The Patience of Love – 1982

Callow youth, especially in an ideological time, does some regrettable things, but I don’t altogether disown this album. I should have had better voice lessons, and perhaps better sense than to spend my money on the project—and I should certainly have had better sense than to be distracted by the romance of Women’s (or Womyn’s) Culture—but one has to make one’s mistakes. The lyrics, on the whole, are ept.

One of the leading lights of the East Lansing folk scene declined to review the album because he deplored my “destroying tradition.” I think he overstated the case, or at least misunderstood loving appropriation and punning for destructiveness. In fact I was trying to preserve, not to destroy: to bring a certain kind of British folk sensibility and aesthetic with me into radical feminism, which I suspected would vehemently refuse it. I couldn’t quite dance at the revolution if I couldn’t dance to that music. It’s hard to see what kind of threat that quiet backwater activity could be to the tradition of Martin Carthy and Maddy Prior, who would always sell more albums than I would, and as better musicians deserved to.

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