BE CAREFUL, THERE’S A BABY IN THE HOUSE
Sorrels strides bravely into areas where many other folksingers fear to tread. She thus avoids the notorious folkie pitfalls–earnestness and preciousness. The expected children’s songs and prairie ballads are vital to her repertoire, but so is an unblinking acknowledgment of the limits of optimism in the face of life’s cruelties. Her gallery of heroes extends from the usual valiant proletarians and pioneer women to street hookers and irascible old barflies, and she makes it a point to avoid judgment. She celebrates the human spirit in all its flawed beauty, and she’s not bound by preconceived notions of musical authenticity or political correctness.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
There are a few new wrinkles, however. Sorrels’s music and writings have always celebrated life and survival largely by evoking her own experiences and friendships, as well as tradition; but the populism that’s integral to folk music was usually more implied than proclaimed. This time, the political message is up-front: her notes start off with a manifesto on abortion. Characteristically, it’s interwoven with a harrowingly honest telling of her own story–including the tale of a bloody illegal abortion at age 16 at the hands of “the midwife from hell in a dirty motel.” Sorrels raised five children pretty much on her own (“I really know I did the best I could. . . . Goddamn, it was a hard row to hoe. . . . no one can take care of five children by themselves”); both the love and bitterness of that experience permeate the notes and the recording.
Continuing the theme is “Baby Rocking Medley,” a reprise from her Always a Lady LP (released on Philo in 1975). This is one of Sorrels’s signature tunes–a typically tough/tender meditation on the joys and stresses of child rearing. It merges a “benevolent” baby-rocking song with a “hostile” one, the latter to be sung at “5:30 in the morning [when] that lousy kid has not quit howling now for six hours.” The crystalline harmonies and singsongy lilt of “Baby Rocking Medley” and the cozy, familial gaiety of the tune that follows–a deliciously bent Shel Silverstein children’s song, “You’re Always Welcome at Our House”–are obviously intended ironically. They represent what a lot of people don’t like about folk music, though, and the unconverted may cringe.
The poem’s iron refusal to accept second-class reproductive citizenship for women (“Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman / you lay claim to her pastures for grazing / fields for growing babies like iceberg lettuce”) segues fiercely into a savage portrayal of botched illegal abortions and tortured children. It then broadens into a prophetic vision of the inevitable moral collapse of a society that doesn’t value its women and children (“a child screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched”), and the final verse delivers the clincher: “This is my body / If I give it to you I want it back / My life is a non-negotiable demand.” Sorrels spits out these lines with a trembling, dead- eyed venom, and when it’s over the silence itself sounds like applause.
The last cut, “I Cannot Sleep for Thinking of the Children,” is yet another Malvina Reynolds meditation on the lost and hungry little ones. If you’ve listened this far, you’re obviously in tune with Sorrels’s aching love affair with the vulnerable and dispossessed; she again takes what might have been overly sentimental and redeems it with her affirming power. In her hands, this lightly flowing song becomes almost a flag-waver, a feminist “women and children first” anthem. I can think of no other way to put it: Sorrels makes it hip to care.
