ALWAYS A SONG

Musician and teacher Harper looks back calmly and objectively on a full life in and out of the folk music scene.

Born in 1947, Harper started out as a “red diaper baby” in Boston, one of four children of an “atheist father and secular Jewish mother.” During the McCarthy era, her father lost his teaching job because of his earlier association with the Communist Party, and the family moved to Claremont, California. There, in 1958, her parents set up the Folk Music Center, where they sold and repaired musical instruments and sponsored concerts. The author worked at the center on and off throughout her life; now, she is the owner of what has become a nonprofit educational corporation. As she taught guitar classes and repaired instruments, Harper met a number of well-known musicians, many of whom, like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, she admired for their skill while recognizing their “entitled” attitudes and other bad behavior. Though a product of the counterculture, she's cleareyed about the damage caused by drugs and alcohol as well as some of its less predictable side effects—e.g., when she had to spend hours cleaning “sweat and patchouli” off guitars tried out and abandoned by shirtless musicians. While the center is a running theme, the author gives equal time to her life outside its reach. Her personal life included a marriage to a Black college administrator that produced three children and sadly ended when his alcoholism gained the upper hand and he began beating her. After a career in college teaching, Harper returned to Claremont, committed to “reinventing myself once again.” Besides writing the book, she has been performing with her son, popular singer/songwriter Ben Harper (who provides the foreword), and has released albums of her own. Without either sugarcoating or overdramatizing her experiences, the author crafts a compelling story of an ordinary life taking surprising turns.

A memoir that will interest even those who have never heard of either Harper.