touring on the blues and chitlin circuits. 

Davis cut sessions for Ace that produced fine tracks like “Nice And Easy” and “There’s Got To Be Some Changes Made” in the mid 70s, and later issued some disco singles on the revitalised House Of Orange label. In 1981 he joined the MT label run by James Bennett in Jackson, Mississippi, who issued several singles and a good LP “Better Days”. Like so much of Bennett’s output some of the tracks were decidedly under-produced but in Listen Right Back For More he got it just right. The song was issued twice and the version with overdubbed horns was to be Davis’ last great release. 

Davis died of a heart attack in Dallas, Texas, in 1984 at the age of 38, leaving behind his wife, Lula Davis; his two daughters Vernecia and Laquita Davis; and stepdaughter Sandra Darby. In 1985, as a tribute to his friend, Bobby Blue Bland re-recorded two of Davis' most popular tracks on his Members Only album: "Sweet Woman's Love", and "I've Just Got To Know". 

(Edited from Wikipedia & AllMusic)

Carolyn Hester born 28 January 1937

Carolyn Sue Hester (born January 28, 1937) is an American folk singer and songwriter. She was a figure in the early 1960s American folk music revival. 

Born in Waco, Texas, Hester moved to New York in 1955 to get into music and acting. However, she would first record for Norman Petty at his studios in Clovis, New Mexico, not far from Lubbock, Texas, where her parents were living in the late '50s. Her first album, Scarlet Ribbons, was produced by Petty in 1957, and found release on Coral Records. She was a friend of Holly's as well, although his influence on her subsequent music is not too audible, other than on her multiple versions of his "Lonesome Tears." 

In 1960, she made her second album, Carolyn Hester, for Tradition, the label run by the Clancy Brothers. This cast her very much in the thick of the folk revival, including her standards of the movement "The House of the Rising Sun" and "She Moves Through the Fair," sung in her high, almost shaky and girlish voice. n the early '60s, she was briefly married to author and folk singer/songwriter Richard Fariña, who became friendly with Bob Dylan shortly after Dylan's arrival in New York. While recording her third album (also, confusingly, titled Carolyn Hester) for Columbia and producer John Hammond in September 1961, she invited Dylan, then almost unknown, to play harmonica on a few cuts. His work on the album helped bring him to the attention of Hammond, who signed Dylan to Columbia as a solo artist shortly afterwards. 

                                   

While other performers of the early-'60s folk revival made great strides forward in sales and influence -- including Dylan, Baez, and Collins -- Hester remained relatively obscure. She turned down a chance to form a folk trio with Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey, offered by manager Albert Grossman; that position went to Mary Travers, and the trio found stardom as Peter, Paul & Mary. In hindsight, her two Columbia albums may have opened ears up to the possibilities of folk musicians recording with bands, as they included contributions by Bill Lee on bass, future Dylan sideman Bruce Langhorne on guitar, and even light drums on a cover of Buddy Holly's "Lonesome Tears" (not released until 1995). However, in sticking exclusively to traditional material, rather than covering songs by contemporary writers or writing anything herself, Hester was falling behind the folk curve. 

After her second album, Hester moved to Dot, and began recording again with Petty in Clovis. These 1964-1965 recordings, with a band including George Tomsco of the Fireballs on guitar, inched a little toward folk-rock without actually getting there, and also included some covers of material by then-current folk singer/songwriters like Tom Paxton and Mark Spoelstra. Through his friend Hester, another Petty recording artist, Jimmy Gilmer, met Paxton and was influenced to record some of his songs on his 1965 Folkbeat album. However, the Tex-Mex folk-rock sound, as produced by Norman Petty and performed by Gilmer, the Fireballs, and Carolyn Hester, never did make a substantial impact. 

In 1966, Hester was re-signed to Columbia by John Hammond. Although she made a good number of recordings there with producer John Simon, only two singles were released. One of these, "Early Morning,” was a fairly good commercial piece of pop-folk-rock, but Hester didn't seem terribly well-suited to electric music. Other Columbia recordings, most of which were not released until 1995 on the Dear Companion anthology, show her casting about for direction, running through material by Tim Hardin, Jackson Frank, and Cat Stevens, taking a stab at the Beatles' "Penny Lane" and even doing an odd cover of Ravi Shankar's "Majhires" that verged on psychedelic music. 

In the late '60s, Hester made the unexpected move to psychedelic music as part of the Carolyn Hester Coalition, who recorded a couple of little-known albums for Metromedia. These were erratic but not half-bad, interspersing updates of traditional material like "East Virginia" and Ed McCurdy's "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" with moody and fuzzy folk-rockers. Hester also did some recording for Decca, RCA, and Capitol, and formed the Outpost label with her husband, jazz pianist, producer and songwriter David Blume. With Blume, she ran an ethnic dance club in Los Angeles, and she continues to record and tour occasionally. She was seen duetting with Nanci Griffith on Bob Dylan's "Boots of Spanish Leather" on a nationally broadcast tribute to Dylan at Madison Square Garden in the '90s.  Hester was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the World Folk Music Association in 2003. 

Hester continued to be musically active into the new century and released We Dream Forever in 2009. As of spring 2022, Hester continued to perform and tour with her daughters Amy Blume and Karla Blume. 

(Edited from AllMusic & Wikipedia)