Kristin Lems wrote her first song, “Hula Hoop With Your Honey,” at age 11. She didn’t have a honey or know how to hula hoop, but she says the words “had a catching rhythm.”
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Lems’s early musical training was supervised by her mother, a concert pianist, but, she says, “when you grow up in a classical-music environment, you don’t learn improvisation or self-accompaniment.” Improv is an important part of any Lems performance, whether at a local club, a children’s birthday party, or a rally for the ERA, the farm workers, or Earth Day.
Lems got her start folksinging as a student at the University of Michigan. But her career took off when she took a job teaching English as a second language in Iran. Three weeks into her first term, some of her students asked her to be the female vocalist in their rock band. The clear-voiced, tall, blond, “all-American” Lems made quite a sensation, especially when she sang in Farsi. At first she memorized the phonetics without knowing the words. She later mastered the language and has since sung in 14 languages on four continents.
For the next five years she continued to organize the music festival while traveling and performing her blend of eco-feminist folk music, singing on college campuses, at conventions, at ERA rallies (including a May 10, 1980, Grant Park performance for a crowd of 90,000), and for women’s professional organizations.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/J. Alexander Newberry.
